The Purity Myth (14 page)

* All of the CWA’s evidence is anecdotal.

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talking about the content of porn or the health environment for sex work- ers, or even just plain old sexism, CWA zeroes in on Victoria’s Secret and the former hit television show
Friends.
Really.

In a 2006 podcast, former chief counsel of CWA Jan LaRue bemoaned how CBS played lingerie label Victoria’s Secret’s runway show during a prime- time spot, and angrily mentioned how the
Friends
characters joke about looking at pornography. LaRue failed to mention any
actual
porn and instead focused on popular mainstream culture—like actresses posing partly nude on the cover of
Vanity Fair.
This is the virginity movement’s version of antiporn activism.
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Even when fighting back against actual bad decisions, CWA can’t help but throw in its two cents, which are always about sexual shaming. In a release about an Oklahoma court decision that freed a man after he was caught taking pictures upasixteen-year-old girl’s skirt (apparently, a teen in amallhasno“expectationof privacy”), the organization was sure to point out that the “teenager was not Brit- ney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or Paris Hilton out and about town sans panties.”

“Unlike those celebrities, the teen was not dressed for and ready to be photographed getting out of cars without a care as to who sees what they are purposely revealing.”
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You know, girls who would be “asking for it.”

That isn’t to say CWA focuses on sexualization in pop culture only; it also targets corporations like hotel chains for providing pay-per-view porn, and seeks enforcement of state and federal obscenity laws. However, what it’s striving for is not progressive change, but a return to “traditional” norms and a time when porn—widely defined as seemingly anything that’s not women in head-to-toe prairie dresses and anything less chaste than hand holding— existed but was hidden from view and not discussed.* Ever.

* CWA seems concerned about any kind of progress—in its podcast on porn, LaRue also complained about iPods and portable DVD players.

And those obscenity laws CWA is fighting to uphold and enforce? Out- side of being used to prosecute child pornographers—an honorable cause if there ever was one—these laws vary from state to state and more often than not center on pornography that strays from the heterosexual, “vanilla” norm. In 2005, for example, the FBI formed a “porn squad,” an anti-obscenity crew of agents tasked with targeting pornography created for adults.*
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They fo- cused on (consensual) sadomasochistic porn, even arresting owners of an erotic-fiction website that featured just stories.
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Many anti-obscenity laws are so broadly interpreted that they have been used to ban the sale of sex toys in some states. In 2007, Alabama sex shop owners being targeted by anti-obscenity laws even tried to take their case to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear their challenge to the ban, so the law remained in place.
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And in 2004, Joanne Webb, a Texas mother of three, was arrested for being a representative for passion parties—kind of like Tupperware parties, except the wares are vibrators rather than food containers.
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Texas law actually does allow for the sale of sex toys, so long as they’re described as novelty items. But when a person like Webb, also a for- mer schoolteacher, explains what their actual role in sex is, she’s
breaking the law.
Talk about a telling specification! Sex is fine so long as you’re not talking about it seriously or openly.

This is the same reason the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), an antifeminist organization similar to CWA (but without the explicitly reli- gious tilt), uses its campus program to try to stop on-campus productions of the award winning play
The Vagina Monologues
—which, the IWF says, “glori- fies promiscuity and treats women as sex objects.” It’s not that the play says

* One FBI agent joked in
The Washington Post,
“I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror.”
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anything particularly outrageous; the mere fact that “vagina” is in the title is enough to make it obscene.*
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But it’s really the fact that the play discusses— yes, in detail—female sexuality that gets the goat of virginity-movement organizations like IWF.

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, yet another organization that combats “obscenity,” even published a booklet called “The Vagina Mono- logues Exposed: A Student’s Guide to V-Day,” which calls the play “humili- ating” and “pornographic” and aims to help students protest their campus’s productions. The “facts” the institute presents to discredit the play make little sense; for example, it describes one monologue that discusses masturbation as “exactly what the early suffragettes were fighting against.”
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And here I thought it was disenfranchisement! And when the organization gets into the nitty-gritty of why it believes the play is so pornographic, its underlying fear of female sexuality is clear.

Myth #5: The play is not pornographic.

False. It includes extremely graphic descriptions of women’s sexual expe- riences. One monologue has an explicit depiction of two lesbians having sex. “She’s inside me. I’m inside me” (Ensler 115). And it gets much more graphic. “The Vagina Workshop” describes one woman’s experience with masturbation.
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The virginity movement’s notions regarding obscenity and pornogra- phy have little to do with the actual issues in porn that affect women, such as hypermasculinity, humiliation, or violence against them. Gay sex or mas- turbation isn’t what’s harming women through porn—a hyped-up patriar-

* Because, as we all know, conservative women don’t have vaginas.

chy is. After all, there’s nothing “alternative” about calling women “whores” or presenting violence against women as sexual. That’s good-old fashioned misogyny, and it’s been around and systemically supported for a long time. That’s why the purity pushers’ objections to pornography are so hypocriti- cal: They see it not as something that degrades women, but as something that degrades patriarchy and male control of female sexuality. If this isn’t the case, then why the focus on masturbation and lesbian sex—two activities that are clearly very much under
women’s
control?

The truth is that commercial pornography is exactly in line with the purity myth’s values. In an article about the “raunch culture” that Levy dis- cusses in her book,
In These Times
writer Lakshmi Chaudhry aptly notes that this porn culture “shift did not occur despite the rise of the religious Right but because of it.”

[M]ake no mistake, raunch is Republican. The sexuality that reigns

supreme in Bush World bears the basic imprimaturs of right-wing ideol- ogy: gross materialism, sexual hypocrisy, and acquiescence in the name of empowerment. It is in every sense a conservative wet dream come true.
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And because this new porned America is actually a “conservative wet dream,” the virginity movement is loath to change it, and would rather use it as an excuse to maintain the sexual status quo. Therefore, when groups like IWF or CWA call for an end to pornography, what they point to is never more realistic sexual images—it’s chastity, the only acceptable answer.

The simple chaste “solution” has become so widespread that even some feminists are touting it. Naomi Wolf, for example, wrote a
New York
maga- zine piece on how men are becoming turned off by “real” women because of

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porn. Her suggestion seemed more like something Shalit would say than the woman who was arguably the ’90s most famous feminist. She wrote about visiting an old friend, now an orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, who covered her head with a scarf.

“Can’ t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there.

“No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.” . . . And I thought: Our husbands see

naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.
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The thing is, naked women aren’t the problem—a woman believing her only value is sexual is what’s dangerous. It’s not women’s sexuality that we have to watch out for, it’s the way men construct it.

m o v i n g f o r w a r d i n a P o r n e d w o r l d

This similarity between purity and porn culture—the way both fetishize women’s sexual subservience—is what makes the virginity movement com- pletely unable to analyze pornography in a progressive or helpful way. The movement has latched on to the mainstreaming of porn not because it cares about women and the way in which their sexuality is represented, but because porn is an easy scapegoat for what the movement perceives as society’s ills (women having sex), as well as a convenient excuse to uphold the movement’s regressive goals. The fact that conservative organizations conflate porn with sex toys, and masturbation and female pleasure with obscenity, reveals the true nature of their objections. These organizations blame progressive and feminist values because
that’s
what they’re fighting against—not real, tangi-

ble problems that affect women. So, instead of criticizing pornography from a perspective that seeks to help women, they end up reinforcing porn’s sexist aspects. There’s no doubt that the pornification of the United States affects young people adversely, but if young women are treating their bodies and sexuality as commodities, it’s not because of porn culture—it’s because of a larger societal message that tells them their sexuality is not their own.

But there’s also no arguing that this new porn culture, raunch culture, or whatever one wants to call it merits analysis—be it political or moral. If they’re doing it wrong, how do
we
do it right?

To start with, we must abandon the idea that women’s bodies are inherently shameful, and that women’s sexuality needs to be restricted. Some of the more recent measures to control pornography are mired in the state-as-pimp model. Through the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Pro- tection Act, the U.S. Department of Justice generates a list of all actors in the porn industry. According to the 2007 rules, this list ensures that no minors are engaging in sex work, but infringing on a whole industry’s freedom of privacy seems a bit extreme.

Instead of employing the naming-and-shaming technique, organiza- tions and legislators should be using their collective power and funding to
talk to
those in the sex industry and not dismiss them out of hand. There are feminist and pro-woman porn makers and performers who are working to make the industry better for women every day. Connecting with them is a necessary first step.

We need to start, though, by
finding
those woman-friendly sex industry workers! In a culture where all things commercial and porned come with an appropriated feminist “empowered” label (think the Pussycat Dolls), it’s dif- ficult to parse what’s woman-friendly and what’s being marketed as such.