The Purity Myth (29 page)

* 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.”

†
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!

In the world the virginity movement paints, girls are in grave danger— primarily from themselves. The “bad” ones are going wild, drinking, hooking up, and shunning traditional roles. The “good” ones are constantly at risk of being corrupted.

While there’s no doubt that girls are in trouble—they’re being targeted by a movement that’s hell-bent on making sure they stay in “their place”— young women aren’t putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage.

Who?
you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they’ll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-funded organiza- tion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women’s studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn’t meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women’s access to abortion because he doesn’t think they’re smart enough to make their own decisions.
These
are the people who are making the world a worse place— and a more dangerous one, at that—for girls and young women. We’re just doing our best to live in it.

These people not only act in ways that have tangible consequences for individual women, they’re also doing a great disservice to young women across the United States by participating in, and furthering, a culture that simply doesn’t trust women. Whether it’s about the decision to have (or not have) a child, the decision to have a drink at a bar late at night, or any number of daily life choices that people make, the virginity movement presupposes that women don’t know what’s best for them.

And when it comes to sex, the weapon of choice in the movement’s push to deny women their rights, this distrust is amplified. Women can never make

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a choice about sex that is considered moral, or even acceptable, save for hav- ing straight sex within a marriage.* It’s time to turn that around, for our own sake and for our daughters’ futures.

d i str e s s i n g d a m s el s

There’s a strategy behind talking about young women as out-of-control girls gone wild or innocent damsels in distress. If we’re no more than sluts or vic- tims, than it’s reasonable for society to make our decisions for us—because, if left to our own devices, we’d muck it all up.

For those young women who are considered victims or potential victims—like the purity princesses or the young, white, suburban girls whose parents live in fear of MySpace stalkers and the corrupting in- f luence of MTV—a “Daddy knows best” paternalism is omnipresent. Whether it manifests itself in the form of forcing girls to take virginity pledges and go to purity balls, or even is propagated by a casual joke when parents laugh about how they’re going to have to lock their teen daughter away until she’s twenty-one, the idea that these young women need pro- tection spreads perpetually.

For the young women who don’t fit into the perfect-virgin mold, the paternalism is still there, of course, but they also have to contend with the disdain that their “transgressions” incur. These are the young women of color who are considered promiscuous simply because they are not white, who are lesbians who will never fulfill a woman’s “natural” role as a man’s wife, or who are low-income and met with scorn when they choose to have

* And even then, women aren’t safe from criticism—we’re judged for having sex for plea- sure 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.

children despite their socioeconomic circumstances. These are the women who are mistrusted most of all—so, instead of receiving paternalistic pro- tection, they get punished.

In an article about Christian right members’ opposition to the HPV vac- cine,
Nation
columnist Katha Pollitt wrote that they “increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear.”
3
“Moral children” is
exactly
the right term. Whether we’re grown women or young girls, the virginity movement assumes we’re moral children—and American culture and politics treat us as such.

But this concept of women as moral children needs to be enforced consistently and pervasively for the gender power dynamic to remain as it is—especially now, when women are doing better than ever. And what bet- ter way to drive home the point that women are incapable than by shouting it in newspaper headlines and college talks, in legislation and the media? For virginity pushers and conservatives, there’s an added benefit to framing young womanhood as a sexual disaster in need of intervention: It’s an excel- lent distraction.

The fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers and titillate the imagination make it that much easier to ignore
actual
problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix. For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn’t even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the “moral” debate over STIs won’t do anything for her the next time she needs to see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn’t going to make her life any better or easier.

If the same people who are working themselves into a purity panic over women’s sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that

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young women really need help with, we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we’re stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn’t a shame at all.

g i r l s g o n e n o r m a l

The happy truth about young women and sexuality is that they’re doing a lot better than all the “gone wild” hoopla would have us think. The stereotypical American girl, as pop culture, the media, and purity advocates imagine her, is self-conscious, not so smart, apathetic, and oversexed (think Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson).

But a survey of five hundred thousand high school seniors from 1975 to 2005 showed that 70 percent of young women today report being happy with themselves, and that 77 percent are happy with their lives. The same study shows that 70 percent of young women think it’s important to make a contri- bution to society, and that 90 percent hope to have a job that enables them to help others.
4
Young women are happy and think it’s important to be socially engaged? Quite a different picture than the one certain conservative organi- zations and the media are painting.

Michael Males, a writer and senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in California, dissected these statistics and others for an essay in the forthcoming anthology
Beating Up On Girls: Girls, Violence, Demonization and Denial.
5

Males reports that young women are smoking, drinking, and using drugs less today than in the past, and at older ages. He also debunks ever- pervasive hooking-up fears:

[W]idespread claims by commentators of female sexual apocalypse are not borne

out. As far as I can determine, the damning term invented to label modern girls’ relationships—“ hooking up”—is meaningless . . . ranging from a casual email to an orgy. . . . If girls today are having random, unsafe sex by rising legions, we’d ex- pect pregnancies and STIs to be rising as well. Again, just the opposite is the case.

But girls who are succeeding don’t make for good headlines, and they certainly don’t allow for the moral panic that facilitates the control the virgin- ity movement would like to have over young women’s lives.

Imagine how odd it would be to see magazine covers about the young women across the United States who are succeeding not only in school, but in life in general—making change in their communities and beyond. Young wom- en who volunteer, young women who start organizations, young women who are activists—these women exist, but they’re invisible in American culture.

The only time girls’ success earns anything
close
to visibility is in the obligatory antifeminist articles about girls going to college at a higher rate than boys that argue that all this equality stuff is taking a toll on men. The only pieces about girls doing well are the ones written by people who seem to think that that’s a problem.

Likewise, imagine how shocking—but wonderful—it would be to see statistics and media about how young women are making informed and safe sexual choices. Which—despite what we keep hearing—they are.*

Statistics show that sexually active young people are doing a lot bet- ter than purity advocates would have us think. Gone are the anecdotes about depression, falling grades, and shame. The real world of young sexuality is one in which young people are capable of making safe and

* Save for those who have had the misfortune of receiving abstinence-only education.

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responsible decisions, which requires that we trust them enough to give them the information they need to do so.

It’s no secret that a large percentage of teens in the United States—45.6 percent of high school students and 79.5 percent of college students—have had sex.

The good news is that despite the onslaught of abstinence-only edu- cation, cultural virginity fetishism, and slut shaming, teen pregnancy, abortion, and birth rates have dropped significantly in every age and racial group across the country. Between 1988 and 2004, the teen pregnancy rate decreased from 111 pregnancies to 72 pregnancies per one thousand teen girls.
6
And a 2007 study found that 86 percent of this decline could be at- tributed to increased contraception use.
7

Advocates for Youth reports that sexually active teens are using con- traception at higher rates, and more effectively: 70 percent of teen women and 69 percent of teen men reported using a condom the first time they had sex, and in 2005, 63 percent of sexually active youth reported using a con- dom the last time they had sex; these figures represent a 17 percent increase from 1991.
8

The bad news is that despite these victories, the United States still has higher rates of teen pregnancy, abortion, and birth than other industrial- ized nations.
9
This problem is largely socioeconomic, as lower-income teens are more likely to get pregnant. In fact, nearly 60 percent of teen girls who have children are living in poverty, in part because poor teens are less likely to use or have access to contraception.

Statistics aside, the real question we should be asking ourselves isn’t how we can stop teenagers from having sex, but how we can help them make informed, healthy decisions about their sexuality in general. And,

perhaps more important, how we can foster a culture that values young women’s ability to make those decisions.

t r u st i n g w o m e n

Truth be told, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea of teenag- ers having sex in and of itself.* I think sex is a good—nay, a great—thing, and that young people armed with accurate information are capable of de- ciding for themselves to have sex.

Sex—particularly as it pertains to young women—needs to be reframed as a moral and deliberate choice. Positioning unmarried, nonprocreative sex- uality as dirty and immoral is not only dangerous but untrue. It’s high time we trusted young people enough to tell them the truth about sex and sexual- ity: There’s nothing wrong with them.