The Barely Legal Type: Purity Culture, Rape Culture, and America’s Lose-Lose Proposition for Girls

Last week, Megyn Kelly took to her show to launch a bizarre defense of Donald Trump by way of a defense of Jeffrey Epstein. Litigating the distinctions between pedophilia and ephebophilia, Kelly stressed that Epstein’s interest in young girls was centered on adult-presenting fifteen year-olds, which she referred to as “the barely legal type.” Here is an excerpt:

[Epstein] was into the barely legal type, like, he liked 15-year-old girls. [I’m] not trying to make an excuse for this, I'm just giving you facts — that he wasn't into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by.

Her argument generated considerable outrage. Many pointed out the simple fact that fifteen is not “barely legal” according to the age-of-consent laws in any U.S. state. Others appropriately attacked Kelly’s suggestion that teenagers are somehow adult-passing rather than clearly being adolescent girls. 

While it is encouraging to see comments like Kelly’s receive such widespread condemnation, they did not come from nowhere. Rather, Kelly’s grotesque minimization of Epstein’s abuses rests on deeply ingrained attitudes and ideas about women in American society, including evangelical Christianity. The truth is that we have sexualized teenagers and we continue to do so. And even the very parts of American culture that claim to promote teen abstinence and sexual purity operate on a parallel logic to the rape culture that enables the darkest misogynistic violence against women. I want to explore some of these themes below, using Kelly’s comments as a guidepost. 

What a teenager looks like 

As I noted, Kelly’s comments engendered a massive amount of pushback. A number of women took to social media to show what they themselves looked like in their mid-teens. As these users all noted, fifteen looks decidedly non-adult—it’s braces, childlike cheeks, and the awkward graces of adolescence. 

As NPR reported, former One Day At a Time star Valerie Bertinelli posted a photo and the comment, “This picture was taken in 1975. I'm 15. I'm a child. I'm gonna say this a little louder for those in the back row. I'm FIFTEEN. I'M A CHILD." 

Actress Christina Ricci, famous for her childhood performances in Casper and The Addams Family movies, stated “This woman is a danger to children.”

Another former child star Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls Wilder on the television show Little House on the Prairie, entered the conversation and offered her thoughts on having to kiss her older co-star Dean Butler, then in his early twenties. Gilbert said the experience left her “nauseated,” adding,

The girl on vacation in Hawaii with her family is the same girl who was expected to 'fall in love with' and kiss a man on film who was several years older than she was. Through the lens of today, this is shocking. I have no words other than to say, 'I WAS A CHILD' 'I WAS FIFTEEN.' And I was the good news.

It’s a moving reminder that even under the controlled, professional conditions of scripted television and a film lot, a teenager is not an adult. 

Reading this, I also thought about how many American teen dramas and comedy movies are full of adults playing high schoolers. It’s the sort of thing that’s a running gag in our culture—obviously adult actors portraying the hardships of prom and Algebra 2. But it also makes perfect sense. Even when the cast hews younger, they are usually mostly twenty-somethings because who actually wants to watch real-life tenth graders engage in the sexual and illicit escapades that typically unfold in these soapy dramas and raunchy comedies?

Yet the underlying logic of much of our media is that girls are inherently sexual and desirable from the moment they cross out of childhood. Of course, adolescence for all genders is a winding and fraught path toward the realities of adulthood. Caring adults should seek to lovingly guide adolescents along. But time and again we arrest young people, particularly girls, on this journey and project adult thoughts and experiences onto them. It’s a kind of physiological and psychological distortion that simply falls apart if we really look at the teenager before us. 

Jezebels and jailbait 

Kelly’s comments, the way she focused on the sexual characteristics of the girls Epstein was interested in, also highlights a key point of convergence between rape culture and the purity culture that ‘90s-kid evangelicals like myself know so well. In both views, the onus is on girls and women to not be temptations to men. Men are taken at face value as slaves to lust and impulse, and therefore have diminished responsibility for their sexual behavior. Allow me to elaborate. 

Kelly is Roman Catholic, but her language smacked of countless lessons on sexuality I encountered in my evangelical adolescence. Purity culture places a focus on teen chastity and emphasizes waiting until marriage as a path to spiritual closeness with both God and your future spouse. But the teachings tend to fall disproportionately on girls, with their developing bodies presented as dangerous temptations for boys and men with barely controllable appetites. 

In her book, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Linda Kay Klein describes the myriad ways purity culture shames, pressures, and isolates girls, all while enabling a deeply unsettling logic of abuse. Purity culture focuses on the need for girls to tame and even repress their burgeoning sexuality in the name of their own holiness and in service to a future husband with whom they are meant to share a godly relationship. 

Kay explains, 

The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.

But, to be clear, this way of thinking does not mean that girls are considered non-sexual entities before marriage. Instead, their sexuality is right up front. Kay writes, “Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.” 

In fact, women are seen as brimming with sexuality to such a degree that their very presence poses a constant threat to the chastity of those around them. It’s female sexuality that endangers the goal of reaching the safe harbor of marriage as pure virgins. This is because men are driven by appetite and impulse, and women are almost impossible for them to resist. 

Throughout her book, Kay utilizes the language of “stumbling blocks,” a common evangelical euphemism for temptation. It derives from the Biblical admonishment for Christians not to cause one another to sin, but in purity culture it is used mainly to caution and shame girls about their sexuality. And it starts at a young age. Kay notes, “In junior high, the term stumbling block annoyed me. The implication that my friends and I were nothing more than things over which men and boys could trip was not lost on me.”

Lara Dunn, one of the only sources in Kay’s book to use her full name, recounts being told by her mother that her tight clothing was making her brothers-in-law uncomfortable: 

When I was a freshman in high school, my mom said ‘The way you’re dressing, your clothes are too tight, and you’re making all your brothers-in-law uncomfortable.’ It disgusted me. It made me feel sick. If that’s what they’re thinking, isn’t that their problem?

Again, Laura was a freshman in high school at the time. So that means this is a story about a girl too young to get her driver’s license being told her male adult in-laws found her body too distracting to be around. 

The idea that teenage girls are not only stumbling blocks for their male peers but also sources of temptation for adult men is the darkest and most dangerous point of convergence between purity culture and rape culture. Women and girls have a duty not only to say no but to do nothing to arouse the passions of the men around them in the first place. After all, if they do, then no might not be enough. And who knows what those men might do. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein and associates like Prince Andrew, we know all too well. 

In the wake of the 2021 misogynistic mass killing of eight women at an Atlanta-area spa, Jessica Valenti wrote a powerful essay articulating the ways purity culture and generalized misogyny can converge in horrible, violent acts:

For too long, women have been punished and killed because of men's inability to deal with issues around rejection, desire and shame. Women of color are especially at risk; they're disproportionately attacked and more likely to be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them. Six of the people killed last week were Asian women, who are distinctly hypersexualized in American culture…

Mr. Long's views on sexuality, for example, appear to stem from his religious upbringing. Reportedly, he didn't own a smartphone because he was afraid he would be tempted by online pornography.

He is said to have felt ashamed of masturbating and was suicidal over his belief that his habit of visiting sex workers meant he was "living in sin." Mr. Long also told the police he didn't commit his crime just to stop his own urges, but also to "help" other men by removing the "temptation." (Namely, women.)

These thoughts mirror traditional conservative evangelical Christian teachings about sex and the idea that it's women's responsibility to avoid leading men into sexual situations.

This kind of purity culture has a reach far beyond religion. Abstinence-only education classes taught in over half the states across the country tell young people that the onus is on girls not to tease or tempt boys, whose sexual compulsions, they say, are near uncontrollable.

At the center of this is a problem of agency. To reiterate, both purity and rape culture place the burden of sexual lust on women and girls. They are objects of desire, and men are creatures of desire. Men by their nature cannot control themselves, and so it is women—even girls—who must shoulder that responsibility. In this view, words like jezebel and jailbait become legible as a language of female complicity and male ineptitude. Women and girls are alternatingly knowing seductresses and innocent things unaware of their effect on hapless man-children. 

In the context of evangelical Christianity, Kay puts it bluntly: “The church views men as animals with no agency.” Laura Dunn, who I mentioned above, would go on to become a leading legal advocate for victims of sexual abuse after she was unable to get justice for her own rape while a student at the University of Wisconsin. 

The idea that men are powerless when it comes to sexual desire is a peculiar thing to set against all the other domains in which male leadership and control is considered a requirement. Women are thus seen as wholly in control of their sexuality, responsible for every lustful thought they excite in the men around them, but also fatally incapable of leading themselves or their household in serious matters like faith and finances. It’s a lose-lose proposition. 

The baby girl two-step

What happens here, and especially in right-wing spaces, is a sort of two-step by which women are both unfairly infantilized and inappropriately aged up. Girls are described as sexually mature, even knowingly seductive. Yet right-wing male influencers and religious leaders insist on the essential helplessness and submissiveness of women. 

I recently wrote about the right-wing push to disenfranchise women. One of the leading figures in that movement, Christian nationalist Joel Webbon, has made the case that women are meant to be childlike in their submission to men. As Webbon argues: 

You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote…Are you saying that a woman is like a child? Yes. But not intellectually. I'm not saying that. The question is how? In what way is a woman like a child? She is like a child in the way that God has appointed men to protect them. Women are not supposed to be leading the way, they're to be protected.

In his now-infamous interview with Tucker Carlson, rising fascist star Nick Fuentes laid the drop-off in marriage and birth rates at the feet of liberal women, though he insisted they were acting against their inherent natures and desires by embracing feminism: 

Of course I think all women naturally want strong men. They naturally want a Chad. They want like a tall, buff guy. None of them want to work either…They like these vague appeals to equality. ‘We want a chance to work! And we want respect!’ And ultimately, I think the whole political system is just based around women never being accountable for any of their choices…I think a lot of men are looking at women and they’re very liberal, they’re overweight, they have a very high estimation of themselves. People call it ‘hoeflation.’ Their sense of their own looks and sexual value is very inflated. And so a lot of people are looking at these like frumpy, obnoxious, loudmouth, liberal women, who are also very promiscuous, and saying, ‘This is not actually appealing at all. And I don’t want to start a family with a person like this.’

For his part, Carlson stressed that this male supremacist view is actually one that benefits women: 

If you believe in the patriarchy, as I fervently do ‘cause it’s just reality, you know. We didn’t choose the system. We were born into a system that is part of nature. Can’t get out of it. So if you believe that’s true, which it is, then you think men should lead.

Carlson added that he does not “know a single happily married woman who is a liberal.” 

The reasoning here is a bit convoluted. Women are both pliant creatures who are best served by submitting to a strong male figure, but they are also rebellious and intemperate, incapable of doing what’s in their own best interest. In Fuentes’s words, women even “want to be raped.”

On one hand, yes this is undoubtedly extreme. But is it fringe? Of course, I don’t think many pastors would stand up on Sunday and suggest women want to be raped. But just how far is such a declaration from the constant, pervasive insistence that young girls must keep every curve and smile in check, lest they rouse an uncontrollable beast in the men around them. 

Moreover, as outrageous as Webbon and Carlson’s statements on male leadership are, they carry the same infantilizing logic that turns young women into sexual footballs to be handed off from their strict, protective fathers to their loving but dominant husbands. The only place along the way where women have agency is in their choices not to tempt the men around them and not to sully their own purity. 

This does, in the end, do harm to men and women—to boys and girls. No young boy benefits from being taught he is a perverted sex monster who cannot control his own thoughts and actions. And neither does the world. We live, unfortunately, in one made by such boys grown into men. 

Featured image is Allegory of Chastity, by Hans Memling