Sexuality in the '90s: the era of purity tests

AYON NANDI/YH

Have you ever not paid your library fines? Have you ever fantasized about Smurfs during sexual activity? Have you ever plotted felony? Have you ever "basted" yourself?

Have you ever taken a test that covered so much ground? And this is merely a sampling from the 1500 question purity test, version 6.6b, the grandfather of all purity tests. Most of them only consist of 100 questions, but this one charts areas of purity and impurity that may have never crossed your mind and may never since.

I first encountered the 100-question purity test, the version most commonly circulated throughout the Yale campus, during my freshman year when a girl in my entryway was simultaneously flaunting and bemoaning her impossibly low score (single digits). I resolved to locate the test and chart my own graph of purity on its shaky, highly unsubstantiated axes. There had been so much whispering and giggling about this famous litmus test of virtue that I couldn't help but feel a stinging sense of disappointment when I was finally huddled around a computer in the A&A Library with my nearest and dearest ready to tally my score. This was the purity test I had heard so much about? This poorly structured stab at covering all the bases of deviant behavior in 100 yes-or-no questions? This schizophrenic catechism which first appears to proceed on a traceable gradient of deviance and then juxtaposes questions about lubricant use with questions about bondage? Answering Question No. 17, I'm trying to figure out if I've ever had a "clitoral erection" (whatever that means). Then, for Question No. 18, I'm trying to recall whether I've ever been "engaged or married." Then it's on to Question No. 19 and back to the more familiar territory of whether I've ever "read a pornographic book or magazine." Is there any discernible logic at work here? To whom am I speaking? Who made this test?

Sex, Drugs, and E-mail

Perhaps we will never know, or care. The Armory (an open-access system run out of a Santa Cruz, Calif. computer geek house) gives a cursory stab at explaining its antecedents, stating only, "Purity tests have existed for ages, originally taking the form of written lists of questions. With the advent of the Net, it became popular to distribute them by electronic means." Ages, eh? This description makes it sound like the first purity test was carved on the other side of the Rosetta Stone—and perhaps it was. But it seems to me that the purity test has found its true home in the infinitely bifurcating halls of e-mail. The advent of e-mail as the primary avenue of communication between college students has ushered in a whole new dialectic of intimacy—walking that tenuous line between a phone call and a letter, e-mail inspires people to say what they might have swallowed during a phone call or gone back and erased when writing a letter. A suggestive e-mail is just ephemeral enough to be laughed off, just substantive enough to be secretly taken seriously. It is difficult to take oneself seriously when sitting down to take a written purity test, armed with a fistful of No. 2 pencils and a portable sharpener. It seems to make a lot more sense when all of this unfolds in the realm of e-mail, clustered around a computer screen telling your roommate when you're ready to scroll down.

"A suggestive e-mail is just ephemeral enough to be laughed off, just substantive enough to be secretly taken seriously."

The purity test is essentially a communal experience, so it should of course make its home on the Web—the International Town Green of the 20th Century. Because the questions are so arbitrary—so concerned with the minutiae of certain experiences on the one hand and so willing to gloss over entire categories of experience on the other—the test becomes less about the final result and more about the process of taking it. You can learn a great deal more about the purity of your friends by watching the way in which they take the test than by asking them what their final score is. We are the "I never" generation, encouraged to amass experience and deal openly with issues of sexuality. The purity test is simply the lowest common denominator of this cultural principle.

Purity tests: literature or silliness?

Contrary to the assumptions of many, there is no one purity test. In fact, there are so many purity tests that one might go so far as to say that they define an entirely new genre of technological literature—a canon worthy of study by the likes of Harold Bloom, GRD '56. And, like any good literary movement, the purity tests have not only branched out to encompass a plurality of disciplines and forms (there's even one in verse), but also spawned a healthy flow of satire. The most vicious of these spoofs hails from the Brunching Shuttlecocks and is entitled "The 100-Question Parody Test," a series of responses to the original purity test that poke fun at the silly way in which most of the questions are framed. In response to Question No. 38, "Have you ever had an orgasm due to manipulation by an MOS [member of the opposite sex]?", the Brunching Shuttlecocks respond, "No, but I've driven to Fargo, North Dakota due to the manipulation of a woman." In response to one of the earliest questions, "Have you ever kissed an MOS?" the Shuttlecocks quip "You mean, like, on the lips?," gesturing toward the absurd amount of ground the test purports to cover—everything from going on a date to committing bestiality.

How pure is Mr. Bean?

Culturally impoverished college students of the late '80s probably only had one or two purity tests to call their own, but today there are hundreds. There is the "1000 Point Omnisexual Purity Test," the "Electrical Engineering Purity Test," the "Feminist Purity Test," and even the "Mr. Bean Purity Test." Popular culture has reared its ugly head amidst the purity tests, applying the paradigm to every format imaginable. All of these attempts to widen the breadth of the purity tests, however, serve only to magnify the essential silliness of the concept.

What the purity test attempt to do, essentially, is quantify deviance. This notion is somewhat paradoxical because deviance, by definition, resists codification at every turn. Deviance is an attempt to circumvent and challenge systems of organization, not conform to them. This central contradiction becomes most readily apparent when taking the "Weirdness Purity Test." The whole idea of taking a test to determine how weird you are just doesn't make any sense—if you were really weird, you would be eating the test instead of taking it. Or whatever. The point is that anyone who thinks weirdness can be summed up by 100 answers of yes or no just isn't sufficiently weird. Taking a test is a normative activity, and weirdness is an attempt to resist and even to revolt against normative forces. Similarly, the "Feminist Purity Test" is an abysmal failure. This test is simply all over the map, bouncing from questions as elementary as "Do you know what 'suffrage' means?" to questions as specific as "Did you obtain a tattoo or piercing during a ritual or have a tattoo or piercing with spiritual significance?" Are we still taking the same test here? It's the pit of arbitrariness into which every purity test falls into, one way or another—they try to cover too many bases and the result is meaningless. But let's not kid ourselves about the real reason these specialized purity tests fail, the same reason why "I never" and "Truth or Dare" always turn into drunken catalogs of sexual exploits. Try as they might to start out the game with some semblance of variety, no one plays "I never" in order to ascertain how many of their friends have read War and Peace, just like no one takes the purity test to actually figure out how pure they are. It's a voyeuristic activity, an exercise in naughtiness. It's no fun if you take it alone. As a techno-literary movement, the purity test is a failure. But as a 3 a.m. drunken activity, I give it an A. When else are you encouraged to fail a test?