Purity test

A purity test is a self-graded survey that assesses the participants' supposed degree of innocence in worldly matters (sex, drugs, deceit, and other activities assumed to be vices), generally on a percentage scale with 100% being the most and 0% being the least pure. Online purity tests were among the earliest of Internet memes, popular on Usenet beginning in the early 1980s. However, similar types of tests circulated under various names long before the existence of the Internet.

Historical examples

The Rice Thresher student newspaper in 1924 published the results of an informal ten-question survey of 119 female undergraduate students at Rice University, with questions like "Have you ever been drunk?", "Did you ever dance conspicuously?", and "Have you ever done anything that you wouldn't tell your mother?" The test has periodically been revisited and revised by the Thresher, usually on its satirical "Backpage," with expanded lists of questions that students can take and score on their own, starting with a list of 100 questions in 1988. An official website was created for the 2012 edition by the newspaper staff.

The Columbia University humor magazine, The Jester, reported in its October 1935 issue on a campus wide "purity test" conducted at Barnard College in 1935. The issue of The Jester was briefly censored, with distribution curtailed until the director of activities at the university could review the article. According to the editor-in-chief of The Jester, "We printed the survey to clear up some of the misconceptions that Columbia and the outside world have about Barnard girls," he said. "The results seem to establish that Barnard girls are quite regular. I fail to see anything off-color in the story. It's a sociological study."

In 1936, The Indian Express reported that students at Toronto University were "under-going a 'purity test', which took "the form of twenty very personal questions, designed to determine the state of their morals and their 'purity ratio'. For example, so many marks are lost for smoking, drinking, and every time the sinner kisses a girl or boy. Then, after truthfully answering all the questions, the total number of bad marks are added up and subtracted from a hundred. What is left, if any, is the 'purity ratio'. The test is unofficial and just what it will prove when completed nobody knows."

Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and Carl R. Pagter included examples of purity tests in their 1975 book Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. They noted, "An indication of the particular sexual activities that are valued is provided by various versions of a questionnaire parody entitled 'Virtue Test' or 'Official Purity Test' or the like. It is obviously doubtful whether anyone would answer the questions posed on the test in an honest and truthful fashion. Nevertheless, the questions themselves serve to reveal a good deal about the American male's sexual fantasy life." Dundes and Pagter's book reprints a "Virtue Test" circulated at Indiana University in 1939 and a more contemporary "Official Purity Test" circulated at California Institute of Technology.

In 1976, a teacher at La Grange High School in Texas was fired for distributing a 1966 purity test, which had appeared in the Ask Ann Landers column, to her students. The questions on the test ranged from "Ever said 'I love you'?" to "Ever had group sex?" The teacher sued the school district and was awarded $71,000 in back pay and damages.

Description

Most purity tests have possible scores anywhere from 0% to 100%. Purity tests ask numerous personal questions of their users, most commonly about the use of alcohol and illicit substances; sexual acts with members of the opposite or same-sex; other illicit or illegal activities, and the above actions in an odd or "kinky" context. These tests typically have anywhere from 50 to 2000 questions.

Many popular purity tests encourage participation in a social situation (one person reading a purity test aloud while others mark down their "yeses" for later tabulation). The tests often acknowledge that some may use them as a checklist for things to do, try, or accomplish.

One test is The Unisex Purity Test (or, simply, the Purity Test). First written before 1980 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Baker House, the first incarnation had two parallel versions, 100 questions each; one for male, and one for female. The next iteration (247 questions, written at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983) heralded the merging of the gendered versions, making it unisex. Over the next decade or so, many re-writes and expansions commenced, a 2000-question version being written in 1995.

Further reading

• Linder, Joselin (2009). The Purity Test: Your Filth and Depravity Cheerfully Exposed by 2,000 Nosy Questions. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 978-0-312-38785-3.