Purity culture doesn't wait until you're old enough to understand sexuality before it starts teaching you what sexuality means.
It arrives early, in the form of lessons about modesty, about sin, about the body being a source of danger. Before a child has any framework for what desire is, they've already been given a framework for what desire means: that it points toward something wrong in them, that it requires management, that its existence is evidence of a problem. The content of sexuality is almost irrelevant at that point. The emotional architecture has already been built.
This is the part that makes purity culture's effect on sexuality so persistent and so strange to work through. People expect that updating their beliefs will update their experience. They leave the church, they read different things, they meet people with healthier relationships to their bodies, and they expect that the shame will follow the beliefs out the door. It doesn't, or not at the pace they expect. The shame was installed earlier than the beliefs were available to justify it. It doesn't require the justification to keep running.
What this looks like in practice is different for different people. For some it's a dissociative quality during sex: a sense of watching from outside, of not quite being present in the body, that developed as a coping mechanism when being present in the body felt forbidden. For others it's guilt that arrives after the fact, automated and unconnected to anything they actually believe, like an alarm system that went off years ago and still hasn't been disarmed. For others it's a difficulty with desire itself — not low libido exactly, but a learned reflex to suppress or redirect arousal before it becomes fully conscious.
The recovery from purity culture's effect on sexuality is largely a body-level project, not a belief-level one. This is where most people get stuck — they do the intellectual work, they understand what happened, they update the beliefs, and then they're surprised to find the body still performing the old rules. The body isn't reading the same books. The body learned something through years of repetition and reinforcement, and it updates through years of different experience, not through argument.
What that different experience looks like is specific to each person, and working through it — the religious trauma work that addresses this specifically — is less about analyzing what happened and more about creating the conditions for a different relationship to actually form. Slowly. Without forcing the pace.
Purity culture gave you a relationship to your sexuality before you had a chance to form one yourself. Recovery is the long process of finding out what's actually there when you take the framework away.