The Purity Myth (18 page)

* Apparently, the virginity movement is not just concerned with the high rates of teen sex—it’s combating the evils of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers as well!

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informational-website links—and the more irreverent “Abstinence only sex education is just like hold it potty training.”

Political and feminist blogs have taken abstinence-only education to task time and time again, whether it’s RH Reality Check calling out corrupt abstinence leadership or Feministing.com covering the legislative angles while mocking the bad T-shirts.
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Abstinence-only programs have also been criticized by organizations ranging from the Society of Adolescent Medicine—which called the ab- stinence curricula “ethically problematic” and a threat to “fundamental human rights to health, information, and life”—to the American Psycho- logical Association.
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But despite all of the political, organizational, and community outrage over abstinence-only education, the programs contin- ue to be funded—heavily.

t h e e n d o f a b s t i n e n c e ?

Thankfully, there does seem to be a light at the end of the abstinence-only tunnel. In addition to concerned parents, teens, and progressive organiza- tions, state governments and school boards are catching on. To date, almost half of the fifty states have refused federal abstinence dollars, namely because of the way those subsidies limit schools’ ability to talk about contraception— and all the evidence indicates that more states will join them.
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But that doesn’t mean abstinence proponents are going anywhere— far from it. In early 2008, the NAEA launched a $1 million campaign called Parents for Truth, the goal of which is to enlist one million parents to support abstinence-only education by lobbying school boards and lawmakers.
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The organization timed the campaign to coincide with Congress’s debate over whether to authorize approximately $190 million in federal abstinence funds.

Not surprisingly, there’s not much truth telling going on in this cam- paign—its website’s headlining video reports that comprehensive sex educa- tion tells children it’s okay to take showers with each other and instructs them on how to give partners orgasms.

James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, an organization that helps young people make informed and responsible decisions about their re- productive and sexual health, calls this characterization of comprehensive sex education “absolutely misleading.” In an interview
The Washington Post,
Wagoner noted that Parents for Truth is “a classic fear and smear campaign.”
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Par for the course for abstinence proponents, of course, and for the virginity movement as a whole.

No matter how successful abstinence leaders might be, and whether they continue to receive funding or not, Americans are nonetheless going to have to deal with cleaning up the mess that abstinence-only education leaves in its wake. After all, we can’t teach false statistics and medically inac- curate information for twenty years and expect that a generation of young people will be just fine.

A 2007 study Congress ordered found that middle school students who had received abstinence-only education were just as likely to have sex as teenagers as those who had not. The same report showed that the teens who had taken abstinence classes were more likely to say that condoms were ineffective in protecting people against STIs—over 20 percent said that condoms can never protect against HIV.
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So if students who take ab- stinence classes are just as likely to have sex as their peers, but have less in- formation about how to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs—or, worse, believe they cannot prevent pregnancy and STIs at all—that leaves them completely unprotected.

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It makes sense, then, that a 2005 report showed that teenagers who took abstinence-only education classes and pledged their virginity were not only less likely to use condoms, but also more likely to engage in oral and anal sex.
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Clearly, this isn’t what we want for young people. What these students are proving is that the shaming and scaring isn’t working. Less information isn’t helping—it’s hurting.

I’m not going to reinforce the “they’re going to do it anyway”* argu- ment. I believe it’s time to take a stance on sex education that isn’t so pas- sive—young people deserve accurate and comprehensive sex education not just because they’re going to have sex, but because
there’s nothing wrong with having sex.
Allowing educators to equate sexuality with shame and disease is not the way to go; we are doing our children a great disservice. Not only are we lying to them, we’re also robbing them of the joy that a healthy sex life (as a teenager or in adulthood) can provide.

Young people deserve to be equipped to make well-informed decisions for themselves. Enough with teaching young women that they’re somehow “ruined” if they become sexually active. Enough with telling students that sexuality is shameful. Enough. I’m reminded of the title of the Abstinence Clearinghouse’s 2007 annual conference: “Abstinence Is a Black & White Issue: Purity vs. Promiscuity.” That’s what we’re fighting against—it’s time we inserted some nuance and empathy into this national disaster we call sex education.

* Which, of course, they will.

c h a P ter 6

leg i s l at i ng sex ua l i t y

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.”

b i l l n a P o l i,

Former South Dakota Senator, responding to a question about what kind of woman

should be “allowed ” to have an abortion

in late 2006,
Ohio-based blogger Biting Beaver wrote about being de- nied emergency contraception. Her partner’s condom had broken late that Friday night, so she called doctors, hospitals, and local clinics looking for the pill that could stop her from getting pregnant. Everyone turned her down.

I was told by every urgent care I called and every emergency room that I was shit out of luck. I was asked my age. My marital status. How many children I had. If I had been raped and when I became uncomfortable with the questions

I was told, “Well Ma’am, try to understand that you will be interviewed and the doctor has ‘criteria’ that you need to meet before he will prescribe it for you.”
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Already a mother of three children, Biting Beaver did not want to get pregnant again. But because she hadn’t been raped (and wouldn’t say that she had), she couldn’t find a provider to give her this over-the-counter,
legal
con- traceptive. It took her until early the following week to find someone who would give her the morning-after pill, and as it turned out, it was too late. Biting Beaver later informed her readers that she had indeed gotten pregnant and would now be scheduling an appointment to obtain an abortion.*

Her experience struck a chord, and soon news outlets were picking up the story. Other women writers and bloggers across the country started to share their stories of being denied contraception. Biting Beaver’s experience, it seemed, was not uncommon.

Because of “refusal clause” laws (also called “conscience clause” laws)— which exist in some form in forty-seven states—healthcare providers, includ- ing doctors, pharmacists, and nurses, can deny women access to medication, procedures, or even referrals if the providers object morally to what’s being

asked of them.
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†
The laws are a tremendous win for the virginity movement,

which believes that any form of contraception is wrong. After all, why should women be able to obtain prescriptions that make it easier for them to have premarital sex—something the movement believes women shouldn’t be do- ing in the first place?

But this push to legislate chastity is much broader than just denying women birth control—there are laws that provide only married women with access to reproductive technology (such as in vitro fertilization), laws

* It’s worth noting that coming forward with her story led to BB’s being terribly harassed— she was derided and threatened in hundreds of comments and emails.

†
Shockingly, it’s not condoms, Viagra, or jock-itch medication that healthcare providers

seem to have a problem with.

mandating that women take “marriage promotion” classes in order to receive their welfare benefits, and even laws that ban the sale of vibrators. While these issues may seem unrelated, they’re all part of a larger agenda to control wom- en’s reproductive and sexual lives—reinforcing the idea that women must be chaste, even if that requires government intervention.

Recent rollbacks of women’s political rights—especially reproductive rights—stem directly from the belief that women
shouldn’t
have control over their own bodies. More and more, policy that affects women’s bodies and rights is being formulated with the myth of sexual purity in mind. That’s why rape victims are routinely treated more compassionately in abortion- rights conversations than women who have sex consensually are, and why legislation doesn’t target women who fit into the perfect-virgin mold to the same degree as it does women who don’t fulfill the stereotype—like low- income women and women of color. This is where the purity myth gets truly dangerous, because it’s encroaching on our lives not just through social in- fluences, but directly through legislation—legislation that’s mired in fear of young women’s sexuality, in paternalism, and in a need to punish women who aren’t “pure.”

o u r b o d i e s , t h e i r l a w s

Over the last decade—thanks in no small part to the Bush administration— women’s reproductive rights have decreased significantly. Not only has their right to obtain an abortion been endangered on both the state and the federal level, but there have also been continued assaults on birth control, and even on women’s right to have children.

Cristina Page, author of
How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex,
told me, “You don’t have to search too

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deeply on anti-abortion websites to find that the broad agenda entails stop- ping people from having sex outside of marriage or even within marriage if not for the purpose of procreation.”

The Pro-Life Activist’s Encyclopedia
explains that just the notion of planning a pregnancy is heresy. It is their belief that attempting to plan a pregnancy is basically admitting you don’ t believe that God will provide. If you don’ t believe God will provide, well then you just don’ t believe. As Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, explained, “If you are using

birth control, stop. Let the number of children you have be decided by God.”

The goal of the pro-life movement is to strip us of the ability to prevent pregnancy and let the chips fall where they may.
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While many Americans believe that women’s reproductive health and rights are safe because of
Roe v. Wade,
the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, nothing could be further from the truth.

Between 1995 and 2007, states enacted 557 anti-choice measures—forty- three in 2007 alone. During George W. Bush’s presidency, state legislatures con- sidered more than 3,700 anti-choice measures in total.
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These include parental notification and consent laws (legislation mandating that teenage girls get per- mission from their parents before they’re permittedtoobtainanabortion*), wait- ing periods, and even outright bans on the procedure. If
Roe
were overturned— not unlikely, given the Supreme Court justices’ current leanings—thirty states would be ready to make abortion illegal within a year from that decision.
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