The Purity Myth (5 page)

Whether they’re pledges, bare stems, or Virginity Vouchers, the messages are clearly regressive. But virginity proponents are doing one heck of a job marketing them as “revolutionary” and “empowering.” Appropriating feminist rhetoric to reinforce traditional gender roles is nothing if not brilliant.

Wendy Shalit, a writer and virginity guru whose first book,
A Return to Modesty: Discovering Lost Virtue,
was the topic of much debate when it was released in 2000, is a prime player in the “making abstinence cool” movement (or, as she calls it, the “modesty movement”). Shalit, who in 2007 penned

* Contraception is for “bad” girls who planned out sex, not girls who got caught in the heat of the moment. And, of course, many of these teens are taught that birth control doesn’t work anyway, so why bother?

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another ode to chastity,
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good,
founded a website, the Modesty Zone,
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and a blog, Modestly Yours,
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which has twenty-one in-house bloggers. The site describes itself as “an informal community of young women who don’t have a voice in the mainstream media.”

“Whether you’re a virgin waiting until marriage, or just against casual sex more generally, you can find a safe harbour here to share your ideals, inter- ests, and goals for the future,” it reads. The Modesty Zone features “Rebels of the Month” and slogans like “Be Daring, keep your shirt on!” Of course, the core message of the modesty movement is still in plain view, as evidenced by the blog’s tagline: “Modesty Zone: A site for good girls.”

Some virginity-movement members are even resorting to using sex to sell their antisex message. A shirt being sold on the website of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Christian organization, says, Virgins are hot, and groups on Facebook dedicated to the same message call their own work “passion for purity.”

What’s most telling about all of these efforts, whether they’re being executed via education, religion, or social imperatives, is that they’re not working—at least, not in the ways the movement would like them to. Vir- ginity pledges have proved ineffective time and time again; the same is true of abstinence-only education.
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Blogs like Shalit’s Modesty Zone have little web traffic,
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and the purity groups on social-networking sites are dwarfed by groups like “This is what a feminist looks like” or even those as trivial as “If You Can’t Differentiate Between ‘Your’ and ‘You’re’ You Deserve To Die.”

Despite its inability to keep women “pure,” or to convince most Ameri- cans that abstinence is best, the virginity movement is strong, well funded, and everywhere. While there isn’t a critical mass of young people who iden-

tify with this movement, that doesn’t mean they aren’t affected by it; these are the people who are teaching our kids about sex and teaching our daughters about morality. And what they’re teaching them is wrong.

Abstinence-only classes are part of the reason why one in four young American women have a sexually transmitted infection (STI),
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and are cer- tainly to blame for the disturbing revelation that teens in Florida believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV, and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy.
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These are the organizations with billboards peppered across America’s highways telling young women, Wait for the bling and The ultimate wedding gift is your virginity.
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All of these messages—which position certain young women as the ideal, substitute sexual purity for real morality, and commodify virginity— are part of a larger effort to roll back all women’s rights. The virginity move- ment is seeking a return to traditional gender roles, and focusing on purity is the vehicle toward that end.

When I emailed my high school ex to let him know about this book, I asked him about our first time and what he took away from the experience. Like mine, his memories were wrought with uncomfortable moments* and questions. He remembers writing the date above his bed as a way to add per- manence to a fleeting moment. I was surprised to learn, however, that his views about women’s sexuality weren’t any more sophisticated than what I remembered them to be during our teenage years.

“No matter how sexually curious or ‘ready’ a girl is, she seems to be able to keep her wits about her a bit better than her male counterparts, so more is expected of [women], and rightly so,” Josh wrote to me. This is an all-too-

* Like his trying to hold back by staring at a bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne and attempt- ing to spell the name backward.

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common assertion—the idea that women are somehow less sexual than men and are therefore the gatekeepers of sexual morals. It’s a fundamental notion of the virginity movement, however, so I shouldn’t have been so shocked to hear this line of reasoning being regurgitated by my former boyfriend. After all, the purity message is widespread. But it’s one thing to hear the media use this type of language about Britney Spears; it was quite another to hear an ex- boyfriend use it about me. At the end of the day, though, it
is
about me—it’s about all of us. However theoretically we’d like to discuss issues of virginity, purity, and women’s moral value, the fact is, they affect all of us.

c h a P ter 2

ta i nted love

“Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it. It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker.”

d a r r e n w a s h i n g t o n,

an abstinence educator at the Eighth Annual Abstinence Clearinghouse Conference
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the above Quote is one i rePeat
often when speaking at colleges and feminist events. It’s shocking, telling, and, frankly, disgusting. Unfortu- nately, it also epitomizes the message that the virginity movement is working so hard to send to women: Sex makes us less whole and a whole lot dirtier.

I’ve never understood what it is about having sex that makes women dirty. I can recall countless conversations I’ve had or overhead over the years about women’s supposed sexual dirtiness. Struggling with the irrationality of it all, I’ve often wondered how it’s possible that a penis could have such power, that by merely being in the
vicinity
of a woman’s genitals, it could transfer some kind of ambiguous filth onto us. Or perhaps women are just
born
dirty, and the sex merely reinforces our sullied selves’ true nature.

When I’ve gotten engaged enough to argue commonsense points about the sexual double standard—Aren’t men sullied as well? If you use a con- dom, are you less dirty because you don’t actually come in contact with the penis?—I’ve been met with refutations, mostly from men, about how women who are willing to “give it up” easily aren’t really the datable kind anyway.

The men I’ve had these conversations with, misguided as they were, had to have absorbed this line of thinking somewhere. And I can’t say I completely fault them, since popular culture is saturated with ever more sexual images while sexuality is still being touted simultaneously as dirty, wrong, and even deadly. The messages that sex for anything other than procreation makes women used goods are disproportionately targeted toward girls and young women, but the impact they have on boys and young men is equally harmful. While girls internalize this message, boys are propagating and enforcing it.

So where does it come from, this dirty double standard? Pathologizing women’s bodies and sexuality is certainly nothing new; from “hysteria”* to fears about menstruation, women have been considered the “dirtier” sex for a long time.

In
The Female Thing,
author Laura Kipnis argues that fear of women’s bodies, specifically our genitals, is at the heart of the dirt double standard.

Recall the unhappy fact that throughout history there’s been the universal con- viction that women are somehow dirtier than men. The male body is regarded, or is symbolically, as cleaner than the female body. . . . Possibly it ’s that outjut- ting parts of the body, like a penis, are regarded as somehow cleaner than holes and cavities. . . . The vagina is frequently associated with rot and decay
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* The word “hysteria” actually comes from the antiquated idea that women’s emotional problems were derived from the uterus.

Not exactly the kind of message we’d like to see spread around, yet that’s what we’re stuck with. Educators, religious leaders, media, and parents alike help to promote these notions of dirty girls. Headlines about girls “gone wild” dominate newspapers and wire services, STI rates are discussed alongside stories of supposedly promiscuous teens on cable news shows, and books about the “hookup culture” ruining young women are a dime a dozen. The scare tactics are everywhere and the message is the same: Sex is hurting women.

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won’t have sex, but rather that they’ll have it without pleasure.*

P e r f e c t v i r g i n s , d i r t y g i r l s

The Abstinence Clearinghouse’s website is a virtual cornucopia of virginity worship.
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It features educational tools, videos, a blog, pictures of purity balls, and links to conservative and religious organizations, all touting purity and chastity. The website also features a page where women (and only women) are pictured and quoted about why they’re chaste. One such quote, from six- teen-year-old Ashley Dial of Tampa, Florida, reads, “I don’t want to show up empty-handed on my wedding night. I want to have the whole package to give to my husband and my husband only.”

Jolene Churchill of Evansville, Wisconsin, says, “Whenever I get the opportunity to speak to young people, I beg them not to become another broken victim of the lie of safe sex. The loss of one’s self-esteem, health, and