Changing the world one virgin at a time: abstinence pledgers, lifestyle movements, and social change

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifestyle movement
• virginity pledge
• abstinence pledge
• social movement

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for helpful feedback from Ellis Jones, Jennifer Snook, and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In discussing competing SM paradigms, Buechler (2000, p. 54) goes so far to say that ‘practitioners of established paradigms selectively incorporate the concerns of competing paradigms with little fundamental change in the original theoretical model. […] Resource mobilization theory has survived a major challenge to its theoretical dominance and is now reasserting itself, with ritual nods to rival contenders.’

2. Significantly, this book is part of the influential University of Minnesota Press series ‘Social Movements, Protest, and Contention.’

3. ‘A History of True Love Waits,’ http://www.lifeway.com/Article/true-love-waits-history [accessed 5 July 2017].

4. See ‘Abstinence Only Education Making a Comeback Under Trump’ by Jessie Hellmann, http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/377304-abstinence-only-education-making-a-comeback-under-trump [accessed 24 July 2018].

5. The Legacy Institute has a broad mission towards promoting ‘sexual integrity’ that goes beyond abstinence pledging. I include them because their programing (e.g. purity balls, events for youth) very strongly imply a desire for cultural challenge that encourages abstinence.

6. ‘Silver Ring Thing,’ YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTcZSacRCAY [accessed 5 July 2017].

7. Anscombe Societies take their name from British philosopher and devout Catholic Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) whom they see as modeling an analytically rigorous approach to morality and ethics and sharing their opposition to abortion, contraception, and extra-marital sex.

8. While their opposition to hookup culture has a moral basis, these campus groups may have a point. Studying sexual culture on campuses, sociologist Lisa Wade (2017, p. 19) observes: ‘Hookup culture is an occupying force, coercive and omnipresent. For those that love it, it’s all sunshine, but it isn’t for everyone else. Deep in the fog, students often feel dreary, confused, helpless. Many behave in ways they don’t like, hurt other people unwillingly, and consent to sexual activity they don’t desire.’

9. ‘NEW STANDARD Tour Promo (2016–2017),’ YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5-TOQw8v-w [accessed 5 July 2017].

10. New social movements scholars hinted at this insight without fully pursuing it, suggesting ‘the relation between the individual and the collective is blurred,’ and that ‘many contemporary movements are “acted out” in individual actions rather than through or among mobilized groups’ (Johnston, Laraña, & Gusfield, 1994, p. 7).

11. https://www.lifeway.com/en/product-family/true-love-waits [accessed 25 July 2018].

12. Many progressive movements may ostensibly avoid judgment and calls for purity to avoid comparisons to their supposedly close-minded conservative counterparts/opponents. (Another example of identity work!) However, vegans, voluntary simplifiers, crust punks, anarchists, and others often implicitly create hierarchies based upon one’s dedication and self-regulation.

13. Ethical/activist vegans may be an exception, though most of their statistical claims about the positive climate effects of a vegan diet require that many, many more people adopt vegan diets.

14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNHVwCIOA_A [accessed 25 July 2018].

15. ‘Perseverance,’ silverringthing Instagram, posted 12 June 2017 [accessed 5 July 2017].

16. ‘Trends in Teen Pregnancy and Childbearing.’ Office of Adolescent Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/reproductive-health/teen-pregnancy/trends.html.

17. Studying fair trade consumers, Brown (2013, p. 97–98) finds that ‘consumers play many games in order to maintain their personal identity and social status as conscientious consumers’ but ‘tend to possess only superficial knowledge about how their everyday purchases impact the environment and the workers who made the products.’

18. The editors argue that in late-modernity ‘the relationship between the subjective stance and collective action has radically shifted. Subjectivity in this sense, is a prelude to individual agency within a collective process, and increasingly a prologue to an agency that stresses individual freedoms’ (Farro & Henri Lustiger-Thaler, 2014, p. 2).

19. Studying trans-cis families, Pfeffer (2012, p. 594) writes, ‘Importantly, once individuals engage in normative resistance and inventive pragmatism by identifying and exploiting existing fissures or predictabilities in social structures, they often transform their experiences into narratives and accounts that may be circulated between and across social actors and networks to enable and perhaps even foster cultures of resistance.’

20. Other LMs might include lifestyle political/ethical consumerism (Micheletti, 2003); anarchism (Portwood-Stacer, 2013); social responsibility (Jones, 2002); straight edge (Haenfler, 2006); fair trade (Brown, 2013); Quiverfull (Joyce, 2009); and ethical veganism (Cherry, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Haenfler

Ross Haenfler is Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College, USA. His courses and research revolve around subcultures, lifestyle movements, and critical masculinity studies. Ross is the author of Subcultures: The Basics; Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures; and Straight Edge: Clean-Living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change. He has published in a variety of journals and presented work on subcultures and social change around the world.

Website: https://www.grinnell.edu/users/haenfler

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