The Purity Myth (7 page)

It’s no surprise, then, that Shalit’s book—as well as most abstinence websites, for that matter—is peppered with quotes from 1940s teen advice guides and relies on good old-fashioned fear baiting. “The more experiences

* Girls as Grantmakers executive director Heather Arnet told me in a phone interview that she had agreed to let Shalit interview the teens (all minors) with her present. Shalit later contacted one of the girls without Arnet’s or parental permission and engaged in long, leading email exchanges to get the exact quote she was looking for. Journalism at its finest!

teens have, the more likely they are to be depressed and commit suicide . . . this is particularly true of girls,” Shalit writes.
16

Similar ominous “statistics” are cited by Physicians for Life, whose web- site notes that “sexually active teens are more prone to be depressed/suicidal than teens who are chaste,” and that “teenage girls who had sex were three times more likely to be depressed than girls who did not engage in sexual activity.”
17

No matter how revolutionary or forward-thinking Shalit might claim her ideas or the events she cites are, the virginity movement always returns to the idea that sex is dangerous for women, and that certain sexual choices (abstaining) are good, while others (not abstaining) are bad. Shalit even writes about “goodness” and “badness” explicitly in this way: “Conforming to badness is ultimately more oppressive than conforming to goodness.”
18
“Empowering” rhetoric or not, there’s nothing revolutionary about reinforc- ing the virgin/whore dichotomy.

t h e e m o t i o n a l / P h y s i c a l m y t h : s e x m e a ns s u f f e r i n g

Stepp’s
Unhooked
takes a more targeted look at girls “going wild,” choosing to focus on the supposed decline of dating. Arguing that hookup culture has dangerous emotional consequences for young women, Stepp uses every trick in the backlash book to shame women for having premarital sex. She interviewed only a handful of young women—mostly white, upper class, and attending private school—over the course of a year.
19
During that time, some of the women hooked up and some were in more serious relationships, but instead of listening to the women she interviewed, Stepp pontificates about why they’re not happy and what they should be doing. In a nutshell,

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Stepp believes that premarital and casual sex aren’t really what women want. Like Shalit, Stepp wants her readers to believe that what young women
really
want is to get married, have babies, and bake cookies.* Virginity Mommy knows best.

In a 2007 article for
The American Prospect,
deputy editor Ann Friedman (also a Feministing.com editor) wrote about how Stepp’s theory is little more than regressive wishful thinking:

She tells women they don’ t really like going out and get ting drunk, they

just think they do. (“Admit it , the bar scene is a guy thing.”) . . . Stepp says women aren’ t naturally inclined to initiate sex. Back in the good old days “ there were generally accepted rules back then about what to do and not

do sexually,” she wrote. “These standards restricted young women more

than young men, by no means a fair deal, but they at least allowed women time and space to consider what kind of partners they wanted to love and what that love should look like .” Because for Stepp, love, not academic or career ambitions, should be the focus of young women’s energies.
20

What Stepp recommends, quite literally, is for women to get out of the bar and back into the kitchen: “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods,” she writes. Somehow I can’t get behind the idea that a generation of young women would give up casual sex for casual baking because a retrograde reporter promises it will be
so
much more fulfilling.

It’s not all that surprising, however, that Stepp advocates a return to tradi- tional gender roles. In 2006, she penned a piece for
The Washington Post
about how sexually aggressive girls (defined as those who don’t mind initiating sexual

* Yes, cookies.

encounters) were responsible for a nationwide scourge of impotence.
21
Stepp seems to think that the future of erections everywhere are dependent on female subservience, so it’s no wonder she’s arguing so fervently for it!

A similar screed,
Unprotected,
which received the most coverage in Christian media, relies primarily on Grossman’s experience as a campus psy- chiatrist at UCLA for its analysis. She argues that young women are not only increasingly more depressed because of hooking up, but also more diseased— physically
and
mentally. To drive home the fear her book is meant to incite, its cover shows a large picture of a young woman in a party dress and fishnet stockings sitting on the floor, slumped over, and seemingly passed out.*

Grossman blames what she calls politically correct campuses for not teaching young women that hookup culture can lead to sexually transmitted diseases. In a column published after
Unprotected
was released, she wrote:

For a teenage girl in 2008, “exploring” her sexuality places her at risk for

some two dozen dif ferent bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. She is likely to be infected soon after her sexual debut. This is due to the prevalence

of these organisms, their ability to infect without symptoms, the wide-

spread practice of casual sex with multiple “partners,” the inconsistent and improper use of condoms, and to a girl ’s physiological vulnerability.
22

Grossman also touts bringing back dating and long-term relationships, as if they’ve disappeared entirely from public life. (I hate to be the one to tell Grossman this, but even if he buys you flowers and takes you out to dinner first, you can still get HPV.)

* Because the only kind of sex young women have is drunken post-party, regrettable sex, obviously.

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The real danger in Grossman’s sensationalized ideas about the dangers of sex, however, is the way the media perpetuates them. Syndicated conser- vative columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote a glowing article in
The Washington Post
about Grossman’s research on college campuses, going as far as to write that hooking up has “created a mental health crisis.”
23
Parker also presented some very questionable claims that rely on Gross- man’s politicized version of science.

“The consequences are worse for young women,” says Grossman. In her psy-

chiatric practice, she has come to believe that women suffer more from sexual hook-ups than men do and wonders whether the hormone oxytocin is a factor. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and nursing to stimulate milk produc-

tion and promote maternal attachment. It is also released during sexual activ- ity for both men and women, hence the nickname “ love potion.”
24

Ah, oxytocin—it’s the magical love drug that virginity-movement regulars cite as the reason young women should wait until marriage for sex. Oxytocin first became famous in the reproductive rights world when Eric Keroack, an abstinence-only proponent the Bush administration appointed to oversee reproductive health funding, claimed that women “who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an indi- vidual.” The short version? Too much sex equals no more love. (In keeping with the sex-as-dirty theme, it’s worth noting that before Keroack resigned, he also said that “pre-marital sex is really modern germ warfare” and “sexual activity is a war zone.”
25
)

t h e r e l i g i o u s / P o l i t i c a l m y t h :

s e x h a s l a r g e r - t h a n - l i f e c o ns e Q u e n c e s
Women are used to hearing about how having premarital or “casual” sex will harm them. Liebau’s
Prude
takes the argument a bit further, theorizing that young women’s sexual activity is not only harmful to them, but also detri- mental to society as a whole. Liebau writes that the United States “pays a heavy price” for young women’s sexuality, and rattles off statistics about the national costs of treating STIs and welfare programs for young mothers. Lie- bau joins in on the health- and moral-scare fun, too. She writes that having sex “often condemns young women to a life of poverty and deprivation.”
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Once again, she offers very little in the way of real analysis, but provides a lot of salacious anecdotes to get readers’ outrage antenna going, like listing all the various places in schools and communities where young people have been caught having sex.

Dawn Eden, who is also a well-known pro-life blogger at the Dawn Patrol,
27
uses her own life as a former rock critic and sexually active young woman in New York City to make her argument that chastity is best.

Eden writes that she spent much of her youth sleeping around in the hope that a man would want a more serious relationship, and that made her miserable. The problem here is that Eden assumes that all women who have sex outside of the confines of a serious relationship (specifically, marriage) are miserable as well.

She even goes so far as to write that women who have premarital sex aren’t fully women: “[O]nly through chastity can all the graces that are part of being a woman come to full flower in you.” Additionally, Eden seems to be convinced of the idea that women are inherently less-than. In a 2007 article for the
Times
(U.K.), Eden writes that women are “vessels [who] seek to be

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filled.”
28
This sentiment is expressed rather unsubtly throughout much of Eden’s book, reverberates throughout the virginity movement as a whole, and is what gives away the movement’s true agenda: women’s supposed inferiority and its link to our sexuality.

Outside of pathologizing female sexuality, there’s another stark similar- ity between this spate of recent books and most literature on chastity and virginity: Lesbian women don’t exist, nor does sex for pleasure. These two issues are highly connected in their absence from the virginity movement’s conversations, because they speak to the same issue: Sex is okay only when it’s happening with your husband. Therefore, women who are having lesbian sex and women who are engaging in sex for the pleasure of it simply don’t reg- ister. After all, why even acknowledge sexuality that has nothing to do with traditional gender roles? It’s not part of their goals for women, so they simply don’t exist.

f o e , t h y n a m e i s f e m i n i s m

All of the above-mentioned authors, along with much of the media covering these imagined girls going wild, have arrived at similar conclusions about what cultural culprit is to blame for all of this sexuality gone wild: feminism. In the eyes of the virginity movement, feminism promotes the idea that women should be exactly like men. Apparently, this includes being subject to the testosterone-driven sex craziness that supposedly is male desire. Thus, feminism is named in every book as one of the causes, if not the central cause,