The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  CHAPTER 2

  tainted love

  “Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it. It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker.”

  DARREN WASHINGTON,

  an abstinence educator at the Eighth Annual

  Abstinence Clearinghouse Conference1

  THE ABOVE QUOTE IS ONE I REPEAT often when speaking at colleges and feminist events. It’s shocking, telling, and, frankly, disgusting. Unfortunately, it also epitomizes the message that the virginity movement is working so hard to send to women: Sex makes us less whole and a whole lot dirtier.

  I’ve never understood what it is about having sex that makes women dirty. I can recall countless conversations I’ve had or overhead over the years about women’s supposed sexual dirtiness. Struggling with the irrationality of it all, I’ve often wondered how it’s possible that a penis could have such power, that by merely being in the vicinity of a woman’s genitals, it could transfer some kind of ambiguous filth onto us. Or perhaps women are just born dirty, and the sex merely reinforces our sullied selves’ true nature.

  When I’ve gotten engaged enough to argue commonsense points about the sexual double standard—Aren’t men sullied as well? If you use a condom, are you less dirty because you don’t actually come in contact with the penis?—I’ve been met with refutations, mostly from men, about how women who are willing to “give it up” easily aren’t really the datable kind anyway.

  The men I’ve had these conversations with, misguided as they were, had to have absorbed this line of thinking somewhere. And I can’t say I completely fault them, since popular culture is saturated with ever more sexual images while sexuality is still being touted simultaneously as dirty, wrong, and even deadly. The messages that sex for anything other than procreation makes women used goods are disproportionately targeted toward girls and young women, but the impact they have on boys and young men is equally harmful. While girls internalize this message, boys are propagating and enforcing it.

  So where does it come from, this dirty double standard? Pathologizing women’s bodies and sexuality is certainly nothing new; from “hysteria”i to fears about menstruation, women have been considered the “dirtier” sex for a long time.

  In The Female Thing, author Laura Kipnis argues that fear of women’s bodies, specifically our genitals, is at the heart of the dirt double standard.

  Recall the unhappy fact that throughout history there’s been the universal conviction that women are somehow dirtier than men. The male body is regarded, or is symbolically, as cleaner than the female body. . . . Possibly it’s that outjutting parts of the body, like a penis, are regarded as somehow cleaner than holes and cavities . . . . The vagina is frequently associated with rot and decay. . . . 2

  Not exactly the kind of message we’d like to see spread around, yet that’s what we’re stuck with. Educators, religious leaders, media, and parents alike help to promote these notions of dirty girls. Headlines about girls “gone wild” dominate newspapers and wire services, STI rates are discussed alongside stories of supposedly promiscuous teens on cable news shows, and books about the “hookup culture” ruining young women are a dime a dozen. The scare tactics are everywhere and the message is the same: Sex is hurting women.

  Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won’t have sex, but rather that they’ll have it without pleasure.j

  PERFECT VIRGINS, DIRTY GIRLS

  The Abstinence Clearinghouse’s website is a virtual cornucopia of virginity worship.3 It features educational tools, videos, a blog, pictures of purity balls, and links to conservative and religious organizations, all touting purity and chastity. The website also features a page where women (and only women) are pictured and quoted about why they’re chaste. One such quote, from sixteen-year-old Ashley Dial of Tampa, Florida, reads, “I don’t want to show up empty-handed on my wedding night. I want to have the whole package to give to my husband and my husband only.”

  Jolene Churchill of Evansville, Wisconsin, says, “Whenever I get the opportunity to speak to young people, I beg them not to become another broken victim of the lie of safe sex. The loss of one’s self-esteem, health, and potentially their life is just too high of a price tag to pay for merely being used by another individual.”k4

  When did sex become such a downer?! “The whole package”? “Broken victim”? These are fighting words for those of us who see sex as a healthy expression. Would it be so terrible to talk about sex in a way that acknowledges how wonderful it can be?

  After all, it’s not as if the virginity movement is completely without joy. On the contrary, it finds happiness in discussing girls’ virginity—in the form of its perfect virgins. Women like Churchill, Dial, and Janie Fredell, the young woman featured in The New York Times Magazine article who equated saving her virginity with strength, are held up by pro-virginity organizations as the ideal woman. They’re quoted on websites and touted as “purity princesses,”5 and are the apples of their virginity-pledging fathers’ eyes. But what happens when these pure teens get married and have sex? Are they still strong and joyful then? Presumably, but when the virginity movement speaks of sexual joy within marriages, that joy is not about orgasms or intimacy; it’s about the (almost smirking) knowledge that your relationship is more “complete” than other people’s because you waited.l

  It makes sense—after all, the perfect virgin and holding up examples of chaste young women are integral to the virginity movement. The problem with this, however, aside from the way it fetishizes young women’s sexuality, is that the girls presented as examples by the virginity movement are by and large a narrow, idealized representation: young, good-looking, straight, and white.

  Young women of color, who are so hypersexualized in American culture that they’re rarely positioned as “the virgin” in the virginity movement or elsewhere, are largely absent from discourse concerning chastity. How can you be “pure” if you are seen as dirty to begin with?

  As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, “Naked Without Shame,” about black women’s bodies and politics, “Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption.”6 She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. “[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled,” hooks wrote.7

  Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women—these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It’s only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.

  We’re a sex divided. As Patricia Hill Collins once wrote, “Dividing women into two categories—the asexual, moral women to be protected by marriage and their sexual, immoral counterparts—served as a gender template for constructing ideas about masculinity and femininity.”8

  I’d also argue that merely positioning one kind of woman over all others as good and “clean” implies that the rest of us are dirty. So for those women who don’t fall under the perfect-virgin category, schools, newspapers, and American culture in general are ready and waiting to tell them that they’re impure.

  MEDIA GONE WILD

  If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college a
t the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.9

  In 2007 alone, nearly one thousand articles referred to the “girls gone wild” and “raunch culture” phenomenon.10 Topics ranged from general hawing about girls’ promiscuity to the “trend” of bikini waxing for ten-year-olds11 to bemoaning college women’s “slutty” Halloween costumes.12 A 2007 feature article for Newsweek, “Girls Gone Bad,” even wondered whether America was raising a generation of “prosti-tots.”13

  This isn’t to say that there isn’t a real problem around the way young women are being oversexualized—of course there is. But media coverage focuses more on salacious scare tactics than on nuance. For example, a 2006 editorial in The New York Times titled “Middle School Girls Gone Wild,” about so-called suggestive dancing in school performances, channels the hackneyed “these darn kids” trope, rather than actual discourse.

  They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. ‘Don’t stop don’t stop,’ sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. ‘Jerk it like you’re making it chok e . . . ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.’ The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.14

  Rarely do editorials own up to the fact that “dirty dancing” has been around since the 1950s, when parents were up in arms about rock ’n’ roll music.

  And as for the question of who’s being covered when we talk about promiscuity, disproportionately it’s young white women. Why? Because the sexuality of young women of color—especially African Americans and Latinas—is never framed as “good girls gone bad”; rather, they’re depicted as having some degree of pathologized sexuality from the get-go, no matter what their virginity status. You’ll find articles about STI rates, pregnancy, and poverty—which are issues that affect women of color disproportionately and deserve attention. But when articles about the sexual infection rates of African American women are one column over from an article about young white women’s spring break, a disturbing cultural narrative is reinforced—that “innocent” white girls are being lured into an oversexualized culture, while young black women are already part of it.

  One of the most frustrating outcomes of this recent media panic is that it’s produced more hand wringing and finger wagging than actual results. The only tangible outcome of the girls-gone-wild media trend is a handful of lucrative careers. After all, nothing makes money like lamenting fallen and promiscuous youth, especially when those youth are female.

  Not to be outdone by wire services and news magazines, sex-scare writers have also started promoting purity with books. Modesty maven Wendy Shalit is not the only writer to gain from pushing chastity. In 2007, five popular books, all arguing that sexual activity hurts young women, were released: Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, by Laura Sessions Stepp; Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Hurts Young Women (and America, Too!), by Carol Platt Liebau; The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, by Dawn Eden; Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, by Miriam Grossman; and, of course, Girls Gone Mild, by Wendy Shalit.

  These books were written by virginity-movement frontliners, all using the media’s obsession with young women’s “deviant” sexuality to cash in and spread their regressive messages. I’ll save you some money here, because these books can actually all be summed up in one sentence: If you’re a young, unmarried woman who’s having sex, you’re putting yourself in danger—better go back to baking cookies and pretending you don’t know what a clitoris is. (Really. I wish I were joking.) The only real difference I can determine among these books is which supposed consequence of women’s sexuality the author chose to focus on. For Stepp, it’s emotional consequences; for Grossman, physical. Shalit wrote about the moral implications of sexuality, and Eden, the spiritual. Liebau beat all them, however, with her argument that young women’s engaging in sex has national political consequences! All of these supposed penalties have multiple tie-ins with other virginity-movement rhetoric and organizing—and all with the same goal: to return to traditional gender roles.

  THE MORALITY MYTH : WOMEN REALLY WANT TO BE “PURE”!

  Shalit’s book received the most media attention by far; it was covered in dozens of articles, and she made a handful of television appearances. Much like her websites, Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild asserts that girls really want to be modest and chaste, that they’re naturally such, but that society and outside influences force them to be sexual. (In Shalit’s worldview, women are naturally modest and chaste; if we’re sexual at all, it’s because of outside influences.) Her book argues that young women are rebelling against sexualized culture by forming a movement for chastity.

  Shalit describes “Pure Fashion” shows as evidence of this modesty backlash. These events were started in 1999 by Catholic moms across the country who were sick of the skimpy clothing that was seemingly the only thing available for their daughters to wear. The shows, which feature clothing that cover more skin than most muumuus, would be a noble enough cause except for the etiquette classes they’re paired with, better suited for girls growing up in the 1900s. The misleading purity rhetoric—that somehow it’s “good” girls who wear these modest clothes and bad girls who don’t—doesn’t help, either. But most problematically (and untruthfully), Shalit describes the events as “mainstream,” even though there were only seventeen held in 2006, hardly a high number for seven years of work.

  As further evidence of the chastity movement, Shalit cites a boycott of the clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch by a group of high school girls, which was launched after the company produced shirts with messages such as WHO NEEDS BRAINS WHEN YOU HAVE THESE emblazoned across the breast area. Shalit fails to acknowledge that the boycott, which received national media attention, was in fact organized by a Pennsylvania-based feminist group, Girls as Grantmakers.15 To attract support for her argument that this boycott demonstrated a commitment to “modesty” (as opposed to simply fighting sexism), she tries to distance the action from feminism, going so far as to write that one of the girls thought the National Organization for Women was “brainwashing.” Shalit knew that Girls as Grantmakers was a feminist organization, but in order to fully appropriate the protest into her imagined modesty movement, she had to make it seem as if the girls involved were somehow opposed to feminism.m

  Appropriating feminist language and action is nothing new in the conservative movement, but in Shalit’s case it’s particularly egregious, as she’s attempting to create a “movement” out of thin air and shoddy reporting. She instead ought to be focusing on the national movement that does exist to fetishize virginity and modesty, and acknowledge that it’s being led and energized by conservative institutions, not by young women—especially not young feminists who are working hard to battle sexist stereotypes, rather than promoting purity balls or modesty wear.

  And while there’s no question that American culture demands much of girls, including hypersexualization, there’s no room in the virginity movement’s analysis for the idea that young women may want to be sexy, to have sex, or to express themselves in ways that don’t include wearing ankle-length skirts and finding husbands. The idea that young women could have a sexuality all their own is just too scary. And that’s why Shalit’s work speaks so acutely to parents and educators who are buying into the virginity movement’s ideals. Shalit not only reinforces their beliefs about chastity and modesty, but also makes them believe that this limited vision of sexuality is something girls actually embrace.

  It’s no surprise, then, that Shalit’s book—as well as most abstinenc
e websites, for that matter—is peppered with quotes from 1940s teen advice guides and relies on good old-fashioned fear baiting. “The more experiences teens have, the more likely they are to be depressed and commit suicide . . . this is particularly true of girls,” Shalit writes.16

  Similar ominous “statistics” are cited by Physicians for Life, whose website notes that “sexually active teens are more prone to be depressed/suicidal than teens who are chaste,” and that “teenage girls who had sex were three times more likely to be depressed than girls who did not engage in sexual activity.”17

  No matter how revolutionary or forward-thinking Shalit might claim her ideas or the events she cites are, the virginity movement always returns to the idea that sex is dangerous for women, and that certain sexual choices (abstaining) are good, while others (not abstaining) are bad. Shalit even writes about “goodness” and “badness” explicitly in this way: “Conforming to badness is ultimately more oppressive than conforming to goodness.”18 “Empowering” rhetoric or not, there’s nothing revolutionary about reinforcing the virgin/whore dichotomy.

  THE EMOTIONAL / PHYSICAL MYTH : SEX MEANS SUFFERING

  Stepp’s Unhooked takes a more targeted look at girls “going wild,” choosing to focus on the supposed decline of dating. Arguing that hookup culture has dangerous emotional consequences for young women, Stepp uses every trick in the backlash book to shame women for having premarital sex. She interviewed only a handful of young women—mostly white, upper class, and attending private school—over the course of a year.19 During that time, some of the women hooked up and some were in more serious relationships, but instead of listening to the women she interviewed, Stepp pontificates about why they’re not happy and what they should be doing. In a nutshell, Stepp believes that premarital and casual sex aren’t really what women want. Like Shalit, Stepp wants her readers to believe that what young women really want is to get married, have babies, and bake cookies.n Virginity Mommy knows best.