CONFIDENTIAL TO THE Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco's sacred order of divinely inspired drag nuns: Sister Anal Receptive, Sister Merry Peter, Sister Porn Again, Sister Bea Attitude, and Sister Constance Craving, your sex-positive gospel of guilt-free joy is under attack by another nun – a rival sister!

Calling herself the Pink Nun and done up in a bright pink habit and white makeup, she spreads her gospel in concerts, at music festivals, and even on city street corners as a one-nun spectacle. Her message: No sex until marriage. Not even the everything-but kind. "I'm very pro-sex," the Pink Nun writes on her Web site, where she proclaims herself a superhero defending purity. "I just have high standards for the use of sex. I believe sex is a sacred, precious, amazing thing."

The Pink Nun – a 27-year-old art teacher named Lisa Bulten – is proud to say that in carnal baseball, she's never gone farther than first. But it's not lost on this Christian virgin that her breed of abstinence pride is not exactly mainstream in 2003. So she seeks to turn 13- to 30-year-olds on to the benefits of keeping or rediscovering their virginity – it's never too late! – with all the ribald frankness of a potty-mouthed sex educator, counseling girls to "keep it tight!" and commanding boys to "lock your cock."

The first edition of the Pink Nun Zine features on its cover a graphic, almost clinical drawing of a spread vulva with the headline "Issue 1: For the Love of the Hymen." Among the "hymen rhymin' " ditties in the Pink Nun's self-styled hymnal: "Booty Duty," "Cock Talk," and "One Eyed Snake." A typical verse (from "Purity Pride"): "My mouth down south / Won't eat your meat / You better get uncocked / Cuz these lips are locked!"

The Pink Nun's home cloister is in Chicago, but she's taken her mission from God as nearby to San Francisco as Los Angeles, where she made an appearance at Ladyfest Los Angeles last November. Apparently, she puzzled the ladies, whose archly reclaimed definition of lady does not mean waiting for a ring to say, "yes, yes, yes, oh yes."

"The modern feminist crowd has mixed reactions," the Pink Nun concedes. "They mostly react against it, because it's aimed at the heterosexual crowd." But the Pink Nun sees herself as a feminist too, rescuing sex from a bankrupt consumer culture that has degraded a sacred act. "You are not fast food" is one of her favorite slogans. "I get so upset by the way that culture uses sex to sell things, turning women into objects," she says. "Women end up thinking that they're supposed to look a certain way and have sex because that's what you're supposed to do."

One Pink Nun postcard features a repulsive hybrid of a woman's body with the torso and head replaced by a slot machine. "I'm saying, 'Don't let yourself be sold as an object to just be played with,' " the Pink Nun explains. "It's a feminist slant on virginity. Taking control of your body is a feminist act." So, according to the pro-sex feminists who've taken the slur out of slut in a bazillion titillating burlesque shows and I-was-a-teenage-tramp memoirs, is doing whatever you want with your body, despite what anyone else has to say about it.

"I know that more and more women today are having sex because they want to, not because they're pressured to, but I think that it's not a healthy thing to have sex frequently purely because you enjoy it," the Pink Nun protests. "You're numbing yourself to the intense bond that it is." When did orgies become the orthodoxy and the puritanical purity-pushers the contrarians?

On Valentine's Day the Pink Nun stood on Belmont Street in Chicago and handed out 600 unromantic missives designed to get lovers out of the mood:

She thought he would leave her,

So she gave him head

And after he got some beaver,

He STILL fled.

Being lectured to about sex by someone who has never had it is no one's idea of a good time, and the Pink Nun gets that. "I think kids are sick of being preached at, and I've never liked that myself," she says. "My ambition is to present my beliefs in a humorous way that is going to challenge people." She strives to make chastity edgy and cute, selling a line of "purity products" – stickers, buttons, patches, T-shirts, and even underwear plastered with her signature cold-water slogans – during her public appearances and in Chicago lingerie, novelty, and sex stores.

One T-shirt features a woman's spread legs in gynecological stirrups, a pair of ears where her genitals should be, with this chipper slogan: "Don't pierce your ears without a ring." Another shows a meat inspector looking down at a dead chicken sporting a human vagina, which comes in both "You don't need his approval" and "Are you too chicken to say no?" flavors. "The T-shirts are really confrontational," the Pink Nun says. "You have to have a lot of courage to wear one. The underwear is supposed to be more like the modern-day chastity belt, like your accountability almost."