How Purity Culture, Diet Culture, and Rape Culture Shape Body Image
The Hidden Web of Shame and Control
When people talk about body image issues, it often gets reduced to media influence or personal insecurity. However, the roots go much deeper, especially for those raised in high-control or religious environments. In therapy sessions with clients healing from religious trauma or spiritual abuse, I often see a recurring and painful pattern: purity culture, diet culture, and rape culture are tangled together, shaping how people feel in and about their bodies.
What Is Purity Culture?
Purity culture is a belief system, often taught in conservative religious spaces, that moral worth is tied to sexual abstinence and "sexual purity." This is often weaponized against women and queer individuals. It promotes modesty codes, discourages sexual education, and teaches that a person’s value is closely linked to their virginity, “cleanliness,” or ability to resist temptation.
Key messages include:
Your body is dangerous and must be controlled.
Sexual thoughts or desires are sinful.
If someone acts out sexually, it is your fault for tempting them.
Your worth is tied to your virginity or “purity.”
Sexual activity outside of marriage permanently damages you.
Modesty is your responsibility to protect others from sin.
Men are naturally lustful; women must manage their behavior to help them stay pure.
Queer or gender-nonconforming identities are inherently wrong or sinful.
Consent is irrelevant if you are “saving yourself” for marriage.
Experiencing sexual harm or assault makes you impure.
Physical affection is a slippery slope to sin.
God will reward your suffering and self-denial with a “perfect” marriage or partner.
If you are not modest enough, any harm that happens to you is your fault.
Your body exists primarily for your future spouse or to glorify God, not for you.
These messages often create a profound disconnection from the body. You learn to ignore intuition, suppress desire, and internalize shame. This can show up in subtle or profound ways, including:
Feeling numb or checked out during physical or sexual intimacy
Difficulty identifying or trusting physical needs (e.g., hunger, fatigue, arousal, pain)
Chronic guilt or shame when experiencing pleasure or desire
Viewing your body as a source of sin, temptation, or danger
Avoiding mirrors, photos, or physical attention
Difficulty relaxing into your body, feeling constantly tense or hyper-aware
Struggles with touch, even when it is safe or consensual
Belief that the body must be punished, controlled, or hidden
Feeling unsafe or undeserving when resting, enjoying food, or practicing self-care
Dissociation- zoning out, feeling floaty, or disconnected from physical sensations
Feeling like your body is not really yours, but instead belongs to God, a future spouse, or your community
Compulsive modesty or fear of being “too much” physically or emotionally
Difficulty setting or honoring bodily boundaries (e.g., saying no, asking for space, identifying discomfort)
When you are constantly told that your body is dangerous, sinful, or a source of temptation, you learn to distrust your own physical experiences. You begin to suppress natural emotions like desire, curiosity, and pleasure. Over time, this can lead to dissociation, a psychological survival mechanism where you "check out" from your body entirely to avoid discomfort, fear, or shame. This disconnection is not just emotional, it becomes neurological. When your nervous system has been taught to associate embodiment with danger or guilt, even gentle experiences like rest, touch, or enjoyment can feel unsafe. Reconnecting with your body requires intentional healing, where you relearn how to listen to and trust your internal cues, and reclaim your right to take up space, without fear, apology, or shame.
Diet Culture and the Demand for Control
Diet culture shares a surprisingly similar framework: it moralizes bodies and promotes restriction, control, and perfectionism. Thinness is equated with discipline, success, and attractiveness, and anything outside of those narrow ideals is seen as failure or laziness.
For people coming out of purity culture, diet culture can feel familiar. Both systems:
Prioritize external approval over internal cues.
Promote self-denial as a virtue.
Create rigid “good” vs. “bad” binaries (good food/bad food, pure/impure, modest/tempting).
Reinforce the belief that your body must be fixed or hidden.
Dieting becomes another way to earn love, acceptance, or even spiritual “worthiness.” It is not just about weight, it is about survival, belonging, and trying to feel good enough.
The Overlap with Rape Culture
Rape culture is a social system where sexual violence is downplayed, excused, or even normalized. It shows up in victim blaming, disbelief of survivors, sexual objectification, and the widespread idea that someone “asked for it” based on how they dressed, acted, or existed in their body. Purity culture does not exist in a vacuum, it often lays the groundwork for rape culture to thrive. Together, they reinforce each other in harmful and often invisible ways.
Here is how they intersect:
Purity culture teaches that it is your responsibility to avoid tempting others.
→ Rape culture says if you were harassed or assaulted, it is because you were immodest, flirtatious, or "leading someone on."Purity culture tells you that “good” people do not have sex or think about sex.
→ Rape culture tells you that if something happened to you, it must mean you are not “good” anymore.Purity culture avoids conversations about consent, desire, and bodily autonomy.
→ Rape culture thrives in that silence, where people are not taught what consent actually looks or feels like.Purity culture idealizes obedience, especially for women and girls.
→ Rape culture exploits that obedience, reinforcing that saying no is rude, dangerous, or unspiritual.Purity culture shames sexual experiences, even when they are non-consensual.
→ Rape culture uses that shame to silence survivors, implying that speaking up will only further “taint” their image or ruin their life.Purity culture views sex as something that can be “stolen” from you.
→ Rape culture supports that view by framing survivors as “damaged goods,” rather than focusing on the harm caused by the perpetrator.
Together, these systems place the entire burden of sexual responsibility on the most vulnerable—particularly women, LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, even children, and those in high-control or religious communities. Meanwhile, perpetrators are often excused or protected, especially if they hold social or religious authority. This toxic overlap can leave survivors feeling not just violated, but deeply broken. Many who were raised in religious environments do not even have the language to name what happened to them. They may think, “I shouldn’t have been alone,” or “I didn’t fight hard enough,” or “Maybe it was my fault because I wasn’t pure.”
The trauma gets buried under spiritual guilt, social silence, and a profound sense of shame. Survivors may:
Never tell anyone what happened.
Internalize it as a personal failure or spiritual consequence.
Stay in environments where their boundaries continue to be violated.
Often, people only begin to process what happened years or even decades later, when the symptoms (like anxiety, chronic shame, disordered eating, dissociation, or relationship struggles) finally become too loud to ignore.
The Body as the Enemy
When these systems collide, the body is no longer seen as a source of wisdom or belonging, it becomes a problem to solve, a temptation to manage, or a liability to control. The body becomes the enemy.
You may have been taught (explicitly or subtly) that your body is dangerous, shameful, or even spiritually corrupt. That your curves invite harm. That your hunger (whether for food, touch, or rest) must be suppressed. That your pleasure is sinful. That your pain is to be endured silently. Over time, this messaging creates a fundamental split between your mind and your body, where your body is no longer a place of safety, but a site of surveillance, discipline, or punishment.
This can show up in so many ways:
Feeling betrayed by your body when it expresses desire, need, or vulnerability
Seeing your body only through the lens of how others perceive it, never for yourself
Treating your body like a project, always needing to be “fixed,” “cleansed,” or made smaller
Hating your body for being harmed, or blaming it for being targeted
Pushing through illness, pain, or exhaustion because listening feels like weakness
Silencing sensations (pleasure, pain, hunger, grief) because they feel unsafe or “too much”
Fearing embodiment because you were taught that the body leads you away from God, purity, or worthiness
Even after leaving these belief systems, the relationship often lingers in the nervous system. You might reject the teachings intellectually, but still feel fear or disgust when you look in the mirror, set a boundary, or allow yourself to enjoy food, sex, or rest. The body holds the stories you were told, and the unlearning can take time. But it is possible.
How Therapy Can Help
In therapy, we start by naming these systems for what they are, not personal failures, but cultural conditions rooted in control, fear, and shame. Then we slowly build a new relationship with the body, one rooted in safety, agency, and self-trust.
We explore questions like:
What does your body want and need?
What would it feel like to eat, move, or rest without guilt?
Can you reclaim pleasure — not just sexual, but sensory, emotional, relational?
What beliefs are you ready to let go of?
What would it mean to live in your body, instead of against it?
This work is powerful when done with a therapist who understands the intersection of trauma, spirituality, and embodiment.
Therapy can help you unravel these messages and build a relationship with your body that is grounded in consent, curiosity, and care. You deserve to feel safe, empowered, and whole.
I offer trauma-informed therapy for survivors of religious trauma and high-control systems. Whether you are just starting to question old beliefs or deep in the work of healing, you are welcome here.
