Sarah Moon analyzes how purity culture perpetuates a power imbalance between whites and non-whites:
Some women are seen as impure just because of who they “are.”
Jessica Valenti points out in The Purity Myth, “we rarely see women who aren’t conventionally beautiful idolized for their abstinence… The desirable virgin is…young, white, and skinny. She’s never a woman of color…”
I think it’s a fascinating (and infuriating) contradiction, the way the American Church is able to simultaneously essentialize sexual behavior and—in practical terms—deny sexuality as a fundamental component of humanity.