The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  In a 2007 article for The American Prospect, deputy editor Ann Friedman (also a Feministing.com editor) wrote about how Stepp’s theory is little more than regressive wishful thinking:She tells women they don’t really like going out and getting drunk, they just think they do. (“Admit it, the bar scene is a guy thing.”) . . . Stepp says women aren’ t naturally inclined to initiate sex. Back in the good old days “there were generally accepted rules back then about what to do and not do sexually,” she wrote. “These standards restricted young women more than young men, by no means a fair deal, but they at least allowed women time and space to consider what kind of partners they wanted to love and what that love should look like.” Because for Stepp, love, not academic or career ambitions, should be the focus of young women’s energies.20

  What Stepp recommends, quite literally, is for women to get out of the bar and back into the kitchen: “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods,” she writes. Somehow I can’t get behind the idea that a generation of young women would give up casual sex for casual baking because a retrograde reporter promises it will be so much more fulfilling.

  It’s not all that surprising, however, that Stepp advocates a return to traditional gender roles. In 2006, she penned a piece for The Washington Post about how sexually aggressive girls (defined as those who don’t mind initiating sexual encounters) were responsible for a nationwide scourge of impotence.21 Stepp seems to think that the future of erections everywhere are dependent on female subservience, so it’s no wonder she’s arguing so fervently for it!

  A similar screed, Unprotected, which received the most coverage in Christian media, relies primarily on Grossman’s experience as a campus psychiatrist at UCLA for its analysis. She argues that young women are not only increasingly more depressed because of hooking up, but also more diseased—physically and mentally. To drive home the fear her book is meant to incite, its cover shows a large picture of a young woman in a party dress and fishnet stockings sitting on the floor, slumped over, and seemingly passed out.o

  Grossman blames what she calls politically correct campuses for not teaching young women that hookup culture can lead to sexually transmitted diseases. In a column published after Unprotected was released, she wrote:For a teenage girl in 2008, “exploring” her sexuality places her at risk for some two dozen different bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. She is likely to be infected soon after her sexual debut . This is due to the prevalence of these organisms, their ability to infect without symptoms, the widespread prac tice of casual sex with multiple “partners,” the inconsistent and improper use of condoms, and to a girl’s physiological vulnerability.22

  Grossman also touts bringing back dating and long-term relationships, as if they’ve disappeared entirely from public life. (I hate to be the one to tell Grossman this, but even if he buys you flowers and takes you out to dinner first, you can still get HPV.)

  The real danger in Grossman’s sensationalized ideas about the dangers of sex, however, is the way the media perpetuates them. Syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote a glowing article in The Washington Post about Grossman’s research on college campuses, going as far as to write that hooking up has “created a mental health crisis.”23 Parker also presented some very questionable claims that rely on Grossman’s politicized version of science.

  “The consequences are worse for young women,” says Grossman. In her psy chiatric practice, she has come to believe that women suffer more from sexual hook- ups than men do and wonders whether the hormone oxytocin is a factor. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and nursing to stimulate milk production and promote maternal attachment. It is also released during sexual activity for both men and women, hence the nickname “love potion.”24

  Ah, oxytocin—it’s the magical love drug that virginity-movement regulars cite as the reason young women should wait until marriage for sex. Oxytocin first became famous in the reproductive rights world when Eric Keroack, an abstinence-only proponent the Bush administration appointed to oversee reproductive health funding, claimed that women “who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” The short version? Too much sex equals no more love. (In keeping with the sex-as-dirty theme, it’s worth noting that before Keroack resigned, he also said that “pre-marital sex is really modern germ warfare” and “sexual activity is a war zone.”25)

  THE RELIGIOUS/POLITICAL MYTH : SEX HAS LARGER-THAN-LIFE CONSEQUENCES

  Women are used to hearing about how having premarital or “casual” sex will harm them. Liebau’s Prude takes the argument a bit further, theorizing that young women’s sexual activity is not only harmful to them, but also detrimental to society as a whole. Liebau writes that the United States “pays a heavy price” for young women’s sexuality, and rattles off statistics about the national costs of treating STIs and welfare programs for young mothers. Liebau joins in on the health- and moral-scare fun, too. She writes that having sex “often condemns young women to a life of poverty and deprivation.”26 Once again, she offers very little in the way of real analysis, but provides a lot of salacious anecdotes to get readers’ outrage antenna going, like listing all the various places in schools and communities where young people have been caught having sex.

  Dawn Eden, who is also a well-known pro-life blogger at the Dawn Patrol,27 uses her own life as a former rock critic and sexually active young woman in New York City to make her argument that chastity is best.

  Eden writes that she spent much of her youth sleeping around in the hope that a man would want a more serious relationship, and that made her miserable. The problem here is that Eden assumes that all women who have sex outside of the confines of a serious relationship (specifically, marriage) are miserable as well.

  She even goes so far as to write that women who have premarital sex aren’t fully women: “[O]nly through chastity can all the graces that are part of being a woman come to full flower in you.” Additionally, Eden seems to be convinced of the idea that women are inherently less-than. In a 2007 article for the Times (U.K.), Eden writes that women are “vessels [who] seek to be filled.”28 This sentiment is expressed rather unsubtly throughout much of Eden’s book, reverberates throughout the virginity movement as a whole, and is what gives away the movement’s true agenda: women’s supposed inferiority and its link to our sexuality.

  Outside of pathologizing female sexuality, there’s another stark similarity between this spate of recent books and most literature on chastity and virginity: Lesbian women don’t exist, nor does sex for pleasure. These two issues are highly connected in their absence from the virginity movement’s conversations, because they speak to the same issue: Sex is okay only when it’s happening with your husband. Therefore, women who are having lesbian sex and women who are engaging in sex for the pleasure of it simply don’t register. After all, why even acknowledge sexuality that has nothing to do with traditional gender roles? It’s not part of their goals for women, so they simply don’t exist.

  FOE, THY NAME IS FEMINISM

  All of the above-mentioned authors, along with much of the media covering these imagined girls going wild, have arrived at similar conclusions about what cultural culprit is to blame for all of this sexuality gone wild: feminism.

  In the eyes of the virginity movement, feminism promotes the idea that women should be exactly like men. Apparently, this includes being subject to the testosterone-driven sex craziness that supposedly is male desire. Thus, feminism is named in every book as one of the causes, if not the central cause, of the decline of women’s sexual morality.

  Prude author Liebau, who believes that premarital sex has widespread political consequences, has written, “Rather than themselves urging girls not to behave in ways that conform to the ‘bad boy’ stereotype (and which, objectively, are destructive), feminists instead label those who do so as enemies of female liberation.”29 (Claiming that
feminists want to end “femininity” is a common antifeminist trope and an effective scare tactic. Never mind that the femininity antifeminists are so quick to defend often centers on subservience and regression.) Liebau has also written that feminism is “completely irrelevant and silly to most well-adjusted women.”30

  Eden has noted on her blog that the feminist movement is “inextricably linked with the movement for a sexual ‘freedom’ that was in fact ‘utilitarianism’—a ‘freedom without responsibilities’ that is, as John Paul II said in his ‘Letter to Families,’ ‘the opposite of love.’” And, of course, there’s Stepp’s above-mentioned epic article “Cupid’s Broken Arrow,” about feminism as the root of impotence.

  The antifeminism connection isn’t limited to the written word, though. These authors also have ties to virulently antifeminist organizations that are central to the virginity movement. Grossman, for example, is a senior fellow with the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, a conservative women’s organization that runs campaigns like “Bring back the hope chest”; Liebau is a regular columnist for the conservative, antifeminist publication Townhall; Stepp, Shalit, and Eden even spoke together at panel called “Modest Proposals” sponsored by antifeminist organizations.31

  If the virginity movement cared about young women, the link to antifeminism wouldn’t be so evident. What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsible not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I’m more than a little suspicious of those who see women’s advancement as a bad thing. Besides, the regressive messages the virginity movement pushes through these books and the media is clue enough about what it really wants from women: not independence and adulthood, but submissiveness, “modesty,” and adherence to traditional gender roles. Focusing on our sexuality is just one piece, and a tool, of the larger agenda. After all, there’s a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement believes that’s the only thing women are meant for.

  SEXUALITY REALITY

  Despite these panicked myths and sensationalized media about the physical and emotional consequences of premarital sex and hooking up, the truth about young women’s sexuality is far from scandalous—or even dangerous.

  Nearly all Americans have premarital sex. In fact, by the age of forty-four, 99 percent of Americans will have had sex, and 95 percent of us will have had sex before marriage.32

  Single women, the primary target of the virginity movement, are not excluded from these numbers. One-third of U.S. women, ages twenty to forty-four, are single, and nine out of ten of them have had sex.33 The only thing that’s really changed in recent years—despite the protestations of those who fondly reminisce about the good old days when women were pure—is that the median age of women’s first marriage rose from 22 to 25.3. (I wonder how the numbers would change if same-sex marriage were recognized.)

  Laura Lindberg, who conducted a study of single American women in 2008, said, “For the majority of adult women, living without a partner does not mean living without sex. Yet policymakers continue to promote policies that fly in the face of reality. By neglecting to teach our youth how to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we leave them ill prepared to become sexually healthy adults.”34

  Teens, too, are having sex—and a lot more responsibly than we give them credit for. They’re using contraception more than ever, and teen pregnancy rates have been steadily dropping since the early 1990s, thanks to increased contraceptive use.35 (Of course, abstinence proponents have tried to take credit for this decline, failing to note that the decrease in teen pregnancy preceded funding for abstinence-only education.36)

  That’s not to say all is well, though. One-third of young American women get pregnant before they’re twenty; of those who carry the pregnancy to term, 80 percent of the births are unintended.37 And a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in four young women in the United States has a sexually transmitted infection.38 Since this is the type of information the mainstream media loves to dwell on, these statistics have received an overwhelming amount of attention, most of it more panicked than necessary. The majority of those infections are HPV, most strains of which clear up on their own; the other infections were, likewise, on the less dangerous end of the STI scale.

  Jacob Goldstein, of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in response to the study, “Indeed, several common infections lumped into the big bin labeled ‘STD’ can have mild or no effects on many patients—an issue that has prompted some leaders in the field to call for a dialing back of the nomenclature.” 39 Perhaps there’s less need for panic than we thought. So, without discounting the real harm of serious, and especially life-threatening, STIs, it’s worth noting that the panic surrounding the escalating rates of infection might be a bit overblown.

  What is cause for concern, however, is the racial and economic disparity in those numbers. Forty-eight percent of African American girls, ages fourteen to nineteen, for example, have had a sexually transmitted infection, compared with 20 percent of white teen girls.40 STIs are disproportionately higher in low-income neighborhoods.41 Yet, ironically, it’s these young women whom the virginity movement forgets about—or ignores.

  It’s also difficult to take the virginity movement’s concern about sexual health seriously when, arguably, the increase in STIs is a result not of casual sex, but instead of the predictable outcome of teaching a generation of young people that contraception doesn’t work.

  And regarding the claim that hookup culture is running rampant across America, it’s simply not true—at least, not to the extent that extremists would have you believe it is. Young women are still forming short- and long-term relationships, and they’re still dating, getting married, and having children. Just because they feel less stigmatized doesn’t mean that they’re out having sex willy-nilly. It’s just another figment of the virginity movement’s very active (and sexually obsessed) imagination. It’s telling Americans what they want to hear—salacious stories about young girls having lots and lots of sex—under the rhetoric of helping women.

  After all, what better way to sexify your cause than to focus it on virginity, promiscuity, and young girls’ sexuality? By colluding with the cultural obsession over young women’s sexuality, the virginity movement not only gets extra attention from the mainstream, it also ties women’s sexuality with its larger agenda—to roll back all women’s rights.

  CHAPTER 3

  forever young

  “Virgins are hot.”

  T-SHIRT SLOGAN,

  Heritage Community Services,

  an abstinence-only organization

  Six-year-olds don’t need bras. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a girl under ten who requires one—even a training bra would be gratuitous. So when the nationwide superstore Target started selling Bratzp “bralettes”—padded (yes, padded) bras with cartoon characters on them marketed to girls—consumers and parents were justifiably horrified.1 A similar reaction erupted when it was revealed that Wal-Mart was selling panties in its juniors’ section with WHO NEEDS CREDIT CARDS . . . emblazoned across the front.2

  Unfortunately, inappropriateness surrounding girls’ sexuality doesn’t end with tacky underwear. Toy stores are selling plastic stripper poles, and “modeling” websites are featuring prepubescent girls posing in lingerie. Even mainstream pornography has caught on: In 2006, Playboy listed Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a pedophile who falls in lust with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter, as one of the “25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written.”3 I love Nabakov and I thought Lolita was brilliant. But sexy? Seducing a twelve-year-old?

  The message is clear, and dangerous: The most desirable women aren’t women at all—they’re girls.

  But this isn’t news. Most of us ar
e aware of how subject girls are to inappropriate sexual attention, and how younger and younger women are presented as sex objects in the media. What is news, though, is how this sexualization is coming from someplace other than an easy-to-blame hypersexualized pop culture—it’s also coming from the virginity movement.

  After all, the “perfect virgin” is at the center of the movement’s rhetoric, and its goals revolve largely around convincing girls that the only way to be pure is to abstain from sex. This means there’s an awful lot of talk about young girls’ sexuality in the movement, from T-shirts like the one quoted above to abstinence classes to purity balls. By focusing on the virginity of young women and girls, the movement is doing exactly what it purports to abhor—objectifying women and reducing them to their sexuality.

  And while there has been public outrage over girls’ sexualization—when it comes to bralettes at Target or the ways in which girls are portrayed in ads, for example—much of this concern focuses on what affects our “perfect virgins,” not on the more insidious sexualization coming from the virginity movement, or the kind that hurts girls whom the media doesn’t care about.

  Case in point: Bratz dolls, provocative Halloween costumes, and panty-less pop singers dominate public discourse and outrage, while even more obvious (and, arguably, more dangerous) sexualization of girls—like trafficking, rape, and child pornography—isn’t given nearly the same amount of attention. It’s no coincidence that these more serious issues are ones that overwhelmingly affect low-income girls, girls of color, and young women who don’t match the American virginal ideal.q