The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

Across the United States, a scourge of rape and violence against women is going unpunished and unnoticed. One in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime; young women are four times more likely to be attacked. 3 But instead of these statistics’ and these horrifying stories’ being a national scandal, and instead of the media and government being up in arms over the epidemic of violence that women are facing, the reaction is largely silence—or, even worse, blame.

  One would hope that the days of blaming the victim and qualifying what constitutes rape were long gone. But today, misdirected blame and rape apologism are even worse—because we should know better. More than thirty years ago, feminists fought to shine the national spotlight on violence against women. We’ve had access to books like Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape; we’ve seen legislation passed, like the groundbreaking Violence Against Women Act, which allocated millions of dollars in funding to shelters and sexual assault services; we’ve watched The Accused and dozens of other movies and television shows about how rape isn’t women’s fault.

  But the myth of sexual purity still reigns supreme, and it grossly affects the way American society thinks about violence toward women. So long as women are supposed to be “pure,” and so long as our morality is defined by our sexuality, sexualized violence against us will continue to be both accepted and expected.

  INSTITUTIONALIZING BLAME

  The Maryland law that a woman can’t change her mind once she consents to sex was actually based on a case from 1980, which defined rape based on common law that considers women property (that’s right—sadly, as recently as twenty-nine years ago, women were still considered the property of their husband or father). In this context, “rape” actually just means the initial “deflowering” of a woman; in fact, the injured party in a rape isn’t even the woman—it’s her father or husband. The decision notes that any act following penetration—the “initial infringement upon the responsible male’s interest in a woman’s sexual and reproductive functions”—can’t constitute rape because “the damage is done” and the woman can never be “re-flowered.”4

  Not only is this a good reminder that a lot of laws on the books need a good updating, but it also demonstrates how directly notions about sexual purity affect the way violence against women is perceived, and even prosecuted. Women who have had sex can’t be raped, because—as the law said—the “damage is done.” They’re no longer valuable; maybe they’re no longer even women, in fact, but are completely dehumanized.

  Devaluing women who have had sex is behind much of the institutionalized victim blaming that’s so pervasive in America. The media in particular is one of the worst offenders; its coverage of violence against women gives us an uncomfortable glimpse into how widespread the purity myth actually is, and how it normalizes rape and violence.

  The bulk of media response to sexual violence against women is mired in the stereotype of good girls and bad girls—rape victims worthy of sympathy and slutty girls who should have known better. The rape and murder of New York City college student Imette St. Guillen proves to be an interesting (though tragic) example of this trend, in that her story reflects both sides of the purity-influenced media coverage.

  St. Guillen, a graduate student studying criminal justice, was out celebrating her birthday with a friend the night she was murdered. After her friend went home for the evening, St. Guillen decided to stay out longer and went to a local bar, the Falls. It was later discovered that Darryl Littlejohn, the Falls’ bouncer, kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered the young woman.

  The news coverage of St. Guillen’s murder both sexified the story—referring to her as a young, beautiful woman who was brutally murderedch—and blamed her for being out drinking the night she was killed.

  The initial, sensationalized headlines made much of St. Guillen’s physical appearance: “Beautiful Co-ed Found Murdered,” screamed the New York Post, calling her a “petite, raven-haired beauty.”5 The New York Daily News’ headline was similar: “City beauty slain by beast: Tortured & dumped by road.”6

  But when the media found out that St. Guillen was killed after drinking alone at a bar late at night, the tone of the coverage changed considerably. Now headlines read: “Slain Student Left Bar Alone After 4 am” and “Fearless in the city: Some women still party as if invulnerable.”7 The focus shifted from the murder investigation to (once again) girls gone wild—young women “putting themselves at riskci” by going out to bars and drinking.

  Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show, for example, did a feature segment on the dangers of women going to bars:Bars are usually safe spots to gather with friends. But the combination of alcohol and strangers can be dangerous, especially for young women. Cases like the murder of Imette St. Guillen and the disappearance of Natalee Holloway are important reminders that sometimes a night out can end tragically.8

  NBC sent a security specialist out to a bar to “find out how vulnerable women can be.” CBS’s The Early Show brought on former prosecutor Wendy Murphy and Atoosa Rubenstein, editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine, to discuss St. Guillen and how women can stay safe. The conversation focused on girls’ going out and drinking.

  “But something like 85 percent of all crime has some connection to alcohol or drugs, so it’s important as a matter of criminal policy-making that we talk about the role of alcohol and talk about drinking less,” said Murphy.cj9

  St. Guillen’s story is a textbook case of how concern can quickly turn to blame. One radio host, John DePetro of Boston’s WRKO, said on his morning talk show that St. Guillen’s being out alone at 4:00 AM was “asking for trouble,” and that women should use “common sense.

  “As tragic as it is, your first reaction is she should not have been out alone at 3 or 4 . . . in the morning because look at what can happen,” DePetro said.10

  Wall Street Journal writer Naomi Schaefer Riley topped it all, however, when she penned a piece whose headline was . . . well, let’s just call it transparent: “Ladies, You Should Know Better.”11

  Though Riley wrote that the murder was a tragedy, she made sure to point out that St. Guillen “was last seen in a bar, alone and drinking at 3 AM,” and “that a twenty-four-year-old woman should know better.” Riley went on to call women who drink and later get assaulted “moronic,” and noted that if women wanted to avoid getting raped, they should simply “be wary of drunken house parties.”

  Of course, Riley’s sentiment and victim blaming are nothing new. Author Katie Roiphe based her career on them. Her 1994 book, The Morning After: Fear, Sex, and Feminism, questioned whether date rape really exists and argued that women are in part responsible if they are forced into having sex after drinking or using drugs.12

  Why aren’t college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs , but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be held responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman’s “judgment is impaired” and she has sex, it isn’t necessarily always the man‘’s fault; it isn’t necessarily always rape.13

  Let’s face it—this is “she was asking for it” trussed up in language about agency and responsibility. Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them. Blogger Melissa McEwan, who wrote in 2007 about her own assault, said it best:I was sober; hardly scantily clad (another phrase appearing once in the article). I was wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt; I was at home; my sexual history was, literally, nonexistent—I was a virgin; I struggled; I said no. There have been times since when I have been walking home, alone, after a few drinks, wearing something that might have shown a bit of leg or cleavage, and I wasn’t raped. The difference was not in what I was doing. The differ
ence was the presence of a rapist.14

  Ah, yes, the rapist. Remember him?

  RAPISTS GONE WILD

  Victim blaming shrouded in empowerment rhetoric has become the norm when it comes to sexual assault and drinking—especially when assaults concern young women; to see this trend play out, you need look no further than the girls-gone-wild “trend,” which the media is so very afraid of.

  But rather than waste too much time on the media panic about girls’ supposedly being promiscuous, let’s talk about the real Girls Gone Wild—the company. The Girls Gone Wild (GGW) empire—a video and online porn business that brings in more than $40 million a year—is arguably one of the most blatantly sexually predatory groups in America today. Quite literally, it’s a roving band of would-be rapists and assaulters who get treated like celebrities wherever they go.

  The GGW crew travels from town to town, partnering with local bars and clubs to lure in young women who want to be on camera. And while many people still think GGW is primarily a Mardi Gras-type breast-flashing enterprise (which is certainly what it started out as), the company now deals in much more hardcore pornography. Though, of course, the story remains the same: The camera crew seeks drunk girls willingck to bare all, and maybe do a lot more, on video.

  GGW’s founder, Joe Francis, has incurred numerous rape and sexual assault allegations.cl The most recent include a charge of misdemeanor sexual battery for groping an eighteen-year-old woman in California, a possible role in the 2004 drugging and rape of a college student in Miami Beach, Florida, and a community service sentence as part of a guilty plea for taping underage girls.15

  But Francis is not a lone predator—the whole GGW family likes to get in on the fun, it seems. In 2006, a GGW cameraman was arrested for raping a seventeen-year-old Ohio girl in the back of the company’s “party bus.”16 In 2008, video crew boss Matthew O’Sullivan, thirty-seven, was arrested for sexually assaulting a twenty-year-old Long Island woman—also on the party bus.17 This isn’t a coincidence—it’s a strategy.

  In an article about the Ohio rape, Carl Moss, an event coordinator who has worked with GGW on several occasions, noted that the company’s staff acts in a distinctly “predatory” and “systematic” way.

  As the night progresses, the drunker the girls get, they’ll start separating them. They’ll say, “Hey, you guys want to come on the bus?” And the girls’ll say, “Yeah! ”And they’ll take three down to the bus. But when they get to the bus, they’ll say, “Well, we can only take one at a time because you girls have to sign a release, and blah blah blah blah, and we’ll come and get the other two.”18

  The other girls will go back into the club, said Moss, while the cameraman takes a single girl to the back of the bus. “I’ve seen it every time now,” he said—as have others. The rapecm of an eighteen-year-old girl by Francis, once again on the bus, was actually detailed in a Los Angeles Times exposé on the porn empire.

  Eventually, [Jannel] Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans, and climbed on top of her. “I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, ‘No’ twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, ‘Oh, my god, it hurts.’ I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn’t keep talking.”19

  Reporter Claire Hoffman, who also wrote about how Francis physically assaulted her during their interview—pushing her up against the hood of a car, twisting her arms behind her back until she cried—wrote that Francis’s lawyer, Michael Kerry Burke, responded to Szyszka’s story by saying they had had consensual sex, and “though Mr. Francis cannot speak to Ms. Szyszka’s discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed.”cn20

  Despite these rape accusations, investigations, and unabashed physical assault of women, it’s not Francis, his cohorts, or the company that get talked about when rape, drinking, and “going wild” are discussed in the media.co (In fact, they rarely get punished, either—you’d think that some of these men would be doing prison time, though none are.) It’s women—portrayed as wild, sexual, irresponsible, and thoughtless. And little attention is devoted to the fact that these women are teenagers being systematically targeted by adults. Adults who have done this more than once. Adults who have the power of money, lawyers, and a society that loves to blame impure women backing them.

  What’s strikes me most about the GGW culture is that it’s iconic in contemporary American society—these aren’t just a bunch of frat guys who made a couple of bucks with a handheld camera. GGW is a way of life; it’s a way of thinking about sex, sexuality, and women. Men, especially young men, look to GGW (and other pornography, as discussed in Chapter 4) for cues about what women are like—as sexual beings, people, and, ultimately, objects. As a result, our sexual paradigm centers on coercion, trickery, inebriation, and assault. And instead of screaming to the rafters that we’re not going to take it, we wag our fingers at the young women who drunkenly take that trip to the back of the party bus.

  WE’RE ALL “GIRLS GONE WILD”

  You don’t need to “go wild” on camera to be blamed for an assault. Almost any woman can land in the “impure” camp and be blamed for sexual violence committed against her. “Impure” behavior isn’t limited to being sexually active, either—drinking, staying out too late, or, in some cases, not being white all qualify as well.

  Take Cassandra Hernandez, a female Air Force airperson who was raped by three of her colleagues at a party—where, yes, she was drinking. After she went to the hospital and filed a report, the Air Force treated her to a harsh interrogation—so harsh, in fact, that Hernandez decided not to testify against her attackers. Instead of giving her the treatment she deserved, the Air Force charged Hernandez with underage drinking and “indecent acts.”cp To make matters worse, Hernandez’s three attackers were offered immunity from sexual assault if they testified against her on the indecent-acts charge. So, in effect, she was charged with her own rape.21

  In the highly controversial Duke University rape casecq—in which an African American woman accused three white lacrosse players of raping her—the media almost always referred to accuser Crystal Mangum as a “stripper” or “exotic dancer,” despite the fact that she was also a college student, a mother, a person. The narrative became “stripper accuses college athletes,” dehumanizing Mangum. In fact, the media was so enamored with this storyline that they expanded it to include all women on college campuses. One ABC News article on the case reported on the “The ‘Lacrosstitute’ Factor”:They’re on every college campus where sports teams succeed: groupies who want to date athletes—or at least have sex with them . . . . At Princeton University, where the men’s lacrosse team is regularly ranked as one of the best in the nation, the women are known as “laxtitutes” or “lacrosstitutes.”23

  Apparently, calling women whores isn’t beneath even the most mainstream of media. And it’s not just the press that uses women’s sexuality against them when discussing sexual violence—it’s the courts, too. In California, for example, a police officer who ejaculated on a woman he’d detained at a traffic stop—and threatened to arrest her if she took action against him—was let off even after admitting what he’d done. Why? Well, the victim was a stripper on her way home from work. In officer David Alex Park’s 2007 trial, Park’s defense attorney argued that the woman “got what she wanted,” and that she was “an overtly sexual person.”24 The jury (composed of one woman and eleven men) found Park not guilty on all counts.

  Similarly, a judge in Philadelphia ruled that a sex worker whom multiple men had raped at gunpoint hadn’t been raped at all—she’d just been robbed. The victim, a twenty-year-old woman who worked for an escort service and obtained clients via Craigslist, had agreed to certain sexual acts with the defendant for a set amount of money. But he lured her to an abandoned piece of property and pulled a gun—then more men started showing up
. When a fifth man was invited to assault her, he instead helped her get dressed and leave because he saw that she was crying. But municipal judge Teresa Carr Deni insisted that what happened to this woman wasn’t rape—it was “theft of services.”

  “I thought rape was a terrible trauma,” Deni told a Philadelphia Daily News columnist. “[A case like this] minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.” Women who are really raped. You can’t get much clearer than that—a sex worker just doesn’t classify as one of these victims.25

  But a woman need not be a sex worker to be blamed for her rape; having any sexual history at all can do the trick. Under the purity myth, the only women who can truly be raped are those who are chaste—and given how limiting the purity myth is, and how few women actually fit into its tight mold, the consequence is that most women are seen as incapable of being raped.

  A woman who has had sex? Well, she’s done it before, hasn’t she? Not rapeable. A fat woman? She should be happy that someone would want to rape her.cr Had a few too many beers? Take some responsibility for yourself!

  This whole not-rapeable theme is especially true when it comes to women of color, who, as I’ve written previously, are either hypersexualized or dehumanized to the point that they’re hardly even considered women, let alone “pure” women.

  The rates of sexualized violence against women of color in the United States are far higher than those regarding white women. In fact, violence against white women is actually declining, while it continues to increase among women of color. Between 2003 and 2004, the incidents of intimate-partner violence involving black females increased from 3.8 to 6.6 victimizations per one thousand women. And the average annual rate of intimate-partner violence from 1993 to 2004 was highest for American Indian and Alaskan Native women—18.2 victimizations per one thousand women.