The Purity Myth (10 page)

* In the world of the virginity movement, “femininity” is synonymous with submissive- ness and girlishness.

In fact, it’s difficult to watch videos of purity balls, or read the “dat- ing your daughter” literature, and
not
think about these pseudo-incestuous themes—and whether they might be connected to real-life abuse.

In a piece in
The New York Times
on purity balls, Judith Warner notes that even if there is no crime in these events, “there is nonetheless a kind of horror to [fathers’] obsession with their daughters’ sexuality”:

Judith Lewis Herman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whose work with and writings on incest victims in the 1980s revo-

lutionized the understanding of the crime and its perpetrators, believes that incest, like rape generally, has to be viewed within a wider context of power relations. Incest, she says, is “an abuse of patriarchal power,” a criminal per- version of fatherly control and inf luence. It is perpetrated, in many cases, by men who present themselves as the guardians of the moral order.
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The Wilsons, however, insist that purity balls and virginity pledges aren’t about focusing on girls’ sexuality. “Of course, we want to do everything we can to help them enter marriage as pure, as whole persons,” Lisa said in a 2001
Gazette
article. “But it’s not just physical. It’s moral and emotional purity.”
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Yet again, the foundation of a girl’s “moral and emotional purity” and her ability to be a “whole” person is boiled down to her being a virgin! While proponents of date nights and purity balls argue that they’re aiming to pro- tect girls from sexualization, by focusing on girls’ virginity they’re actually positioning girls as sexual objects before they’ve even hit puberty.*

* If you’re thinking that the mysterious world of purity balls doesn’t affect you and yours, and that the events are simply a creepy anomaly, remember that these virginity fetish free-for-alls are
federally funded.

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What’s particularly ironic is that while the virginity movement denounces the sexualization of girls in mainstream culture, it fails to see how its own form of virginity worship is much the same thing.

When the outrage over the padded bras at Target hit the media, for example, a spokesperson from Bratz, the doll company that produces the bras, argued that the padding was for girls “to be discreet as they develop . . . it’s more about hiding what you have got than showing it off. . . . [The bral- ettes] give girls modesty and style as they go through development changes.” (When U.K. superstore Tesco was criticized for selling a different brand of padded bras for young girls, a spokesperson for the company said nearly the same thing: “It is a product designed for girls at that self-conscious age when they are just developing.”
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)

The message
seems
contradictory—padded bras as a way to promote “modesty”? But, as with purity balls and our purity princesses put on pedes- tals for their abstinence, fetishizing virginity (and young girls) is explained away as simply exalting modesty and virtue.

A similar theme woven through both purity culture and pop culture is the valorizing of “innocence” in girls—simply a sly way of focusing on virgin- ity yet again. This idea has been popping up in specific controversies, and it reeks of feigned concern.

When the FDA was considering making a cervical cancer vaccine avail- able in the United States, for example, the single biggest public concern— even after it was deemed safe and legalized—wasn’t health related or about the vaccine’s newness. It was about “innocence”—specifically, the worry that girls would become promiscuous if they were vaccinated.

The cancer vaccine, now sold as Gardasil, prevents human papilloma- virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection that causes cervical cancer.

Opponents of the vaccine—the usual suspects, such as conservative religious groups and antifeminist organizations—argued that girls would be more likely to have sex if they thought they were “safe.”*

Charlotte Allen, of the antifeminist organization the Independent Women’s Forum, wrote that the HPV vaccine gives girls the message that “it’s just fine for them to have all the sex they want, ‘cuz now they’ll be vac- cinated!”
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Bridget Maher, of the Family Research Council, said that giving girls the vaccine is harmful because “they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
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Dozens of other conservative pundits and organizations repeated the sentiment. I rarely quote Bill Maher, but he was right on when he noted, “It’s like saying if you give a kid a tetanus shot, she’ll want to jab rusty nails in her feet.”
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Then came the incessant chatter about innocence. In an interview with
The Washington Post,
one Pennsylvania pediatrician called the vaccine an “assault on [girls’] innocence.”
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In a post on Wendy Shalit’s blog, Modestly Yours, Elizabeth Neville wrote about the vaccine in a post titled “Immu- nized Against Innocence?”; another organization opposing the vaccine took the subtle route, naming itself Parents Promoting Innocence.
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Per usual, the virginity movement sought to protect an amorphous idea like “inno- cence” or “virginity,” rather than taking strong, tangible action on behalf of girls’ well-being. Where was the outrage over actual health concerns—you know, like
cancer?

The innocence trope isn’t limited to specific controversies, either. It seems the mere act of girls becoming women has the American public in a tizzy.

In a 2008 MSNBC medical article, for example, doctor/reporter Billy Goldberg bemoaned how girls are beginning to menstruate at younger and

* Virginity movement logic: Better that girls risk getting cancer than be sexually active.

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younger ages. “What happened to the innocence of youth?” he asked. He also wrote, “Earlier onset of puberty is associated with health concerns beyond the loss of youthful innocence.”
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If being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods
guilty?
And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren’t about lost innocence; they’re about lost girlhood.
The virginity move- ment doesn’t want women to be adults.

Despite the movement’s protestations about how this focus on inno- cence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn’t a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women’s sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequence of this focus is that girls’ sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.

With every virginity pledge taken and every girl sexualized in the media, what the virginity movement—and perhaps even American culture at large— wants for young women becomes clearer and clearer: perpetual girlhood.

g i r l i f y i n g w o m e n

Back in my teenage days in New York City, everyone wanted to go to raves, techno music–fueled dance parties where drugs were abundant.* Putting aside the dangers of teenage drinking and drug use for a moment, the girls’ fashion of that time is worth some examination. I recall wearing baby bar- rettes in my hair (hey, it was the style!) and my friends carrying pacifiers around their necks. Unlike riot grrrls (the early-’90s punk feminists inspired by bands like Bikini Kill—who sometimes mimicked girlhood by wearing

* I know, the image of your feminist author dancing around with glowsticks doesn’t exactly inspire confidence or gravitas, but it is what it is.

Hello Kitty or otherwise “young” clothing as a subversive statement about femininity), the rave fashion scene seemed much more about playing up little girls’ sexuality. Mercifully, the trend waned, but similar fashions have popped up in its place: Schoolgirl-style knee socks paired with heels are popular right now in hipster sects, for example. But fashion is just one cultural indicator of the girlhood fetish—and probably the most innocuous. Over the last two decades, the valorizing of youth and youth culture has hit women particularly hard. Women want to be young—often at too high a cost.

Take vaginal rejuvenation,* the fastest-growing form of plastic surgery in the United States,
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and probably the best example of how women are expected to be girls—and not just girls, but
virginal
girls. (After all, how much more obvious can the virginity fetish be when women are obtaining a surgery that makes their vaginas younger?)

The surgery, touted using feminist rhetoric—“Women now have equal sexuality rights!” says one press release—claims to give women’s vaginas a “youthful aesthetic look.”
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Virgin vaginas, ready to order!

Rejuvenation, which costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000, can include a labia trim, liposuction on the outer lips, tightening the vaginal muscles, or a hymenoplasty (in which the doctor constructs a fake hymen). And although the risks are serious—infection, hemorrhaging, loss of sensitivity, scarring, nerve damage, painful intercourse, and disfigurement—women are lining up to get the surgery.

Why? Well, in addition to the “youthful aesthetic,” many women seem to believe that their genitals simplyaren’t normal. The American Collegeof Obste- tricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says that most women don’t understand the size and shape of genitalia correctly, and that physicians performing vaginal