The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, “We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings.”25

  What’s funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves—and encourage men to see us—as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes, and abilities. But I know that this can’t happen so long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone—men and women—in an unnatural hierarchical order that’s impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo—together.

  CHAPTER 9

  sex, morals, and trusting women

  “If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?”

  BARBARA SMUTS, primatologist

  THE NATURE OF AN educational video produced by Concerned Women for America (CWA) is encapsulated in just the first few seconds, when the narrator says in a serene voice: “An honest talk about casual sex. False promises, searing pain, and tragic problems.”

  The video, of a talk that CWA’s Janice Crouse delivered to college students in Washington, D.C., features Crouse talking about how promiscuity and hooking up are damaging young women. (She also relates a somewhat garbled history of the sexual revolution, which she says had “disastrous consequences for women.”) Rambling off false statistics, Crouse tells her young audience that casual sex leads to poor grades, depression, and even suicide.

  In 2008, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute published a guide for college students, penned by none other than Unprotected author Miriam Grossman. Sense & Sexuality: The College Girl’s Guide to Real Protection in a Hooked-Up World has a lacy pink design, and most of its text is cursive.di

  Like Crouse’s talk, the booklet features mostly scare tactics about premarital sex, including telling readers that the young men they have sex with are likely not to “remember your name,” that “as the number of casual sex partners in the past year increased, so did signs of depression in college women,” and that women who contract HPVdj are essentially unlovable dropouts:Natural reactions are shock, anger, and confusion. Who did I get this from, and when? Was he unfaithful? Who should I tell? And hardest of all: Who will want me now? These concerns can affect your mood, concentration, and sleep. They can deal a serious blow to your self-esteem. And to your GPA.1

  Not satisfied with simply telling young women not to have sex, Grossman also makes sure to lay on the pressure about early marriage and childbearing: “Remember that motherhood doesn’t always happen when the time is right for you; there’s a window of opportunity, then the window closes.”

  There’s even a section in which Grossman seems to be wishing herpes on fictional characters. “It’s easy to forget, but the characters on Grey’s Anatomy and Sex and the City are not real,” she writes. “In real life, Meredith and Carrie would have warts or herpes. They’d likely be on Prozac or Zoloft.”2

  It seems that no consequence, from herpes to suicide, is too weighty to pin on premarital sex.

  In the world the virginity movement paints, girls are in grave danger—primarily from themselves. The “bad” ones are going wild, drinking, hooking up, and shunning traditional roles. The “good” ones are constantly at risk of being corrupted.

  While there’s no doubt that girls are in trouble—they’re being targeted by a movement that’s hell-bent on making sure they stay in “their place”—young women aren’t putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage.

  Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they’ll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-funded organization that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women’s studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn’t meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women’s access to abortion because he doesn’t think they’re smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place—and a more dangerous one, at that—for girls and young women. We’re just doing our best to live in it.

  These people not only act in ways that have tangible consequences for individual women, they’re also doing a great disservice to young women across the United States by participating in, and furthering, a culture that simply doesn’t trust women. Whether it’s about the decision to have (or not have) a child, the decision to have a drink at a bar late at night, or any number of daily life choices that people make, the virginity movement presupposes that women don’t know what’s best for them.

  And when it comes to sex, the weapon of choice in the movement’s push to deny women their rights, this distrust is amplified. Women can never make a choice about sex that is considered moral, or even acceptable, save for having straight sex within a marriage.dk It’s time to turn that around, for our own sake and for our daughters’ futures.

  DISTRESSING DAMSELS

  There’s a strategy behind talking about young women as out-of-control girls gone wild or innocent damsels in distress. If we’re no more than sluts or victims, than it’s reasonable for society to make our decisions for us—because, if left to our own devices, we’d muck it all up.

  For those young women who are considered victims or potential victims—like the purity princesses or the young, white, suburban girls whose parents live in fear of MySpace stalkers and the corrupting influence of MTV—a “Daddy knows best” paternalism is omnipresent. Whether it manifests itself in the form of forcing girls to take virginity pledges and go to purity balls, or even is propagated by a casual joke when parents laugh about how they’re going to have to lock their teen daughter away until she’s twenty-one, the idea that these young women need protection spreads perpetually.

  For the young women who don’t fit into the perfect-virgin mold, the paternalism is still there, of course, but they also have to contend with the disdain that their “transgressions” incur. These are the young women of color who are considered promiscuous simply because they are not white, who are lesbians who will never fulfill a woman’s “natural” role as a man’s wife, or who are low-income and met with scorn when they choose to have children despite their socioeconomic circumstances. These are the women who are mistrusted most of all—so, instead of receiving paternalistic protection, they get punished.

  In an article about Christian right members’ opposition to the HPV vaccine, Nation columnist Katha Pollitt wrote that they “increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear.”3 “Moral children” is exactly the right term. Whether we’re grown women or young girls, the virginity movement assumes we’re moral children—and American culture and politics treat us as such.

  But this concept of women as moral children needs to be enforced consistently and pervasively for the gender power dynamic to remain as it is—especially now, when women are doing better than ever. And what better way to drive home the point that women are incapable than by shouting it in newspaper headlines and college talks, in legislation and the media? For virginity pushers and conservatives, there’s an added benefit to framing young womanhood as a sexual disaster in need of intervention: It’s an excellent distraction.

  The fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers and titillate the imagination make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix. For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn’t even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the “moral” debate over STIs won’t do anything for her the next time she needs to
see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn’t going to make her life any better or easier.

  If the same people who are working themselves into a purity panic over women’s sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that young women really need help with, we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we’re stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn’t a shame at all.

  GIRLS GONE NORMAL

  The happy truth about young women and sexuality is that they’re doing a lot better than all the “gone wild” hoopla would have us think. The stereoty pical American girl, as pop culture, the media, and purity advocates imagine her, is self-conscious, not so smart, apathetic, and oversexed (think Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson).

  But a survey of five hundred thousand high school seniors from 1975 to 2005 showed that 70 percent of young women today report being happy with themselves, and that 77 percent are happy with their lives. The same study shows that 70 percent of young women think it’s important to make a contribution to society, and that 90 percent hope to have a job that enables them to help others.4 Young women are happy and think it’s important to be socially engaged? Quite a different picture than the one certain conservative organizations and the media are painting.

  Michael Males, a writer and senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in California, dissected these statistics and others for an essay in the forthcoming anthology Beating Up On Girls: Girls, Violence, Demonization and Denial.5

  Males reports that young women are smoking, drinking, and using drugs less today than in the past, and at older ages. He also debunks ever-pervasive hooking-up fears:[W]idespread claims by commentators of female sexual apocalypse are not borne out. As far as I can determine, the damning term invented to label modern girls’ relationships—“hooking up”—is meaningless ... ranging from a casual email to an org y. . . . If girls today are having random, unsafe sex by rising legions, we’d expect pregnancies and STIs to be rising as well. Again, just the opposite is the case.

  But girls who are succeeding don’t make for good headlines, and they certainly don’t allow for the moral panic that facilitates the control the virginity movement would like to have over young women’s lives.

  Imagine how odd it would be to see magazine covers about the young women across the United States who are succeeding not only in school, but in life in general—making change in their communities and beyond. Young women who volunteer, young women who start organizations, young women who are activists—these women exist, but they’re invisible in American culture.

  The only time girls’ success earns anything close to visibility is in the obligatory antifeminist articles about girls going to college at a higher rate than boys that argue that all this equality stuff is taking a toll on men. The only pieces about girls doing well are the ones written by people who seem to think that that’s a problem.

  Likewise, imagine how shocking—but wonderful—it would be to see statistics and media about how young women are making informed and safe sexual choices. Which—despite what we keep hearing—they are.dl

  Statistics show that sexually active young people are doing a lot better than purity advocates would have us think. Gone are the anecdotes about depression, falling grades, and shame. The real world of young sexuality is one in which young people are capable of making safe and responsible decisions, which requires that we trust them enough to give them the information they need to do so.

  It’s no secret that a large percentage of teens in the United States—45.6 percent of high school students and 79.5 percent of college students—have had sex.

  The good news is that despite the onslaught of abstinence-only education, cultural virginity fetishism, and slut shaming, teen pregnancy, abortion, and birth rates have dropped significantly in every age and racial group across the country. Between 1988 and 2004, the teen pregnancy rate decreased from 111 pregnancies to 72 pregnancies per one thousand teen girls.6 And a 2007 study found that 86 percent of this decline could be attributed to increased contraception use.7

  Advocates for Youth reports that sexually active teens are using contraception at higher rates, and more effectively: 70 percent of teen women and 69 percent of teen men reported using a condom the first time they had sex, and in 2005, 63 percent of sexually active youth reported using a condom the last time they had sex; these figures represent a 17 percent increase from 1991.8

  The bad news is that despite these victories, the United States still has higher rates of teen pregnancy, abortion, and birth than other industrialized nations.9 This problem is largely socioeconomic, as lower-income teens are more likely to get pregnant. In fact, nearly 60 percent of teen girls who have children are living in poverty, in part because poor teens are less likely to use or have access to contraception.

  Statistics aside, the real question we should be asking ourselves isn’t how we can stop teenagers from having sex, but how we can help them make informed, healthy decisions about their sexuality in general. And, perhaps more important, how we can foster a culture that values young women’s ability to make those decisions.

  TRUSTING WOMEN

  Truth be told, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea of teenagers having sex in and of itself.dm I think sex is a good—nay, a great—thing, and that young people armed with accurate information are capable of deciding for themselves to have sex.

  Sex—particularly as it pertains to young women—needs to be reframed as a moral and deliberate choice. Positioning unmarried, nonprocreative sexuality as dirty and immoral is not only dangerous but untrue. It’s high time we trusted young people enough to tell them the truth about sex and sexuality: There’s nothing wrong with them.

  In this mess of chastity expectations, objectification, and control of women, we have lost a very fundamental truth: Sex is amazing, and there’s nothing wrong or dirty or shameful or sinful about it. The virginity movement isn’t the only faction that pathologizes sex; a mainstream culture that upholds the virgin/whore dichotomy and shames (or exalts) young women for their sexuality and little else has damaged sexuality just as much.

  Teaching sex as a moral, responsible act—not to be taken lightly, but also not to be used as fodder for criticism—has the potential to create real change in young women’s lives. By doing so, we’d be giving young women much needed space to take responsibility for their sexuality. For example, think of the common excuse that young people use when they’ve had unprotected sex: “It just happened.” In these instances, sex is framed not as a deliberate choice, but rather as something that just occurred, thus freeing young people—especially young women—from the judgment that’s heaped upon those who actively choose sex. The lack of protection, in fact, “proves” that the encounter wasn’t premeditated; this allows the participants to absolve themselves of guilt. But if having sex is a morally neutral—or positive—act, young women will start making better and healthier decisions, because they’ll feel justified in making them.

  As it stands now, sexuality is still mired in the woman-as-gatekeeper model (discussed in Chapter 8), in which women are seen as, and expected to be, passive in terms of sex. This viewpoint not only negates women’s active moral participation in sex, but also furthers a dangerous paradigm of men’s feeling that they need to “get” sex from women.

  Thomas Macaulay Millar, in the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World Without Rape,dn asserts that sexuality in the United States currently follows a commodity model: “Sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it.”10

  The commodity model assumes that when a woman has sex, she loses something of value. If she engages in too much sex, she will be left with nothing of value. It further assumes that sex earlier in her history is more valuable than sex later. If she has a lot of sex early on, what she has left will not be something people will esteem highly.11 />
  Millar suggests that we should strive to achieve a “performance” model of sex, which will not only rid our culture of the current model, which has done so much damage, but also promote a more woman-friendly ideal of sexuality, involving a moral and mutual decision-making process in which no one loses any “value.”

  Because it centers on collaboration, a performance model better fits the conventional feminist wisdom that consent is not the absence of “no,” but affirmative participation. Who picks up a guitar and jams with a bassist who just stands there? Who dances with a partner who is just standing and staring? In the absence of affirmative participation, there is no collaboration.12

  Millar’s proposition is an incredibly important step in reframing the way we talk about sexuality—especially when it comes to young women. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey of young people found that 47 percent of teens who had experienced some form of sexual intimacy said they’d felt pressure to do something they didn’t want to do—and young women were more likely to have had this experience than young men.13

  While I believe wholeheartedly in young women’s agency and ability to consent to sexual activity, there’s no getting around the fact that society’s current version of sexuality makes it difficult for young women to have a healthy sexual outlook that centers on their desires.

  But unlike what purity proponents would have us do—push abstinence as the only appropriate option, and shame young women who choose otherwise—I believe that we should arm young women with the knowledge that sex should be a collaborative, pleasurable experience that has no bearing on whether they are ethical people.