The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  WOMEN OF PORN, WOMEN OF PURITY

  There are many (many, many) genres of pornography, but what I find most interesting is the kind of pornography that reveals an image of women that is strikingly similar to what purity culture would like women to be.

  Take Real Dolls, for example. These dolls—which their distributor publicizes as “the most realistic love doll in the world”—are life-size sex mannequins that look disconcertingly like, well, real women. The dolls have articulated skeletons (for “anatomically correct positioning,” says the website 9) and three orifices. Buyers can choose from ten body types, sixteen interchangeable faces, and different wigs, makeup, and even pubic hairstyles. For all of this customization and use of high-end materials, consumers pay about $6,500 per doll.an There is even a community of men online who call themselves iDollators—they discuss their real dolls, post pictures of them, and run a monthly web magazine, Cover Doll.10

  In an article for Salon.com, reporter Meghan Laslocky spent months on iDollator forums and websites, talking to men (online and off) about their Real Dolls. One website, which she called “Hello Dolly” to protect the users of the forum, is nearly twelve thousand members strong—Laslocky called it “a place where all my worst fears about men churned in an awful froth.”

  Here were thousands of men who love the idea of peeling a woman’s face off and replacing it with another, who revel in taking por nog raphic photographs of their “girlfriends” and sharing them with their friends, men who glory in sex unfettered by the daily push-pull of a relationship, men who might have little respect for the word “no.”11

  And, in what seems like a natural next step for men who see plastic dolls as perfect women, Real Doll users often find ways to abuse their dolls. When Laslocky interviewed a Real Doll repairman, he spoke about badly mutilated dolls with their breasts hanging off, their hands and fingers severed. Another entrepreneurial type started a website to “rent out” Real Dolls. “Imagine love making for as long as you want and only in the ways that you want,” reads the site. “A doll that looks a bit like Britney Spears poses and ‘says,’ ‘I am Tracy and I will make your wishes come true. With me everything is at your pace. I never say ‘no’ and it is super easy to rent some time with me.’”12

  In this way, these dolls are the pornographic expression of the ethics of passivity that real-life women are expected to adhere to. In fact, they’re exactly what the purity myth would like women to be: passive, silent, and unable to articulate their desires.

  As one Real Doll owner said to Laslocky, “For the most part, it’s just like sex with an organic woman . . . who doesn’t say anything and is brimful of Quaaludes.” It’s not surprising, then, that these iDollators don’t refer to their dolls as sex toysao or masturbatory aides, but as “girlfriends.” It’s a sad state of affairs when some men would rather form intimate “relationships” with plastic dolls that can’t reciprocate affection, engage in conversation, or do anything, really, than take the time to get to know actual women. (With pesky things like opinions and personalities, who wants to bother?)

  While Real Doll buyers and iDollators may be on the fringe of sex toy aficionados—even twelve thousand members of a doll-fan website is not a tremendous number compared with the membership of other kinds of Internet pornography forums—there’s no doubt that they have become part of current American culture. The 2007 movie Lars and the Real Girl focused on the relationship between a disturbed man and his Real Doll; the dolls have been featured in articles and TV segments, and are a regular part of Howard Stern’s radio-show shtick. There was even a New York Daily News gossip item about Charlie Sheen destroying and disposing of his Real Doll: “He and his bodyguard tried to dispose of it, like it was a real body. They wrapped it in a blanket and drove around in the middle of the night till they found a [D]umpster.”13

  There are other kinds of sex toys—thousands, in fact—so why the fascination with this particular doll? Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that we’re captivated by the Real Doll because it represents a trend in the United States: valuing women for their silence and inability to say no (or to say anything!) and seeing them as sex objects above all else.

  Another part of the new world of porn that reveals volumes about the purity/porn connection is the cult of personal celebrity. A 2007 Pew Research Center poll reported that 51 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds surveyed said that being famous is their generation’s most important or second most important life goal; 81 percent said the same thing about being rich. In a culture where reality television reigns supreme and the promise of online celebrity has everyone lining up for even fifteen seconds of fame, it’s not surprising that young people would hold being famous in such high regard, and think of it as an attainable goal. And with blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking tools being so pervasive, most young Americans have some sort of public identity online. In this new tech world, we’re all in the spotlight—it’s just a matter of how many people are looking at us.

  Unfortunately, for younger women, being famous often means being a sex symbol—or a sex symbol in training—and the “famous for being famous” trend has made it easier than ever to attain that status. Take Tila Tequila, who gained renown through the Internet by posting barely dressed pinup-girl pictures of herself and earning the “most popular person on MySpace” position. Appearances in men’s and porn magazines followed, and now Tequila has a popular reality show on MTV, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, on which both male and female would-be suitors court her.

  The truth is, it’s hard to think of any female celebrity who isn’t sexualized in some way.ap Even female celebrities whose acclaim has nothing to do with sex find that they have to be seen as sex objects in order to remain famous. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy points out that in the weeks before the 2004 summer Olympic Games, female athletes, such as high-jumper Amy Acuff and swimmers Amanda Beard and Haley Cope, were featured near to totally nude in publications like For Him Magazine and Playboy.

  The collective effect of these pictures of hot (and, in most cases, wet) girls with thighs parted, tiny, por ny patches of pubic hair, and coy, naughty-girl pouts made it almost impossible to keep sight of the women’s awesome physical gifts. But that may have been the whole point: Bimbos enjoy a higher standing in our culture than Olympians right now.14

  If Levy is correct (and I’d like to hold out some hope that she’s not), then she explains why so many young women aim to be “hot—if not as a life’s calling, at least as a goal for day-to-day living.” Author and my Feministing coblogger Courtney Martin wrote in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters how this obsession is literally taking over many young women’s lives:The perfect girl focuses her energy on controlling her appearance. She spends her paycheck before the ink dries, buying trendy outfits that make her feel remade. (Never mind that they will bore her before the month is out.) She compulsively buys makeup, gets a membership at the tanning salon, purchases the same pair of shoes in a variety of different colors—all so she can feel worthy of at tention . . . . 15

  But the obsession with celebrity bimbos, as Levy calls them, and the struggle to be considered hot perpetuate the same fetishization of women that the virginity movement is built on. What’s the difference between venerating women for being fuckable and putting them on a purity pedestal? In both cases, women’s worth is contingent upon their ability to please men and to shape their sexual identities around what men want.

  Celeb culture is akin to the spotlight shining on the virginity movement’s purity princesses. Let’s face it—the beauty queens and young girls touting virginity pledges are simply purity porn stars. Whether it’s actual porn or mythologized purity, the end goal is to be desirable to men, and what women may actually want for themselves, sexually or otherwise, is lost.

  PURITY’S PORN AGENDA

  Concerned Women for America (CWA), a conservative Christian organization, wants to put an end to pornography—which CWA
blames for everything from breaking up marriages to child-on-child rape.aq But instead of talking about the content of porn or the health environment for sex workers, or even just plain old sexism, CWA zeroes in on Victoria’s Secret and the former hit television show Friends. Really.

  In a 2006 podcast, former chief counsel of CWA Jan LaRue bemoaned how CBS played lingerie label Victoria’s Secret’s runway show during a prime-time spot, and angrily mentioned how the Friends characters joke about looking at pornography. LaRue failed to mention any actual porn and instead focused on popular mainstream culture—like actresses posing partly nude on the cover of Vanity Fair. This is the virginity movement’s version of antiporn activism.16

  Even when fighting back against actual bad decisions, CWA can’t help but throw in its two cents, which are always about sexual shaming. In a release about an Oklahoma court decision that freed a man after he was caught taking pictures up a sixteen-year-old girl’s skirt (apparently, a teen in a mall has no “expectation of privacy”), the organization was sure to point out that the “teenager was not Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or Paris Hilton out and about town sans panties.”

  “Unlike those celebrities, the teen was not dressed for and ready to be photographed getting out of cars without a care as to who sees what they are purposely revealing.”17 You know, girls who would be “asking for it.”

  That isn’t to say CWA focuses on sexualization in pop culture only; it also targets corporations like hotel chains for providing pay-per-view porn, and seeks enforcement of state and federal obscenity laws. However, what it’s striving for is not progressive change, but a return to “traditional” norms and a time when porn—widely defined as seemingly anything that’s not women in head-to-toe prairie dresses and anything less chaste than hand holding—existed but was hidden from view and not discussed.ar Ever.

  And those obscenity laws CWA is fighting to uphold and enforce? Outside of being used to prosecute child pornographers—an honorable cause if there ever was one—these laws vary from state to state and more often than not center on pornography that strays from the heterosexual, “vanilla” norm. In 2005, for example, the FBI formed a “porn squad,” an anti-obscenity crew of agents tasked with targeting pornography created for adults.as18 They focused on (consensual) sadomasochistic porn, even arresting owners of an erotic-fiction website that featured just stories.19

  Many anti-obscenity laws are so broadly interpreted that they have been used to ban the sale of sex toys in some states. In 2007, Alabama sex shop owners being targeted by anti-obscenity laws even tried to take their case to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear their challenge to the ban, so the law remained in place.20 And in 2004, Joanne Webb, a Texas mother of three, was arrested for being a representative for passion parties—kind of like Tupperware parties, except the wares are vibrators rather than food containers.21 Texas law actually does allow for the sale of sex toys, so long as they’re described as novelty items. But when a person like Webb, also a former schoolteacher, explains what their actual role in sex is, she’s breaking the law. Talk about a telling specification! Sex is fine so long as you’re not talking about it seriously or openly.

  This is the same reason the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), an antifeminist organization similar to CWA (but without the explicitly religious tilt), uses its campus program to try to stop on-campus productions of the award winning play The Vagina Monologues—which, the IWF says, “glorifies promiscuity and treats women as sex objects.” It’s not that the play says anything particularly outrageous; the mere fact that “vagina” is in the title is enough to make it obscene.at23 But it’s really the fact that the play discusses—yes, in detail—female sexuality that gets the goat of virginity-movement organizations like IWF.

  The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, yet another organization that combats “obscenity,” even published a booklet called “The Vagina Monologues Exposed: A Student’s Guide to V-Day,” which calls the play “humiliating” and “pornographic” and aims to help students protest their campus’s productions. The “facts” the institute presents to discredit the play make little sense; for example, it describes one monologue that discusses masturbation as “exactly what the early suffragettes were fighting against.”24 And here I thought it was disenfranchisement! And when the organization gets into the nitty-gritty of why it believes the play is so pornographic, its underlying fear of female sexuality is clear.

  Myth #5: The play is not pornographic.

  False. It includes extremely graphic descriptions of women’s sexual experiences . One monologue has an explicit depiction of two lesbians having sex . “She’s inside me. I’m inside me” (Ensler 115). And it gets much more graphic. “The Vagina Workshop” describes one woman’s experience with masturbation. 25

  The virginity movement’s notions regarding obscenity and pornography have little to do with the actual issues in porn that affect women, such as hypermasculinity, humiliation, or violence against them. Gay sex or masturbation isn’t what’s harming women through porn—a hyped-up patriarchy is. After all, there’s nothing “alternative” about calling women “whores” or presenting violence against women as sexual. That’s good-old fashioned misogyny, and it’s been around and systemically supported for a long time. That’s why the purity pushers’ objections to pornography are so hypocritical: They see it not as something that degrades women, but as something that degrades patriarchy and male control of female sexuality. If this isn’t the case, then why the focus on masturbation and lesbian sex—two activities that are clearly very much under women’s control?

  The truth is that commercial pornography is exactly in line with the purity myth’s values. In an article about the “raunch culture” that Levy discusses in her book, In These Times writer Lakshmi Chaudhry aptly notes that this porn culture “shift did not occur despite the rise of the religious Right but because of it.”

  [M]ake no mistake, raunch is Republican. The sexuality that reigns supreme in Bush World bears the basic imprimaturs of right-wing ideology : gross materialism, sexual hypocrisy, and acquiescence in the name of empowerment . It is in every sense a conservative wet dream come true .26

  And because this new porned America is actually a “conservative wet dream,” the virginity movement is loath to change it, and would rather use it as an excuse to maintain the sexual status quo. Therefore, when groups like IWF or CWA call for an end to pornography, what they point to is never more realistic sexual images—it’s chastity, the only acceptable answer.

  The simple chaste “solution” has become so widespread that even some feminists are touting it. Naomi Wolf, for example, wrote a New York magazine piece on how men are becoming turned off by “real” women because of porn. Her suggestion seemed more like something Shalit would say than the woman who was arguably the ’90s most famous feminist. She wrote about visiting an old friend, now an orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, who covered her head with a scarf.

  “Can’t I even see your hair? ” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there.

  “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband ,” she said with a calm sexual confidence , “ever gets to see my hair.” . . . And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.27

  The thing is, naked women aren’t the problem—a woman believing her only value is sexual is what’s dangerous. It’s not women’s sexuality that we have to watch out for, it’s the way men construct it.

  MOVING FORWARD IN A PORNED WORLD

  This similarity between purity and porn culture—the way both fetishize women’s sexual subservience—is what makes the virginity movement completely unable to analyze pornography in a progressive or helpful way. The movement has latched on to the mainstreaming of porn not because it cares about women and the way in which their sexuality is represented, but because porn is an easy scapegoat for what the movement perceives as society’s ills (women having sex), as well as a
convenient excuse to uphold the movement’s regressive goals. The fact that conservative organizations conflate porn with sex toys, and masturbation and female pleasure with obscenity, reveals the true nature of their objections. These organizations blame progressive and feminist values because that’s what they’re fighting against—not real, tangible problems that affect women. So, instead of criticizing pornography from a perspective that seeks to help women, they end up reinforcing porn’s sexist aspects. There’s no doubt that the pornification of the United States affects young people adversely, but if young women are treating their bodies and sexuality as commodities, it’s not because of porn culture—it’s because of a larger societal message that tells them their sexuality is not their own.

  But there’s also no arguing that this new porn culture, raunch culture, or whatever one wants to call it merits analysis—be it political or moral. If they’re doing it wrong, how do we do it right?

  To start with, we must abandon the idea that women’s bodies are inherently shameful, and that women’s sexuality needs to be restricted. Some of the more recent measures to control pornography are mired in the state-as-pimp model. Through the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act, the U.S. Department of Justice generates a list of all actors in the porn industry. According to the 2007 rules, this list ensures that no minors are engaging in sex work, but infringing on a whole industry’s freedom of privacy seems a bit extreme.

  Instead of employing the naming-and-shaming technique, organizations and legislators should be using their collective power and funding to talk to those in the sex industry and not dismiss them out of hand. There are feminist and pro-woman porn makers and performers who are working to make the industry better for women every day. Connecting with them is a necessary first step.