The Purity Myth (15 page)

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Take the popular company Suicide Girls—porn that features “alterna- tive” women.* For a long time, the company enjoyed a high-profile reputation as female controlled and operated. John d’Addario, editor of the porn blog Fleshbot, noted that “the perception that women had an important/equal role in the administration of the site probably made it more attractive to some people who might not have visited a porn site otherwise.” But in 2005, a group of ex–Suicide Girls starting bashing the company, saying that the female- empowerment front was a farce. About thirty models quit, claiming that Sui- cide Girls is actually controlled by a man, cofounder Sean Suhl, whom they accused of treating the workers poorly and underpaying them.

Mainstream porn establishments masquerading as feminist bastions aside, there is a long history of “pro-sex feminists,”
†
like Ellen Willis, Nina Hartley, Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, Betty Dodson, Audacia Ray, and Tristan Taormino, who do the hard work of talking about porn in a nuanced, multifaceted way.

And with the advent of the Internet, feminist women—many of whom make a distinction between mainstream pornography and
all
pornography— are talking progressively about porn more and more. Take blogger Andrea Rubenstein (a.k.a. tekanji), who wrote, “I am pro in its most basic form (mate- rial that arouses), but anti-mainstream . . . anti-industry, and anti-porn cul- ture. . . . The difference between me and anti-porn feminists is that I believe that, while hard, it is not impossible to have pornography in this culture that doesn’t objectify/degrade the participants.”
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In her book,
Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In

* In this case, “alternative” means lots of tattoos and body piercing, and some variety in body size and shape.

†
Though I have to say, I don’t know any “antisex” feminists!

on Internet Sexploration,
Audacia Ray wrote that “women over the last decade or so have stared to remake, question, challenge, and enjoy the adult industry in a way that perhaps is only possible with the assistance of increasingly user- friendly and inexpensive technology.”
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Ray points out that while mainstream porn is run and created primar- ily by men, women “with the entrepreneurial and nudie spirit” are increas- ingly creating their own sites—something that wouldn’t be possible without online advancements.

This isn’t to say that I believe the Internet will be the answer to misog- yny in porn—it’s clear that online porn is a tremendous part of the problem. But women talking about it, and taking control of the industry, is definitely a first step.

The second step, of course, is to start ignoring the virginity move- ment’s badly intentioned and even more poorly executed actions surround- ing porn. We need to take back the idea of “morality” and sexuality. Why? Because the virginity movement has a stronghold on it and is using it to actively hurt women. And not just by ignoring the real problems; the move- ment is creating new ones. If we continue to allow it to use pornography as a way to make extreme ideas about women, chastity, and sexuality main- stream, we’re supporting a system that devalues women even more than some of the worst porn does.

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c h a P ter 5

c l assroom chastit y

“Each time a sexually active person gives that most personal part of himself or herself away, that person can lose a sense of personal value and worth. It all comes down to self-respect.”

from the abstinence- only teachers’ guide

c h o o s i n g t h e b e s t P a t h
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Pam stenZel has a roomful
of teenagers laughing up a storm. In her educational video
Sex Has a Price Tag,
Stenzel cracks jokes while being en- gaging, authoritative, and convincing. Amidst her quips about sex and an- noying parents, she tells the students—packed into what looks like a school auditorium—that birth control could kill them and that abortion can lead to anorexia and suicide. She follows with another joke, and the teens laugh some more.

For schools that can’t afford Stenzel’s $5,000 speaking fee, this video is the perfect substitute—part of an abstinence arsenal of dozens of DVDs, books, and brochures available on ShopPamStenzel.com. Stenzel is just one

of hundreds of abstinence educators who speak in schools, churches, com- munity groups—even government agencies—nationwide.

Another one of these educators is Christian comedian Keith Deltano, who performs his abstinence routine at Virginia high schools. His shtick involves tying up a male volunteer from the audience and dangling a cinder block pre- cariously over his genital area to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of condoms against HIV/AIDS.
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* Alabama-based speaker Janice Turner, who founded Power of Purity classes, explained her classroom philosophy to a reporter re- cently by saying, “Girls give in to sex not because they want sex—it’s like a hug.

If they can get that from their fathers, they won’t need it from a boyfriend.”
†

These are the virginity movement’s front-liners, spreading the purity message in force.

Abstinence-only education—which includes sex education curricula, speakers like Stenzel and friends, peer educators, and various kinds of absti- nence events
#
—is arguably the virginity movement’s most successful venture to date. It’s widespread, well funded, and becoming more and more mainstream— but not without consequences. The pervasiveness of abstinence-only programs

ensures that a generation of young Americans has been indoctrinated not only with messages about how wrong, dirty, and immoral premarital sex is, but also withsubjective—andoftenfalse—information: thatcontraceptionisineffective (and sometimes dangerous), abortion is wrong, and any sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to make them diseased, poor, depressed, and suicidal.

* I’m betting the actual lesson learned is to steer clear of bad comics brandishing bricks.

†
There are lots of things I imagine young girls would like to get from their dads— a phone call, advice about what to get their mom on her birthday, a pizza and ice-cream night—but I’m guessing a stand-in for sex isn’t one of them.

# Like purity balls or a visit from the local crisis pregnancy center!

t h e a n a t o m y o f a b s t i n e n c e

In Jeniann’s ninth-grade sex ed class in Virginia Beach, Virginia, her teacher told her and her fellow students that it was against the law to have premarital sex. “She told us if we did it and were caught, we could face fines, probation,

and possibly jail time,” Jeniann, now sixteen, emailed me.

“She said it had to be illegal because premarital sex undermines the fam- ily, which is a necessary thing in society.”

Morgan Dickens, a twenty-two-year-old woman I met while visiting Cornell University in upstate New York, told me that at her San Antonio, Tex- as, high school, teachers weren’t even allowed to
mention
words that related to anything but abstinence.

“Our biology teacher told us she couldn’t say anything about birth con- trol when a girl asked how it worked.” Dickens also recalled that a student in her health class was actually kicked out of the room and asked to sit outside because he mentioned something about STIs and using a condom.

Many of the young people I’ve spoken to—whether via email, through Feministing.com, or on college campuses—have told me how abstinence programs use fear- and shame-based tactics to spread their misinformation. Katelyn Bradley of Florida, for example, wrote me an email detailing her middle school health class’s exercise on abstinence: “They asked for several volunteers, and the woman leading the discussing held a wrapped gift. We weren’t supposed to give away this gift until after marriage. If we had sex be- fore marriage, our special present (sexuality) would be ruined. They literally demonstrated this notion in front of the class by passing it along the line of volunteers, with each person stomping on the wrapped gift.” I suppose if this educator thinks having premarital sex is akin to being stomped on, I can’t really hold her abstinence leanings against her.

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Cassandra Tapia, a twenty-one-year-old from Dallas, emailed me about her seventh-grade abstinence-class teacher, who started one of her lessons by yelling, “Sex feels good!”

“She also made us say it,” Tapia told me. “Then she told us a story about ‘Ken’ and ‘Barbie,’ using Velcro gloves as visuals. She talked about how Ken and Barbie dated and hung out, and then—with a dramatic slamming of the Velcroed hands together—had sex. Then she showed us how it was possible to separate her hands, but it was difficult and made a painful ripping noise.”

Sadly, these young women’s experiences aren’t anomalous. It’s not only oddball teachers who are lying to and intimidating students; these tac- tics are written into schools’ curricula. A 2004 report from Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) indicated that over 80 percent of federally funded abstinence programs contain false or misleading information about sex and reproductive health.
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The report found that all of the curricula studied failed to provide in- formation on how to select a birth control method and use it properly; that it greatly exaggerated the failure rate of condoms in pregnancy prevention; and that it flat-out propagated inaccuracies by discounting (or even out- right denying) condoms’ effectiveness in preventing STD and HIV trans- mission. According to the report:

One curriculum draws an analogy between the HIV virus and a penny and

compares it to a sperm cell (“Speedy the Sperm”), which on the same scale would be almost 19 feet long. The curriculum asks, “If the condom has a failure rate of 14% in preventing ‘Speedy’ from getting through to create a new life, what hap- pens if this guy (penny) gets through? You have a death: your own.”
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Other curricula provided false information about pregnancy risks in sexual activity outside of intercourse—one text even states that merely touching another person’s genitals can cause pregnancy. The bad science and misleading statistics go on and on: One program teaches that HIV can be transmitted through tears, while another falsely links abortion with sterility, mental retardation, and premature births in future pregnancies.
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Martha Kempner, vice president of information and communications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), a New York–based organization that advocates for accurate and comprehensive education on sex and reproductive health, told me that this type of misinformation is just the tip of the abstinence iceberg. “They’re at- tacking a way of living, and their brand of sex ed has very little to do with sex—it’s a social message.”

SIECUS has been keeping track of abstinence-only education programs and dissecting their curricula for years, and some of the teachings the organi- zation has found aren’t just wrong—they’re terrifying. One commonly used book says, “Relying on condoms is like playing Russian roulette.”
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Another reads, “AIDS can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact.”
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These programs aren’t just spreading medical and scientific misin- formation, either—they’re also sending social and values-based messages. A popular abstinence text, “Sex Respect,” warns students of the dire con- sequences of premarital sex: “[I]f you eat spoiled food, you will get sick. If you jump from a tall building, you will be hurt or killed. If you spend more money than you make, your enslavement to debt affects you and those whom you love. If you have sex outside of marriage, there are consequences for you, your partner, and society.”
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“This is a social agenda masquerading as teen pregnancy prevention,”