The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  First, Spears got some press for moving in with then-boyfriend and fellow pop star Justin Timberlake. But the sexist brouhaha began in earnest when Spears was no longer considered “attractive,” because she started to gain weight, got pregnant, and no longer looked like a little girl. Pictures of her cellulite popped up on websites and gossip magazines nationwide, along with guesstimations about her weight and jokes about her stomach. Because “purity” isn’t just about not having sex, it’s about not being a woman—and instead being in a state of perpetual girlhood (more on this in Chapter 3).

  Shaming young women for being sexual is nothing new, but it’s curious to observe how the expectation of purity gets played out through the women who are supposed to epitomize the feminine ideal: the “desirable” virgin. After all, we rarely see women who aren’t conventionally beautiful idolized for their abstinence. And no matter how “good” you are otherwise—even if you’re an all-American beauty queen—if you’re not virginal, you’re shamed.

  The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She’s young, white, and skinny. She’s a cheerleader, a baby sitter; she’s accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She’s never a woman of color. She’s never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She’s never disabled. “Virgin” is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially younger women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

  SELLING VIRGINITY

  Unfortunately, this morality model of virginity—in which women’s morals and ethical ability are defined solely by their sexual status—isn’t the only type the virginity movement is pushing. Viewing virginity as a commodity—as it was seen back in the days in which daughters were exchanged as property—lives on, just in less obvious ways (though, arguably, much more insidiously). Now fathers participate in purity balls and virginity pledges to maintain ownership over their daughters, even if it’s only symbolic. Women’s sexuality is still very much for sale.

  Not so shockingly to those of us who do feminist and progressive political work, the conservative, religious right has been at the center of keeping women’s bodies on the market. The backlash against women’s rights over the past three decades has ranged from rolling back our reproductive rights to launching antisexuality scare-tactic campaigns—all part of a larger concerted effort desperately seeking a return to traditional gender roles. Make no mistake about it—these efforts are at the heart of the virginity movement and its goals.

  And they’ve been successful. To a large extent, the virginity movement is the new authority on sexuality. It’s in our schools, telling our children what sex is (dirty, wrong, and dangerous), and in our homes, creating legislation that violates women’s privacy and bodies (more on this in Chapter 6).

  In addition to promoting the virginity-as-morality model, the virginity movement is working hard to reaffirm virginity as something to be bought, sold, and owned. Sometimes these attempts transpire in more obvious ways than others.

  Take, for example, Virginity Vouchers. Sold to abstinence educators as abstinence commitment cards to hand out to students, these vouchers, which look much like credit cards, feature a background image of a bride and groom with the words VIRGINITY VOUCHER: DON’T BUY THE LIE, SAVE SEX FOR MARRIAGE emblazoned across it. The Abstinence Clearinghouse, the largest and best-known abstinence education nonprofit organization in the country, sells the card on its website and makes no effort to hide the fact that this product is, quite literally, commodifying virginity: This “Virginity Voucher” isa hard plastic commitment card with a place on the back to sign their name. Created for both young men and women, this card can be kept in their wallet to remind them of their decision!16

  Right along with their MasterCards and Visas!

  Or consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools and at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, “You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in pre-marital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don’t leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.”17

  Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity, they’re nothing but a “bare stem”?

  Abstinence-only education (see Chapter 5), which receives more than $178 million a year in federal funding, is chock full of lessons like these that tell students that female sexuality is a “gift,” “precious,” and something to “save.”

  A 2008 advertisement promoting Abstinence Awareness Week in Washington, D.C., told young women to “guard your diamond” alongside a picture of a tremendous gem covered in chains and a lock.18

  And, of course, there are purity balls—the federally funded father/daughter dances where girls as young as age six pledge their virginity to their dads, who in turn pledge to hang on to said virginity until an appropriate husband comes along, to whom the fathers can transfer ownership of their daughters.

  Not all of the virginity-for-sale messages are so overt, but all of them are sexist and all of them are dangerous. Why? Because if virginity is a gift, or something “worth saving,” that means that those who don’t save it are somehow lacking—or, even worse, sullied.

  Sex-as-dirty and women-as-tainted messages are central to the virginity movement and are perpetuated most visibly in the most unfortunate of places—our schools. The primary perpetrator, abstinence-only education, has established programs across the country to tell young women that they’re somehow spoiled by sex.

  One popular classroom exercise, for example, employs Scotch Tape to demonstrate how premarital sex can make girls dirty.e A teacher holds up a clear strip of tape, meant to represent a girl, in front of the class. The teacher then puts the strip of tape, adhesive side down, on the arm of a boy in the class, to symbolize his sexual relationship with the girl. The teacher rips off the tape (signifying the breakup, apparently) and holds it up again for the class to look at. Students are meant to see that the strip of tape—the girl—has picked up all kinds of dirt and hair from the boy’s arm and is no longer clean. Then, when the teacher tries to stick the same strip of tape to another boy’s arm, he or she notes that it doesn’t stick—they can’t bond! To end things with a bang, the abstinence educator makes a remark about the girl’s being “used” and therefore unable to have strong future relationships.19

  In another popular exercise, abstinence teachers’ use candy to make their “dirty” points. These candy exercises often consist of teachers’ showing how the candy can’t fit back into its wrapper after being chewed/sucked/ eaten. Another program in Nevada even used its abstinence-only state funding to run public radio service ads that said girls will feel “dirty and cheap” after having sex. (The ads were later pulled due to listener outrage.20) The fact that these examples nearly always focus on girls is no coincidence. After all, our bodies are the ones that get objectified and pathologized, and it’s our morality that’s supposedly in jeopardy.

  But sullied students across America shouldn’t fret! The virginity movement has ensured that there’s a way out of the dirt trap: Megan Landry of Houma, Louisiana, signed a “Pure Love Promise” commitment card when she was sixteen years old while attending Abbey Youth Fest, a Louisiana event for young Catholics. The card, which she signed, dated, and carried in her wallet, reads, “Believing that sex is sacred, I promise to God that I will save the gift of my sexuality from now until marriage. I choose to glorify God withmy body and pursue a life of purity, trusting that the Lord is never outdone in generosity.”21

  As it turns out, Landry had already lost her virginity to a boyfriend when she was in the tenth grade, but she was moved to sign the card anyway after hearing one of the event speakers, Jason Evert, author of Pure Love.

  “[Evert] gave a talk about purity and saving yourself for marriage. He told us about how he had waited until he was married for sex, but his fiancée had already slept with someone. They both decided to not sleep with each other—he took a pl
edge and his girlfriend took a secondary virginity pledge. I just thought that was sooooo sweeeet,” Landry wrote in an email to me.

  The notion of secondary virginity—that you can regain your spiritual and emotional purity by pledging abstinence until marriage, no matter what your sexual history—first became popular in the mid-1980s among conservative Christian groups.22 Also called born-again virginity, the notion is widespread in Christian programs for young people, abstinence-only education, and even pop culture.

  Perhaps sensing that the number of teen virgins in the United States was diminishing, religious groups saw secondary virginity as their opportunity to (for lack of a better term) put more asses in the seats. What better way to increase the numbers of virginity pledgers than to open up the process to everyone—even the promiscuous! It’s possible that the virginity movement even recognized that the purity standard of not having intercourse was simply unrealistic, and saw how promoting a promise that focused on emotional and spiritual purity might woo those who felt ostracized by their virginityless status.

  What I find interesting about secondary virginity is that while it may seem like an easy out, with its emphasis on emotional and spiritual purity, it actually takes a hardline approach to chastity and has the effect of increasing the obstacles to being pure. After all, to be a virgin, all you have to do is not have sex. But to fully embrace your secondary virginity, you must abstain not only from intercourse, but also from masturbation or even thinking about sex. And there’s no more of this “anything but” nonsense, either—Love Matters, a teen abstinence program, tells those considering being secondary virgins to “avoid intense hugging,” and that “anything beyond a brief, simple kiss can quickly become dangerous.”23

  Some groups even advise women to change the way they act and dress to convey their chastity appropriately. An article from Focus on the Family, “Pure Again,” notes that “women find they want to try a different way of dressing—to show more respect for their own bodies.”f24

  Despite efforts to link secondary virginity to teens’ emotional and spiritual selves, the virginity movement’s obsession with bodily purity is impossible to hide. Undercutting the movement’s argument that purity is about spirituality is the fact that many of the secondary-virginity and chastity messages come from crisis pregnancy centers, groups that masquerade as medical clinics when their actual purpose is to convince young women not to have abortions. What could be more intimately tied with women’s bodies and sexuality than pregnancy? And, let’s face it, the language of secondary virginity isn’t exactly subtle. On the website for A Pregnancy Resource Center of Northeast Ohio, an article titled “Take2” asks, “Have you already unwrapped the priceless gift of virginity and given it away? Do you now feel like ‘second-hand goods’ and no longer worthy to be cherished? Do you ever wish you could re-wrap it and give it only to your future husband or wife?”25

  But not to worry, there’s an answer! “Guess what? You can be abstinent again! You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. You can decide today to commit to abstinence, wrapping a brand-new gift of virginity to present to your husband or wife on your wedding night.”26

  The message is clear: Without your “gift,” you’re “second-hand goods.” (Or at least, if you’re properly repentant, that’s what you should feel like.)

  Like most virginity pledges, the appeal of secondary virginity doesn’t seem to last long. Landry, the secondary virginity-pledging teen from Louisiana, broke her pledge within the year:As the months went by, I gradually stopped hanging out with my religious friends and got a serious boyfriend,” she said. “About eight months after I signed the pledge, on New Year’s Eve, I had no use for that card anymore. We dated for about one month before we had sex. After this relationship, I had no interest in abstinence and purity pledges . I was over it.

  Landry is not alone in being “over it.” Like first-time virginity pledgers, secondary virginity pledgers are likely to abandon their promise, and even more likely to not use contraception.g Another young virginity pledger, Emily Seipel of Michigan, even told me that her high school virginity pledge was “an easy [way] to resist flesh sins when you’re already a closeted lesbian.” (Gay people don’t exist in the virginity movement, remember?) Seipel, who is technically still a virgin by conventional standards, is far from alone. The purity that the virginity movement is working so hard for is more of an illusion than it would like to own up to. Teens who make these pledges often do so in front of church members, peers, parents, and community leaders, and oftentimes they have no real choice in the matter. It’s not as if many twelve-to fourteen-year-olds are going to be self-assured enough to refuse to take a chastity vow. (“No thanks, Mom, I’d like to keep my sexual options open!”) These pledges are little more than cultural farces created to make parents feel better about their children’s coming of age. And, frankly, parents who buy into the purity myth need some hope; after all, mainstream media would have them believe that their daughters are going wild and are perhaps irredeem- ably tainted (more on this in Chapter 2).

  Whether they’re pledges, bare stems, or Virginity Vouchers, the messages are clearly regressive. But virginity proponents are doing one heck of a job marketing them as “revolutionary” and “empowering.” Appropriating feminist rhetoric to reinforce traditional gender roles is nothing if not brilliant.

  Wendy Shalit, a writer and virginity guru whose first book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering Lost Virtue, was the topic of much debate when it was released in 2000, is a prime player in the “making abstinence cool” movement (or, as she calls it, the “modesty movement”). Shalit, who in 2007 penned another ode to chastity, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, founded a website, the Modesty Zone,27 and a blog, Modestly Yours,28 which has twenty-one in-house bloggers. The site describes itself as “an informal community of young women who don’t have a voice in the mainstream media.”

  “Whether you’re a virgin waiting until marriage, or just against casual sex more generally, you can find a safe harbour here to share your ideals, interests, and goals for the future,” it reads. The Modesty Zone features “Rebels of the Month” and slogans like “Be Daring, keep your shirt on!” Of course, the core message of the modesty movement is still in plain view, as evidenced by the blog’s tagline: “Modesty Zone: A site for good girls.”

  Some virginity-movement members are even resorting to using sex to sell their antisex message. A shirt being sold on the website of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Christian organization, says, VIRGINS ARE HOT, and groups on Facebook dedicated to the same message call their own work “passion for purity.”

  What’s most telling about all of these efforts, whether they’re being executed via education, religion, or social imperatives, is that they’re not working—at least, not in the ways the movement would like them to. Virginity pledges have proved ineffective time and time again; the same is true of abstinence-only education.29 Blogs like Shalit’s Modesty Zone have little web traffic,30 and the purity groups on social-networking sites are dwarfed by groups like “This is what a feminist looks like” or even those as trivial as “If You Can’t Differentiate Between ‘Your’ and ‘You’re’ You Deserve To Die.”

  Despite its inability to keep women “pure,” or to convince most Americans that abstinence is best, the virginity movement is strong, well funded, and everywhere. While there isn’t a critical mass of young people who identify with this movement, that doesn’t mean they aren’t affected by it; these are the people who are teaching our kids about sex and teaching our daughters about morality. And what they’re teaching them is wrong.

  Abstinence-only classes are part of the reason why one in four young American women have a sexually transmitted infection (STI),31 and are certainly to blame for the disturbing revelation that teens in Florida believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV, and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy.32 These are the organizations with bi
llboards peppered across America’s highways telling young women, WAIT FOR THE BLING and THE ULTIMATE WEDDING GIFT IS YOUR VIRGINITY.33

  All of these messages—which position certain young women as the ideal, substitute sexual purity for real morality, and commodify virginity—are part of a larger effort to roll back all women’s rights. The virginity movement is seeking a return to traditional gender roles, and focusing on purity is the vehicle toward that end.

  When I emailed my high school ex to let him know about this book, I asked him about our first time and what he took away from the experience. Like mine, his memories were wrought with uncomfortable momentsh and questions. He remembers writing the date above his bed as a way to add permanence to a fleeting moment. I was surprised to learn, however, that his views about women’s sexuality weren’t any more sophisticated than what I remembered them to be during our teenage years.

  “No matter how sexually curious or ‘ready’ a girl is, she seems to be able to keep her wits about her a bit better than her male counterparts, so more is expected of [women], and rightly so,” Josh wrote to me. This is an all-too-common assertion— the idea that women are somehow less sexual than men and are therefore the gatekeepers of sexual morals. It’s a fundamental notion of the virginity movement, however, so I shouldn’t have been so shocked to hear this line of reasoning being regurgitated by my former boyfriend. After all, the purity message is widespread. But it’s one thing to hear the media use this type of language about Britney Spears; it was quite another to hear an ex-boyfriend use it about me. At the end of the day, though, it is about me—it’s about all of us. However theoretically we’d like to discuss issues of virginity, purity, and women’s moral value, the fact is, they affect all of us.