All we ever heard in middle school were warnings telling us “don’t have sex” and “abstain until marriage,” but that messaging disappeared as we grew older. At such a large school like Penn State, hookup culture seems to reign supreme through dorm hall gossip and frat party invites.
Underneath it all lies a more harmful ideology: Purity culture. The number of “bodies” someone has is thrown around like an insult and the amount of “revealing” clothing a girl wears supposedly tells us something about her sex life. Women are supposed to feel empowered in this day and age, but not too empowered.
Our generation is often thought to be the most sexually liberated, yet purity culture continues to shape how we see ourselves and our peers. It influences everything; from who we date, to how we dress, to how we talk about our own bodies.
Purity culture began in the 1990s and placed an emphasis on sexual abstinence until marriage. Due to this movement, society began to further equate a woman’s worth with her sexual “purity,” effectively reducing women to nothing but their virginities, or lack thereof.
Today, purity culture takes a different form. Instead of being preached in church youth groups, it’s now presented through targeted messaging, often done by “tradwives” online. Tradwives emphasize traditional gender roles in marriage and life, oftentimes including their believed importance in abstinence.
Overly-judgmental conversations about body counts and the importance of women protecting their “values” have suddenly sparked everywhere we seem to look. Even without knowing it, we begin to incorporate purity culture’s morals into our daily lives, furthering the spread of its toxicity.
The double-standard that exists between men and women in college concerning sexual experience is wildly jarring. Men are congratulated for their hookups and often climb the social ladder higher the more they have sex while the opposite is true for women.
Women aren’t expected to engage in sex often, and when they do, they’re put down and thought of as less-than. There’s an expectation of being the “low-maintenance, casual, cool girl,” but if you’re that girl that for one too many people, you’re thought of differently all of a sudden.
It seems that women can never win in this respect; society tells us that if we’re too pure, we’re boring, but if we’re too experienced, then we’re judged.
Women typically want a partner with experience, while men typically want a partner who’s new to sex and hasn’t yet been “tainted” by another partner. Men get a “get out of jail free” card while women continue to be held to unbelievably high standards.
It sometimes feels like society has a scoreboard mentality, keeping track of everyone’s sexual experiences differently. For men, a higher score is better, but for women, a lower score is better.
The hookup culture that exists in 2026 feels empowering in the moment, but as soon as it’s over, a guilt overtakes us. Sex begins to feel dirty, like something we should feel bad about enjoying.
Even when we think we’ve moved past our internal biases, a lot of us are still carrying them deep inside. An emotional tug-of-war starts appearing where we believe in sexual autonomy but struggle to accept it for ourselves.
After growing up with moralized warnings about protecting ourselves from sexual exploitation, sexuality in and of itself became something guarded that feels like it has to be consciously monitored. Getting on campus and suddenly being in an environment where sex is something casual and normal — even expected — can cause internal confusion.
We want to be empowered and part of the group, but a lingering shame still exists, causing a fear of judgment or becoming “used” or “ruined.” Even if we don’t actively believe in those words holding truth, we can still understand them and internalize them.
We can get stuck between two absolutes: Purity and performance. The idea that our personal worth could shift based on other people’s perception of us is frankly terrifying.
This is not all to say that either engaging in sex or practicing abstinence are wrong. Many women abstain from sex as a personal choice, and they simply don’t want to have sex before marriage, which is valid. Abstinence culture only becomes toxic when it becomes centered around societal shame and pressure.
Women are taught from birth to be gatekeepers. Women become responsible not just for our own behavior and bodies, but for what our behavior and bodies might inadvertently do to men. Purity frames women as the moral center for society.
We’re told to dress carefully, to act carefully, to text carefully, all in the hopes that we won’t “give men the wrong idea.” The burden of caution falls all on us. When something goes wrong, the first question is nearly always: “What was she wearing?” or “Why was she there?”
This rhetoric shows up everywhere. In legislation, in reproductive rights conversations and in debates about contraceptives access and sex education. When policies treat women’s bodies as something to regulate or restrict, they echo the same logic purity culture thrives on: Female sexuality must be controlled.
As college women, we sit on that boundary, right at the center of that tension. We’re old enough to vote and live independently, but our sexuality is still seen as something either fragile or dangerous, subject to the critique of outsiders.
The rise of “traditional feminitity” online also has a strong effect on the way women’s sexuality is viewed. Modesty and domesticity are emphasized, all with the underlying message that our value increases when our sexuality decreases.
The issue at hand isn’t faith or personal values, but rather the ongoing concept that women tend to only be respected under certain circumstances. When it becomes apparent that our worth is conditional, that’s when purity culture becomes problematic.
What women need now more than ever is to empower themselves. Empowerment doesn’t mean you have to have sex or abstain from sex either, but rather to have the capacity to choose without social shame being attached.
Purity culture tells us not to have sex, while hookup culture asks us why we haven’t had sex yet; neither outlook allows women control over their own autonomy. We have to remove ourselves from the narrative the world is constantly trying to push on our bodies and strive to love ourselves and others the way we are, regardless of sexual behavior.
True autonomy means being able to say “yes” to sex without fear and also “no” without shame. It means not tying your worth to either end and not needing to explain your boundaries all the time.
Gen Z inherited both purity culture and hypersexualization from past generations. Now, we need to build something healthier in the middle, not putting shame on any woman.