Twenty years later, that ritual strikes me as almost innocuous — how much power do we give to the scribbled signature of a teenager who had only the faintest idea what sex was? Yet it also carried a psychological burden that many of my peers and I are still unloading. It held out the promise that if I remained pure, then God would reward good behavior with a husband — surely before I turned 30 so that we could have lots of children. Twenty years later, I no longer subscribe to purity culture, largely because it never had anything to say to Christians past the age of Yet lately, I also find myself mourning the loss of the coherent sexual ethic that purity culture tried to offer. Is consent culture the best that we have in its place?