The Purity Myth (6 page)

* Pleasure is widely dismissed, if not denounced, in the virginity movement. When the purpose of sex is simply procreation, pleasure is simply gratuitous.

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potentially their life is just too high of a price tag to pay for merely being used by another individual.”*
4

When did sex become such a downer?! “The whole package”? “Broken victim”? These are fighting words for those of us who see sex as a healthy expression. Would it be so terrible to talk about sex in a way that acknowl- edges how wonderful it can be?

After all, it’s not as if the virginity movement is completely without joy. On the contrary, it finds happiness in discussing girls’ virginity—in the form of its perfect virgins. Women like Churchill, Dial, and Janie Fredell, the young woman featured in The
New York Times Magazine
article who equated saving her virginity with strength, are held up by pro-virginity organizations as the ideal woman. They’re quoted on websites and touted as “purity princesses,”
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and are the apples of their virginity-pledging fathers’ eyes. But what happens when these pure teens get married and have sex? Are they still strong and joyful then? Presumably, but when the virginity movement speaks of sexual joy within marriages, that joy is not about orgasms or intimacy; it’s about the (almost smirking) knowledge that your relationship is more “complete” than other people’s
because
you waited.
†

It makes sense—after all, the perfect virgin and holding up examples of chaste young women are integral to the virginity movement. The problem with this, however, aside from the way it fetishizes young women’s sexual- ity, is that the girls presented as examples by the virginity movement are by and large a narrow, idealized representation: young, good-looking, straight, and white.

* Interestingly enough, a Google search reveals that Churchill is on staff with the Wisconsin state legislature—the virginity movement is not just on abstinence websites, they’re affecting policy!

†
Holier-than-thou joy in sex is just not something I can stand behind, no matter how good it is.

Young women of color, who are so hypersexualized in American cul- ture that they’re rarely positioned as “the virgin” in the virginity movement or elsewhere, are largely absent from discourse concerning chastity. How can you be “pure” if you are seen as dirty to begin with?

As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, “Naked Without Shame,” about black women’s bodies and politics, “Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption.”
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She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. “[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled,” hooks wrote.
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Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women—these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It’s only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.

We’re a sex divided. As Patricia Hill Collins once wrote, “Dividing women into two categories—the asexual, moral women to be protected by marriage and their sexual, immoral counterparts—served as a gender tem- plate for constructing ideas about masculinity and femininity.”
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I’d also argue that merely positioning one kind of woman over all others as good and “clean” implies that the rest of us are dirty. So for those women who don’t fall under the perfect-virgin category, schools, newspapers, and American culture in general are ready and waiting to tell them that they’re impure.

m e d i a g o n e w i l d

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the

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mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and sto- ries generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s stu- dents. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.
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In 2007 alone, nearly one thousand articles referred to the “girls gone wild” and “raunch culture” phenomenon.
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Topics ranged from general haw- ing about girls’ promiscuity to the “trend” of bikini waxing for ten-year-olds
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to bemoaning college women’s “slutty” Halloween costumes.
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A 2007 fea- ture article for
Newsweek,
“Girls Gone Bad,” even wondered whether America was raising a generation of “prosti-tots.”
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This isn’t to say that there isn’t a real problem around the way young women are being oversexualized—of course there is. But media coverage focuses more on salacious scare tactics than on nuance. For example, a 2006 editorial in
The New York Times
titled “Middle School Girls Gone Wild,” about so-called suggestive dancing in school performances, channels the hackneyed “these darn kids” trope, rather than actual discourse.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers with-

out laps. They don’ t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. ‘Don’ t

stop don’ t stop,’ sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. ‘Jerk it like you’re making it choke . . . ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.’ The girls spend a lot of time lying on the f loor. They are in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.
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Rarely do editorials own up to the fact that “dirty dancing” has been around since the 1950s, when parents were up in arms about rock ’n’ roll music.

And as for the question of
who’s
being covered when we talk about promiscuity, disproportionately it’s young white women. Why? Because the sexuality of young women of color—especially African Americans and Latinas—is never framed as “good girls gone bad”; rather, they’re depicted as having some degree of pathologized sexuality from the get-go, no matter what their virginity status. You’ll find articles about STI rates, pregnancy, and poverty—which
are
issues that affect women of color disproportion- ately and deserve attention. But when articles about the sexual infection rates of African American women are one column over from an article about young white women’s spring break, a disturbing cultural narrative is reinforced—that “innocent” white girls are being lured into an oversexual- ized culture, while young black women are already part of it.

One of the most frustrating outcomes of this recent media panic is that it’s produced more hand wringing and finger wagging than actual results. The only tangible outcome of the girls-gone-wild media trend is a handful of lucrative careers. After all, nothing makes money like lamenting fallen and promiscuous youth, especially when those youth are female.

Not to be outdone by wire services and news magazines, sex-scare writ- ers have also started promoting purity with books. Modesty maven Wendy Shalit is not the only writer to gain from pushing chastity. In 2007,
five
popu- lar books, all arguing that sexual activity hurts young women, were released:
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both,
by Laura Sessions Stepp;
Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Hurts Young Women (and America, Too!),
by Carol Platt Liebau;
The Thrill of the Chaste:

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Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On,
by Dawn Eden;
Unpro- tected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profes- sion Endangers Every Student,
by Miriam Grossman; and, of course,
Girls Gone Mild,
by Wendy Shalit.

These books were written by virginity-movement frontliners, all using the media’s obsession with young women’s “deviant” sexuality to cash in and spread their regressive messages. I’ll save you some money here, because these books can actually all be summed up in one sentence: If you’re a young, unmarried woman who’s having sex, you’re putting your- self in danger—better go back to baking cookies and pretending you don’t know what a clitoris is. (Really. I wish I were joking.) The only real differ- ence I can determine among these books is
which
supposed consequence of women’s sexuality the author chose to focus on. For Stepp, it’s emotional consequences; for Grossman, physical. Shalit wrote about the moral impli- cations of sexuality, and Eden, the spiritual. Liebau beat all them, however, with her argument that young women’s engaging in sex has national politi- cal consequences! All of these supposed penalties have multiple tie-ins with other virginity-movement rhetoric and organizing—and all with the same goal: to return to traditional gender roles.

t h e m o r a l i t y m y t h :

w o m e n r e a l l y w a n t t o b e “ P u r e ” !

Shalit’s book received the most media attention by far; it was covered in doz- ens of articles, and she made a handful of television appearances. Much like her websites, Shalit’s
Girls Gone Mild
asserts that girls really
want
to be mod- est and chaste, that they’re naturally such, but that society and outside influ- ences force them to be sexual. (In Shalit’s worldview, women are naturally

modest and chaste; if we’re sexual at all, it’s because of outside influences.) Her book argues that young women are rebelling against sexualized culture by forming a movement for chastity.

Shalit describes “Pure Fashion” shows as evidence of this modesty backlash. These events were started in 1999 by Catholic moms across the country who were sick of the skimpy clothing that was seemingly the only thing available for their daughters to wear. The shows, which fea- ture clothing that cover more skin than most muumuus, would be a noble enough cause except for the etiquette classes they’re paired with, better suited for girls growing up in the 1900s. The misleading purity rheto- ric—that somehow it’s “good” girls who wear these modest clothes and bad girls who don’t—doesn’t help, either. But most problematically (and untruthfully), Shalit describes the events as “mainstream
,
” even though there were only seventeen held in 2006, hardly a high number for seven years of work.

As further evidence of the chastity movement, Shalit cites a boycott of the clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch by a group of high school girls, which was launched after the company produced shirts with messages such as Who needs brains when you have these emblazoned across the breast area. Shalit fails to acknowledge that the boycott, which received national media attention, was in fact organized by a Pennsylvania-based
feminist
group, Girls as Grantmakers.
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To attract support for her argument that this boycott demonstrated a commitment to “modesty” (as opposed to simply fighting sexism), she tries to distance the action from feminism, going so far as to write that one of the girls thought the National Organiza- tion for Women was “brainwashing.” Shalit knew that Girls as Grantmakers was a feminist organization, but in order to fully appropriate the protest

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into her imagined modesty movement, she had to make it seem as if the girls involved were somehow opposed to feminism.*

Appropriating feminist language and action is nothing new in the con- servative movement, but in Shalit’s case it’s particularly egregious, as she’s attempting to create a “movement” out of thin air and shoddy reporting. She instead ought to be focusing on the national movement that does exist to fetishize virginity and modesty, and acknowledge that it’s being led and energized by conservative institutions, not by young women—especially not young feminists who are working hard to battle sexist stereotypes, rather than promoting purity balls or modesty wear.

And while there’s no question that American culture demands much of girls, including hypersexualization, there’s no room in the virginity move- ment’s analysis for the idea that young women may
want
to be sexy, to have sex, or to express themselves in ways that don’t include wearing ankle-length skirts and finding husbands. The idea that young women could have a sexual- ity all their own is just too scary. And that’s why Shalit’s work speaks so acutely to parents and educators who are buying into the virginity movement’s ideals. Shalit not only reinforces their beliefs about chastity and modesty, but also makes them believe that this limited vision of sexuality is something girls actually embrace.