cn It takes a particular je ne sais quoi to make excuses for a rapist simply by noting how large his cock is.
co With the exception of pieces like Hoffman’s, which revealed GGW’s and Francis’s true natures.
cp The military definition of “indecent acts” is hard to come by, but the best one I found was a “form of immorality relating to sexual impurity which is not only grossly vulgar, obscene, and repugnant to common propriety, but tends to excite lust and deprave the morals with respect to sexual relations.”22
cq While the North Carolina attorney general declared the three men innocent, the after-math of the accusation is ripe for analysis.
cr I’m sad to say this is a sentiment I’ve seen oft repeated in the blogosphere when women writers are attacked. The “rape as a compliment” theme never seems to get old.
cs A 2006 University of Maryland study showed that when an online user appears to be female, that person is twenty-five times more likely to experience harassment..
ct Which involved talk about how they’d like to rape her, or their wondering how many abortions she’d had.
cu In a heroic move (if you ask me), she refused to abide by the judge’s rule: “I refuse to call it sex, or any other word that I’m . . . encouraged to say on the stand, because to me that’s committing perjury. What happened to me was rape, it was not sex.”
cv Because what could be more masculine than nonspecific yard work?
cw In my first book, Full Frontal Feminism, I opened by asking readers what the worst thing you can call a woman is (slut, bitch, whore, cunt), then what the worst thing you can call a man is (pussy, fag, sissy, girl). In both cases, the answers were some variation of “woman.” I felt this bore repeating.
cx Not so funnily known as “the rape trail.”
cy Notably, the article’s author, Matthew Fitzgerald, also wrote a book called Sex-Ploytation: How Women Use Their Bodies to Extort Money from Men, available on Amazon. com for just $135. What a steal!
cz And, as in all things purity related, women who do want to have sex are simply whores, worthy of derision and sometimes violence.
da Also known as rape.
db This message is not so far off from that of most abstinence-only education classes. The virginity movement positions men as sexual aggressors and women as ideally chaste, in order to keep supposedly uncontrollable male sexuality in check. And, of course, women who have sex are tainted. At the end of the day, it’s the same idea, different mediums.
dc Dobson’s derision regarding social change is palpable in his commentary immediately following that statement: “That fact was never in question for previous generations.” These darn whippersnappers and their newfangled ideas about equality!
dd In fact, Dobson’s fear of women and the feminine is so great that he often writes (in this book and elsewhere) that boys will potentially turn gay if they are not raised with appropriately masculine role models around them.
de You may remember Parker from Chapter 2: She’s the Washington Post writer who fawned over Miriam Grossman’s book and wrote that girls’ having sex constitutes a “mental health crisis.”
df Parker has also written that women in the military get raped by their fellow officers because “male soldiers and officers have . . . been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they’re not.” Quite a high price to pay for seeking equality.
dg The original cover of the book featured the title scrawled across a brick wall. Apparently, the imagery was a bit too manly, so the publisher opted for an imageless cover instead. Ah, the bare aesthetic of manliness.
dh Indeed, Mansfield also noted in 2008, in an article about Sarah Palin, that “feminist women are unerotic.” How disappointed feminists will be.
di This sugar-and-spice presentation makes it particularly jarring when the following written-in-script statement takes up a whole pink page: “The rectum is an exit, not an entrance.”
dj More than 75 percent of sexually active adults will contract some strain of HPV at some point in their lives—that’s an awful lot of “damaged” women!
dk And even then, women aren’t safe from criticism—we’re judged for having sex for pleasure and not for babies, for having sex that isn’t vanilla, for being sexually voracious or less interested than our male partners. The pathology always lies with us, it seems.
dl Save for those who have had the misfortune of receiving abstinence-only education.
dm I can already see the opposition taking this declaration and running with it, giddy that a feminist said she thinks teen sex is okay. Of everything I’ve written, this statement will get the most play. So let me be clear: I don’t think that having sex is something that’s “okay” for every teen (especially younger teens), nor do I think it’s something that some adults are prepared for. I just believe that the decision to have sex has less to do with age than it does with being informed. I think that a sixteen-year-old who has had comprehensive sex education and who’s been taught to have a healthy perspective on the emotional and physical responsibilities that come with sex is a lot more prepared for a sexual relationship than a twenty-one-year-old who has known only shame-based abstinence-only education and virginity pledges.
dn Full disclosure: I’m the coeditor of the anthology, along with writer and activist Jaclyn Friedman.
do Women’s pleasure doesn’t matter much. It’s their “value” that counts.
dp Not to mention, let’s be logical: If they’re too young to decide to prevent or end a pregnancy, how are they not too young to have a child?
dq Okay, some of us are.
dr For the record: I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don’t really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that’s the point. I believe that a young woman’s decision to have sex, or not, shouldn’t impact how she’s seen as a moral actor.
The Purity Myth
How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
Copyright © 2009 by Jessica Valenti
Published by
Seal Press
A Member of Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, California
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Valenti, Jessica.
The purity myth : how America’s obsession with virginity is hurting
young women / Jessica Valenti.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-786-74466-4
1. Young women—Sexual behavior—United States. 2. Virginity—Social
aspects—United States. I. Title.
HQ29.V338 2009
306.73—dc22
2008042226
The Purity Myth Page 24