Before The Rape Academy was Purity Culture

Originally published April 23, 2026 by Kit Morgan, LCSW on Substack and edited for The Liberated Porch’s Blog August 15, 2026

When I first learned about the online rape academy this spring after the CNN article was released, I was sickened but not shocked. A part of me wanted to be shocked, some preserved naivety that tens of millions of men would not gather to exchange ways of getting away with sexual violence against women, but naivety had left me a long time ago.

According to CNN, the online rape academy has amassed 62 million views. The scale alone is staggering, yet for many women, it simply confirmed what lived experience has already taught them: that there is a persistent risk in navigating a world structured by gendered power.

Just two years before the CNN article about the online rape academy was released, there was a viral social media question to women of whether they would choose to be alone with a bear or a man in the woods. Most women chose the bear, to many men’s dismay, humiliation, and rage. These women’s choice was grounded in embodied knowledge and intuition that was shaped by cumulative exposure to misogynistic harm.

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

Decades before the online rape academy was formed, I was introduced to a parallel framework: Purity Culture.

Both sets of my grandparents converted to Independent Fundamentalist Baptist during the Satanic Panic. Long story short, my parents met because of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist but shortly after marrying, my parents transitioned to the Southern Baptist denomination. I was raised in both Independent Fundamentalist Baptist and Southern Baptist circles growing up, and Purity Culture ran deeply in both religious groups.

Men freely spoke about being threats to women. It was considered to be a fact of life that men were not to be trusted but also were to lead the congregations. I heard pastor after pastor declare publicly that no man should be left alone with a woman who is not his wife because of not knowing what impulses the man could then act up on.

The responsibility for men’s violent lack of self-control was quietly, but unmistakably, transferred onto those of us assigned female at birth.

We were told to not be a “stumbling block,” a gross euphemism to not stimulate a man’s erection by our mere presence. Beneath its sanitized language was a disturbing implication: that male arousal could lead to being raped, and responsibility was displaced onto victims. This rhetoric was so normalized that it rarely drew scrutiny. Over time, entire communities were desensitized to the traumatic realities of sexual violence.

Purity Culture is not adjacent to Rape Culture— it’s a form of it.

Purity Culture operates by grooming and silencing. It conditions victims to internalize displaced blame, teaches perpetrators to redirect responsibility, and constructs a moral framework in which coercion is reframed as obligation.

In Purity Culture narratives, marital sex is described as a duty or responsibility by the wife to the husband. Marriage is described as a covenant in which one “gives” their body to their spouse. This language violently distorts the meaning of consent to a once in a lifetime “I do” at the marriage altar, never allowed to withdraw again. Within this framework, refusing sex is labeled as sinful, selfish, or even “evil.”

Stripped of religious rhetoric, Purity Culture’s teachings align with the definition of marital rape.

What makes this system particularly insidious is its presentation. It is often delivered through polished sermons, framed by religious texts, and reinforced by trusted authority figures. This aesthetic of respectability obscures the underlying harm, allowing it to persist with less scrutiny than more overtly violent spaces like the online rape academy.

But the parallels are difficult to ignore.

Both systems normalize entitlement to women’s bodies. Both displace accountability away from perpetrators. Both rely on coded language to make harmful ideas more palatable. And both contribute to a broader ecosystem in which sexual violence is enabled, minimized, or justified.

People don’t arrive to this violence by happenstance. It’s learned over time, often quietly. Messages about entitlement, control, and gendered responsibility are often introduced early by family systems, religious teachings, and cultural norms, long before they are amplified in more extreme environments.

Naming the connection between The Rape Academy and Purity Culture is not for shock value. Displaced responsibility for sexual abuse must come to an end in The Rape Academy, Purity Culture, and beyond. When euphemism is stripped away from Purity Culture, we can see the sexual harm for what it is— the precursor to The Rape Academy.