My classmate had received a new princess-cut purity ring from her parents on Valentine’s Day.

“Where do you, like, put yours during practice?” she whispered from behind her open gym locker. We were freshmen on the basketball team at Living Christian high school in Wisconsin; besides this and our rings, we didn’t have much in common.

“On the hook,” I answered. By 1993, I’d worn my purity ring – a blue topaz birthstone ring – for more than two years. As the first of my friends to receive such a gift, they came to me for tips on taking care of the first precious piece of jewelry many of us had been entrusted to protect. Losing one’s purity ring was tantamount to losing the real thing – at least according to the rumors that spread via prayer circles.

She looked apprehensive. The concern over leaving her ruby ring just hanging there on a hook was apparent.

“Wrap it in a tissue, then, and wedge it in the crack of your math book”. I slammed my locker, forgetting to take off my own ring.

•••

On my 13th birthday, my parents escorted me to a candlelight dinner and presented me with the finest ring I had yet had the privilege to call mine. Accepting it meant I promised to stay a virgin until my wedding night – to keep my mind innocent, my body untouched, my soul blameless – so that I could one day present my husband with the ultimate gift.

Protecting my purity was a daily topic in my devout Christian household, located a few rusty miles outside of Milwaukee.

In 1991, my family was early to join the crusade to protest America’s promiscuity with public purity pledges. In our born-again circles, word spread through church newsletters arguing that Christians could no longer be complacent over the epidemic of premarital sex. Well-known evangelist Jimmy Hestler circulated tracts reporting that while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated half of all American teens professed to having intercourse by age 17, a study of evangelical teenagers revealed that 43% confessed to fornicating by 18. About 65% admitted to “some kind” of sexual contact.

Amy Deneson with her purity ring. Photograph: Amy Deneson

This was a moral crisis the religious right had to confront.

The slogan “true love waits” was eventually coined and then stamped onto silver rings and widely distributed for $9.95 at youth revivals, Christian rock concerts, purity balls and evangelical bookstores in the mall.

These rings sealed the deal when in the mid-1990s, an estimated 2.5 million American teenagers publicly pledged to pastors, parents, friends and future spouses that they would not engage in premarital sex. Early espousers, like my family, marked this rite of non-passage with gemstones or diamond rings; some passed down heirlooms. My parents were proud to give me a special ring, as opposed to what my mom called “Jesus junk”. By which, I imagined, she meant those cheap silver rings.

•••

Mid-drill, my team-mate hurled a chest-pass at me with such force that the stone of my purity ring popped out and skittered across the court. I dropped to all fours.

Coach blew her whistle.

“Sorry!” I cried. “I broke my purity ring.”

Our point guard, Mary, who took her namesake seriously, fell to the floor to help me scour the court.

“It’s a blue heart,” I described. When my dad gave me the ring, he said it represented my commitment to guard my heart, as instructed in Proverbs 4:23.

“What if you lost it?” Mary murmured, swiping her finger through a water droplet.

I shook my head against the encroaching fear that she could be right.

“Wait! There!” Mary cried, and I crawled out of bounds to retrieve my displaced heart. My ring’s band was bashed, but I was relieved to see my two diamond chips were still intact. They represented “mommy and daddy standing next to me to help me stay strong”, my mom had explained with hope in her voice.

“Hurry and put it away,” my coach shouted. I ran past to the locker room.

Pinching the loose gem, I dug through my backpack for something to hold my heart. I came across a light-day pad. Beneath the protective tape, I secured my stone to the sticky underside. Yet when I went to pull off the ring band, I halted at the sight of it. The gaping hole formed by the empty prongs resembled what I imagined my insides might look like if I ever gave into sin, or what repentant teenagers at my church called “slipping sexually”.

I imagined my hymen to resemble one of those paper-covered doorways that cheerleaders taped up for the boy’s basketball team to tear through on their way into spirit rallies (as did my boyfriend, which was why he accepted handjobs but, for fear of breaking me, never reciprocated). Later, I would learn that hymens were shaped more like the doorframe itself, a smaller enclosure within a larger entity, that formed when the internal and external organs fused together during development.

But at the time, such basic information about my reproductive system would have been viewed as encouraging sexual activity.

•••

Technically, the 1990s purity culture was nothing new; it was ancient. In Virgin: The Untouched History, historian Hanne Blank examined how cultural esteem of virginity has shaped societies for millennia. My experience differed only by name and by those who assumed power to define what was pure or impure.

The foundation of the true love waits movement had been laid during the “just say no” Reagan years. In 1981 The Adolescent Family Life Act, nicknamed The Chastity Act, passed, empowering the government for the first time in US history to fund abstinence-only advocacy programs – ostensibly to stop the spike in unintended pregnancies as well as to curb the spread of HIV/Aids.

George HW Bush dismissed the American Civil Liberties Union’s case that abstinence ideology violated the constitutional separation of church and state. He ratcheted up funding for purity promotion, begetting the health policy oxymoron “abstinence-only sexual education”.

For three decades, virginity pledges were tallied by the Government Accountability Office as proof of efficacy. Success was loosely measured in ring receipts and course completions, irrespective of the person’s actual behavior.

•••

I continued to wear the empty band, fearing what others might think or say if I took it off – especially my boyfriend, Jamie, when he picked me up for our Friday night date. We met at a youth group mixer at our Baptist church and had been inseparable since. By the time my parents permitted us to really go out, Jamie could drive. He was a baseball stud, in the kind of small town where everyone from the postman to the Candy Shoppe owner knew the score.

In the beginning, we actually did go out to all sorts of places; but as of late, we mostly sped to the darkest spot we could find in parking lots.

“I’ve wanted this all week,” he said, pulling me toward the backbench of his mom’s baby blue minivan.

“Me too.”

As Christians, we believed what our pastors and parents told us about premarital sex being an abomination. We were on the honor roll, athletes and preppy. We had state championships, college degrees, a honeymoon (hopefully together) and homeownership in our future. As my dad suggested, we were two souls drawn toward the same transcendent, heavenly goal. Our pursuit not only drew us closer together, but also made us special, praiseworthy and more civilized than ancient barbarians, dogs or, say, the French, whose language I was studying as an elective.

Going all the way was so out of bounds; it wasn’t even on our playing field.

“You OK tonight?” Jamie asked. “You seem, I don’t know, bummed.”

“I just wish we could be closer,” I said, kissing him. “I love you so much.”

Jamie cupped my cheeks, pulled me in for a kiss that increased in fervor, until he gently nudged downward, and I bowed my head.

‘The pressure to have sex was supposed to come from the outside world, not within.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

I closed my eyes, trying to focus on the belief that I was helping us stay pure, that I was being good – everyone knew there was really only one line that couldn’t be crossed before marriage, and I was helping us protect it. His palms tightened on the back of my head. I prayed away the feeling that I wanted him to reciprocate. My frustration became palpable, but I had to content myself with thinking his gratitude was all there was to get.

The pressure to have sex was supposed to come from the outside world, not within. Christian girls weren’t supposed to want it, or to, God forbid, instigate it. Yet, as I kneeled on the crumby minivan carpeting, I realized I wasn’t sure that I wanted to wait, or that I truly had a choice in the matter. Choice required options. My singular option was to uphold the promise of my purity ring or else deserve eternal damnation. My virginity vow no longer felt empowering. Instead, it felt as though someone else was calling the shots over my body, mind, and life.

The overwhelming desire for something more overcame me. I was astounded with myself but couldn’t stop. I crawled up off the floor and straddled him. Jamie was startled by my aggression but responded instantly. My thighs squeezed his waist.

An incredible feeling radiated through me, but before we could go any further Jamie shouted: “Stop! I can’t!”

He pushed me away with more force than either of us expected. My head hit the side window. I was startled, then disgusted, then terrified. His discharge began to seep between my legs and soak my cotton briefs. I peeled out of my underwear. Jamie’s mouth dropped open in shock, then curiosity, then desire.

“Get it off before I get pregnant!”

Stunned, Jamie took a moment to come to his senses but then leapt, with his boxers still around his knees, over the middle minivan seat and dove headfirst into the glove compartment. He dug for the napkins his mom kept there in case of spills. Jamie kept on repeating, “We’re going to be OK. Right?”

He was in a better position to know. His public high school required some semblance of sexual education starting in 10th grade. The bare-bone lessons were tempered by his religious family and conservative storybook town, but at least teachers distributed worksheets and held office hours, and coaches freely handed out condoms. I knew enough from my mom’s long-ago explanation of how babies were made to know that his stuff didn’t just slime down my thighs. It could swim.

“Holy crap!” Jamie stopped dabbing my bare legs and grabbed my hand. “We broke your ring.”

“It was like that,” I said, starting to cry.

He offered the wad of damp tissues, apologetically.

Tears of fear and shame and dissatisfaction seeped out. “We have to stop, Jamie!”

“Stop what?”

“This!” All of this.

“Well, it’s kinda your fault. Grabbing me like that.”

“Just take me home,” I said, righting my twisted, empty ring.

•••

Born into different circumstances, Jamie and I might’ve learned to develop our physical relationship in tandem with our emotional and intellectual connection. I’d like to think that if we had the discipline to stop, we could’ve managed birth control. That said, we were under the impression that only “sluts” prepared to have sex and “frickin’ fags” wore condoms.

We were fortunate that while we groped around in the dark, we only swapped misconceptions about male and female desires and anatomy and were spared from the sexually transmitted diseases and infections that could also spread through unprotected contact.

In After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges, research scholars Hannah Brückner of Yale and Peter Bearman of Columbia reported in the Journal of Adolescent Heath that 88% of purity pledgers had premarital intercourse. This 2001 study was a followup to their earlier report on surveys they conducted throughout 1994 and 1996, at the height of the purity pledge movement.

Responses revealed that while pledges did delay sexual initiation in younger teens by 34%, once they did engage, they were one-third less likely to use protection. That was to be expected, the researchers remarked, “for it is hard to imagine how one could both pledge to be a virgin until marriage and carry a condom while unmarried”.

Consequently, there was no significant difference in infection rates between pledgers and non-pledgers. The 12% who reported keeping their vows into adulthood professed to doing so in order to intimately intertwine their religious beliefs, sexual activity, and matrimonial commitment. The public nature of these personal pledges, similar to wedding vows, created a visible community with which to identify and to express their evolving sense of selves. The allegiance of a minority – an us-against-the-world mentality – was a core appeal of the pledge, as a counter-culture identity.

For centuries, Christians followed God’s call to set themselves apart. Physically marking the body with an outward sign to announce an internal commitment was foundational to a born-again Christian’s identity. For believers, who desired to first and foremost love God, the pledge and ring was holy PDA.

Growing up, I respected the commitments my boyfriend and friends made to abstain. There was nothing weak-willed about those who waited until their wedding nights – on average women were 22; men, 24. Yet, the convictions of a few were touted as being universal and becoming the policy for all.

In 1996, Bill Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, nicknamed the Workfare Act, passed with the rider, Title V, Section 510(b) attached, making the ethereal status of virginity the standard for American teenagers. Over the next five years, $437.5m in federal and state funding supported organizations willing to promote eight ideological tenets, including: “(4) teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity”.

When George W Bush assumed office, he upped the ante to $237m in the first year alone. Virginity culture bloomed into cherry-flavored lollipops, declaring, “Don’t be a sucker. Save sex for marriage,” Wait Wear panties, Britney Spears, abstinence-only education, and father-daughter Purityball portraits.

•••

The next morning, my mom and I went to get my ring repaired after our perm appointments. I assumed we were headed toward the gilded, old-timey storefront, when at the last minute she veered toward the wide swath of automatic doors to Walmart.

“Here?” I asked, shocked. Mom didn’t even buy wrapping paper from Walmart because she said it looked cheap.

“Never know where you might find a treasure,” she said. “I just couldn’t pass up how perfectly it fit our message, with the heart for you, the two diamonds for me and Daddy.”

RINGS $69! $89! $109! Giant yellow smiley faces on signs announced over a fractured rainbow of gemstones. Mom couldn’t pass up the symbolism? Or the price? Of course, I told myself, it was the meaning that counted, not the expense. My gaze followed row after row of semi-precious stones that appeared garden-variety beneath the fingerprinted display case.

‘Never know where you might find a treasure.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

A clerk in a blue vest, who appeared as though she’d rather be smoking, listened to my mom as she explained that she had purchased a ring from them a couple of years ago and that I had accidentally broken it. The clerk looked down at either my bashed band or me, and either way didn’t seem surprised.

“Yeah, naw. We’re not gonna be able to fix that,” she said after a glance. She pursed her lips and shook her curly mullet. “That one is discontinued, but you could get a replacement.” She waved her hand over a puddle of blue topaz rings.

“Thank you,” my mom said, not looking down. “But this one is very special.”

“It’s my purity ring.”

The clerk’s penciled-in eyebrows squiggled together. Her come-again expression probably wasn’t seeking clarification, but I gave it to her anyways, as I’d grown accustomed to doing.

“Purity ring,” I enunciated. “It means I’m gonna stay a virgin till I’m married.” I nodded at her enthusiastically, trying to convince her, and frankly, myself, after my behavior the night before.

Her chin recoiled into her gullet, apparently appalled that I was talking to a complete stranger about such things at Walmart. Was nothing private?

Outside our Christian circles, my parents’ intentions behind this ring were often misunderstood. My dad and mom were against premarital sex for potentially the same reasons as the stranger shopping one aisle over in the purse department. They were concerned about infection, pregnancy, abuse and psychosexual harm. But beyond these universals, they also believed that if done right, intercourse could be transcendent and include the Divine, literally The Holy Spirit. They wanted me to have a positive experience, to esteem me, and to guide me toward what they believed would be the best sex of my life.

I was lightheaded. Perhaps it was the disappointment I felt over discovering my most prized possession had come from Walmart. Was this the best I could expect? My purity ring wasn’t the same as an engagement ring or even a promise ring. It was a placeholder. It sealed the deal.

I wanted a better deal.

“Let’s go,” my mom said, gathering up her faded receipt and indignation. She stormed out of the store without a second glance at the specials. Mom slammed her car door and stomped on the accelerator. She turned left out of the parking lot instead of taking a right toward home.

“Where are we going now?”

“We’ll see.”

•••

Finally, Barack Obama stanched government spending after nearly $2bn had been blown on purity promotion but still threw a $5m bone to a virginity watchdog to get Obamacare passed. Nonetheless, throughout his terms, his administration gave millions to initiatives that provided age-appropriate programs informing youth of preventative measures that were proven to decrease STD/STI transmission and lower unexpected pregnancy rates. He proposed to fully defund abstinence-only programs in the 2017 budget. In an impoverished state of willful ignorance, where only 19 states required sexual education to be medically accurate, this was a hopeful pledge to ending the virginity racket in America.

Then Donald Trump won. On the campaign trail, his running mate, Mike Pence, affirmed his commitment to funding abstinence-only organizations, adding to the cumulative $4.5m he had recently awarded in Indiana contracts as governor. His advocacy for abstinence-only policies represented a commitment to restricting women of all ages from gaining everything from knowledge to healthcare. Purity rings rippled to impact us all, aborting the ownership of our own bodies, minds – and ultimately our lives.

•••

Mom pulled into the parking lot for the fancy mall across town.



“Come on, we’re gonna try something else.”

The sign for Zales appeared on my horizon, and the jewelry store seemed to glow like a setting sun. The plush champagne-colored carpet instantly elevated us to luxury status and merely being inside The Diamond Store felt promising. A woman in heels approached us. She was stunning. If Hollywood were to cast this midwestern sales clerk, the movie director would’ve called Heather Locklear.

“May I help you?”

Mom nodded, hopefully. “We didn’t purchase it here–”

“No, certainly not,” Heather agreed, eyeing my mom’s outfit and my crappy ring.

“But I would be thrilled,” she persisted, “to pay a jeweler if he could fix it.”

Heather pursed her lips without committing one way or another. She lifted her lotioned, polished pointer finger to her glossy lips. “One moment, please.” She returned trailed by a squat, perspiring man with a comb-over.

“Give this man your ring,” my mom instructed as she slid over the heart stone she’d been carrying, in a folded corner of an envelope, for safekeeping.

I obeyed and then went back to ogling the engagement rings. Now those are rings to hold out for! I thought, peering over the spotless cabinet frame, trying not to breathe on the glass.

“Ah yes,” the Zales jeweler said with gravitas. “The heart-shaped setting is inherently loose.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “With only three prongs, the stone will always be wobbly.” Unlike the princess-cut setting that my team-mate wore, which secured her ruby with eight prongs, my setting only had two hooks for the top rounded mounds and one sharp clasp for the point.

“I’ll do my best to anchor your stone, but,” he warned, “be on the lookout. Your heart could fall out at any moment.”

“You can do that,” my mom said. “Can’t you?”

The name of the author’s high school, as well as her former boyfriend, were changed