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.

The Columbia University humor magazine, The Jester, reported in its October 1935 issue on a campus wide "purity test" conducted at Barnard College in the spring of 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.

...
Wikipedia