Thoughts on men’s purity rings

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dolphin
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
This is reference to Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, with the former being President Kennedy’s wife and the latter being his alleged mistress.
 
Perhaps it would help to know my motivation. This past summer I have been stuck in a “friends with benefits” type situation. Never sex but we did different sexual things. I confessed them and I feel bad because I want to wait for my future spouse to do all those things. So now transitioning out from that, it’s been tough not to fall back to that and have to go to confession again.

I’ve been hoping the ring would help remind me to remain pure. The thoughts and memories of those times are also a temptation which is tough.
 
Dolphin…you seem to be obsessed with chastity, to point that I don’t think any “tool” will help. I only say this because many of your post are about this topic.

With that being said:
  1. Join a monastery where you will never be tempted.
  2. Wear a chastity belt.
  3. Become a eunuch.
I know what you are thinking…is he being for real or facetious? I’m being facetious.

Temptation is hard. But much like an alcoholic, you either get all the booze out of the house or you leave that one bottle as either a reason to stay strong (or a just in case you need it).
If you think that a ring, bracelet or a necklace will help you stay chaste, then do it but remember it’s just a tool. It will not stop you.
 
Last edited:
This is really getting into a “talk to your priest” type of situation. You could use more personal advice than you can get on the internet.
 
Yeah I talked with the priest about it, he said just to trust in Jesus
 
Yes at the end of the day it is an active choice to embrace or resist and it’s so easy to resist when not in the moment and so many things trigger the thoughts and memories so it’s hard
 
Last edited:
I don’t usually suggest this, but if that’s actually all he said, I might talk to a different priest. Preferably if you can arrange a time when he can talk to just you.
 
My point was - if a spouse wishes to have an extra-martial affair they usually take off the wedding ring in order to do so. Some, though, don’t and leave it on and they don’t care - it doesn’t remind them they are married and therefore shouldn’t have affairs, thus remaining chaste within their state in life (faithful to their marriage vows etc).

Which is why wearing a chastity ring is not a guarantee that an individual will not give in to temptation and be unchaste either with themselves or with another. As with a wedding ring - it may not be a reminder and therefore not a deterrent, and so not really a help to the individual to remain chaste.

But as you say it is an outward sign to others they are not available/they are ‘taken or spoken for’/are married, as well as being a symbol of their vows to each other.

So a chastity ring is also an outward sign that this person is ‘not available’ (to the current secular general attitude), and is meant to be a symbol of the decision they have made to remain chaste.

But until these rings came on the scene, people in ages past who were chaste did not wear rings to either identify themselves with or remind themselves of their choice/decision.

I hope that explains more deeply what I was trying to convey in a couple of sentences.
 
I might. It’s not something I am involved in anymore. Like I said I’ve confessed it. But I do feel guilty I fell to those temptations and I feel like I took something away from my future spouse. We didn’t have sex but we did have moments that should be shared only in a state of love (marital bonding) and not a state of lust even if it is perceived in the time to be love.

The memories of it make me feel guilty and ashamed. Ashamed because I knew better. Of course it was mutual and friendly. But it was ultimately just lust in the mold of love. I think I fell to it to answer my feelings of loneliness. After reflecting on it I realize only God can bring us that feeling ultimately.
 
Last edited:
DarkLight said:
It’s related to my original point about purity culture not really taking root in the children. If all you teach children is rules, with no depth behind them, then you won’t keep children as they grow up and start to ask questions. “Because that’s the rules” only works for little kids; you have to give more for the mind and the heart to grasp on to as the children grow if you want to have any hope of them staying firm into adulthood.
Click to expand...
I’ve heard a great deal of Protestant teaching on why sex should be reserved for marriage beyond “Because God said so”. There are books, courses, radio and tv teaching on it, as well as teaching in Sunday School and youth groups. They don’t consider the ring to hold any magic, but simply to be an outward sign of an inward pledge. Indeed, there is usually a series of classes that take place before the ring ceremony that address the issue of purity in heart, mind, soul and body as well as issues of sexuality.
 
Two big issues with purity culture is that it can really set people up for disappointment if they were taught since teenage years that if they just followed all these rules about dating and purity then God will bless them with the perfect spouse and marriage. The second issue is that the way it speaks about purity and virginity can burden people with condemnation. If a young Christian sins and goes too far sexually, they’ve become “impure” and no matter how virtuous they are going forward they can never get their virginity back and so when they do marry they can have all of these emotional issues from the guilt that purity culture impressed on them. In their zeal for promoting purity, the purity culture preachers seem to neglect the other side of the message–that even when we fail we can still find forgiveness in Christ, from who true purity comes.
 
Calliope said:
I’ve heard a great deal of Protestant teaching on why sex should be reserved for marriage beyond “Because God said so”. There are books, courses, radio and tv teaching on it, as well as teaching in Sunday School and youth groups. They don’t consider the ring to hold any magic, but simply to be an outward sign of an inward pledge. Indeed, there is usually a series of classes that take place before the ring ceremony that address the issue of purity in heart, mind, soul and body as well as issues of sexuality.
Click to expand...
I grew up in one of those churches. There really weren’t any classes other than a bunch of stuff about how you’re ruining yourself for marriage if your husband isn’t your first. There was often a bunch of nonsense about oxytocin too. And a lot of lessons on spotting hidden immodesties in dress that in retrospect are a bit creepy. I don’t know what the guys got.

But I think you’ll find there’s a lot of us out there from a lot of different churches where “because that’s the rules” was all we got.
 
Anicette said:
I don’t think these evangelical Churches hate sex. They hate extra marital sex.
Besides that, little to nothing is forbidden sexually Inside marriage, apart adultery. Not even divorce.
Click to expand...
I agree that they don’t hate sex per se. Although it seems that evangelicals have a much less well-defined moral theology. As a result, all that is focused on is the negatives of sexuality and why God “says no”, so to speak. I think this leads to problems and can lead many to view sex as “dirty” and create all kinds of disordered understandings of sexuality.

Catholicism has a much more positive approach to human sexuality and a deep moral theology, which gives us a much more poignantly beautiful understanding of sex. Of course, God says no to premarital and extramarital sex, but we understand much more fully why sex has its proper ordering, not just because God says no.
 
jrgmercado said:
Not just “these days”, society has always accepted that men would be sexually experienced and that women should be inexperienced (virgins)…hence the stereotypical “studs/sluts”
Click to expand...
Well, I don’t know if “purity culture” contributed to this but there are some Evangelical women who end their relationships after finding out their boyfriends weren’t virgins. And whether or not they were converts is irrelevant to them. It’s more egalitarian I guess in some way.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Sarcelle said:
The question still remains.

With whom were men to supposed to gain sexual experience with if women were not supposed to be sexually active outside of marriage?

Don’t tell me cougars. Older women are either married, in this case she’s supposed to be having sex only with her husband as all good women do, or single and she’s not supposed to have sex at all.
Click to expand...
I went on a guided tour of Jena some years back. Jena is an old German university town, going back many many centuries and virtually all the great German philosophers and thinkers are linked there somehow, many even taught there, so obviously it was a very desirable place to go and study in the day.

Our guide explained that back then (I guess we are talking the renaissance period through to the baroque period, but definietly post reformation), only men went to university so the town had a massively high proportion of unmarried young men, virtually all from strict households (as things were at the time) and certainly not all, but definitely some were in search of amourous escapades that the folks back home would never know about. Back then not everybody could afford to go to university. Only the rich did. Jena is also the birthplace of fraternities and some of the greatest and most influential fraternities were founded there (hence the town’s significance in the 1848 revolution, but that’s another story). So these were mostly rich young bachelors with money to burn. Women with low moral standards would come from far and wide to partake in the balls and parties that the young men were putting on and convincing these men to lavish money on them. No doubt this sometimes involved sexual favours. The city fathers and university professors sought to stamp this out with variyng degrees of success. At one point there was even a walled enclosure to keep women out of the university grounds, and students needed a permit to go outside. You can even see the dungeon where people were held when caught transgressing, So much of it happened in secret. But it was very much part of the right of passage in those days.

In other words, a small number of females were having extramaritial relationships with a far larger number of young men. This would explain why women were more likely to be virgins at the time of their wedding than men.

As a random side effect, the town also had a high number of illegitimate children being born, often to poor mothers. The town thus built what is maybe one of the oldest maternity and birth clinics in Germany, run by the medical department of the university (previously women typically gave birth at home without a doctor being present and nobody ever studied that scientifically). Many observations, practices and research from that clinic flowed into general maternity medicine and midwifery and are still followed today. The great German poet Goethe is personally credited with setting up that clinic.
 
Last edited:
Anicette said:
to look after the marriage is consummed if the sheets is stained with blood to proove the women’s virginity.

To simplify it is still important in some muslins countries, culture, or gypsie culture.
to my knowledge it has never been done in western Catholic cultures, or stop very long ago.
Click to expand...
and very pointless really, as there is not always visible blood when a marriage is consumated (the hymen can be pre-damaged by sport for example), and especially in muslim culture, there are also various tricks a woman could use for creating blood stains if she wanted to hide the fact that she wasn’t a virgin.

In some cultures the bedsheets would be displayed publically for everybody to convince themselves that the woman had been a “real” virgin. Failure to provide convincing evidence was considered a scandal and might even be used as a reason for anullment. The thought seems pretty barbaric to me. Especially seeing no comparable demand was made of the man.
 
Last edited:
HopkinsReb said:
I just mean the only way you could end up where the men in a particular age cohort are experienced while the women aren’t is if the women are all going after younger men.
Click to expand...
Look at it mathematically.

At least in the middle and upper classes, women got married pretty much after leaving their finishing school. She might have been 18 or even younger. If a woman was still unmarried when she was 25 she was considered a hopeless case.

A man would go to university or learn a trade and set up a business, or serve in the army. Only when he was considered capable of supporting his wife and providing for a family was he considered eligible. Men were thus marrying women who were 10 to 20 years younger than they were. The period of abstinence expected of men was thus far greater, hence the greater probability of transgression.

At the other end of the scale, the age gap meant there were large numbers of widows, many of them in their 40s or 50s maybe, an age at which they might still have a strong sex drive.

Anyway, people who think the old times were better than today from a morality point of view are maybe not seeing the full picture. Sin and depravity are as old as humanity. And there have always been righteous people too, who withstood the temptations.
 
Last edited:
Never heard of them. The remainder of my post was edited to “G” content - thus it is gone.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top