The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  The truth is, we can make a difference when it comes to legislation. In 2005, a Virginia lawmaker named John Cosgrove proposed a bill requiring women who miscarry to either report the miscarriage to a local law enforcement agency or go to jail for failure to report a death—a crime punishable by prison time. Word of the bill spread through the blogosphere, and the outcry was so intense that he withdrew the bill within weeks—and he actually credited blogs as the reason why he retracted it.

  We should also be on the lookout for positive legislation that impacts women, like VAWA, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, or the Equity in Prescription Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage Act. This is about more than stopping the laws that hurt us—we must also fight for the ones that level the playing field!

  SUPPORT LOCAL ORGANIZING

  I’m a big believer in the idea that the most radical and cutting-edge organizing happens on a local level, and through smaller, lesser-known organizations and activists. Unfortunately, these are the people who don’t get nearly enough media attention or funding. By focusing on supporting local groups and the actions in our community, we can help dismantle the purity myth from the ground up.

  Reproductive-rights and health issues are a great example of where to start. Legislating sexuality and purity is wrong—whether it involves limiting women’s access to abortion, telling them they can’t have children, or enforcing traditional gender roles through policy. Women know what’s best for themselves and their families, and our laws must demonstrate trust in them. The anti-choice movement—which doesn’t just want to end access to abortion, but also seeks to stop women from obtaining birth control, from having children when and how they want to, and believes all premarital sex is wrong—is strong in numbers, funding, and political connections.

  So we must support the organizations that are doing the important work of protecting women’s reproductive health and enforcing justice. Yes, we should support organizations like the ones we know—Planned Parenthood and NARAL. But it’s also crucial that we don’t overlook the community organizing going on in our back yards, like the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, or National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

  Countless local women’s shelters and health clinics are barely surviving. Find out who’s serving women in your community, and help them do their incredibly important work.

  GET PROACTIVELY INFORMED

  A lot of the issues surrounding the purity myth are contentious, so make sure to become as informed as you can. Don’t just wait for news to come across your desk; go and find out what the latest is on issues affecting the virginity movement.

  For example, it’s no secret that a tremendous amount of tension exists in the feminist community surrounding pornography. For some feminists, there’s no such thing as woman-friendly porn; for others, the issue is more complex. No matter what your position on porn is, the key to changing the mainstream porn culture that denigrates women is to look to feminists involved in sex work and porn for guidance—feminists like Susie Bright and Tristan Taormino and Annie Sprinkle; feminists whose vision of sexuality and porn is diverse and thoughtful, like SMUT, a Toronto-based, queer, sex-positive magazine, or $PREAD, a magazine by and for sex workers.

  And while feminists like Robert Jensen—whose work, discussed in Chapter 4, I respect deeply—would probably disagree with a lot of what these women have to say, I like to listen to all of them, because I think the answer is more conversation and more critique—not simple denunciation.

  The purity myth is based on the idea that women are only as important as their ability to be chaste, and feminist porn turns that notion on its head. It lends subtlety and nuance to a narrative that the virginity movement and the mainstream porn industry alike posit as cut and dried. The most radical thing we can do to confront women’s objectification and humiliation in some porn is to engage with it in a critical way. The same can be said of any issue surrounding the purity myth: We have to be proactively involved in educating ourselves before we take action on behalf of others.

  DON’T GIVE UP! FIND COMMUNITY, GET SUPPORT

  When you’re fighting against forces as powerful as the virginity movement, sexism, and misogyny, it’s easy to get disheartened. That’s why it’s so important to find community and support wherever you can. And it’s easier to find than you may think!

  Groups like Drinking Liberally—which holds get-togethers at local bars for people interested in progressive politics—have chapters all over the country. The same goes for many feminist organizations, like NOW and the Younger Women’s Task Force. And great websites like MeetUp7 make finding a group near you that discusses the issues you care about as simple as typing in your zip code and area of interest.

  And as I’ve written before (and will surely write again!), you shouldn’t underestimate the wonderful communities available to you online. Whether it’s on a blog, website, or forum, you can find people to share your stories with—your disappointments and your victories. A lot of women out there are interested in making change. Go find them!

  Battling the myth of sexual purity and its consequences isn’t just about trying to reverse the damage done to young women—we also need to move forward with a positive vision. That’s why I chose a bell hooks quote to introduce this final chapter: We must believe in people’s capacity to be transformed as we forge ahead, not only because hope is necessary, but also because it will allow us to do this hard work with open hearts and minds that will make our job easier. People will recognize that we’re coming from a place of compassion and understanding. (Perhaps that’s the optimist in me talking, but is there any other way to be when the cards are stacked so high against you?)

  I wrote this book for the same reason that people around the country are doing this work: because we know that young women deserve better, and because we want a better life for our daughters. Too often, when a feminist—or anyone, really—asserts that American culture should have a more nuanced vision of women’s sexuality, the virginity movement’s knee-jerk reaction is to make the accusation that we actually want girls to be promiscuous, or that we think it’s fine for children to have sex. It’s a standard conservative talking point.

  In fact, before this book was even published, I posted its cover image on Feministing.com and prompted an online backlash of sorts: Conservative blogs quite literally judged the book by its cover. A blogger for the Right Wing News wrote, “For them, it’s not enough to say that, ‘I’m not a virgin’ or ‘I like to sleep with a lot of guys,’ they have to come up with some kind of justification for why it’s the best way to live.”8 The Network of Enlightened Women, an antifeminist college organization, wrote on its blog that this book represents the alliance of the feminist movement “with the sexual liberation movement, although it wasn’t necessary.”9 The House of Eratosthenes wrote, “Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one.”10 Cassy Fiano posted that I must have an “obsession with sluttiness,” and that the book’s goal is to turn “teenage girls into raging whores.”11 Another woman, Ericka Andersen, even claimed to have read the book (despite the fact that it wasn’t to be released for months!) and wrote that “the real purity myth is what Jessica is telling women: that sexual consequences be damned as long as you feel good.”12

  Now, of course, the book cover says nothing about sex, promiscuity, or “consequences be damned”—these writers made that jump. Why? Because for those who buy into the virginity movement, the only alternative to being a virgin is being a whore. There’s no in-between for them; there are no shades of gray when it comes to sexuality, so they assume that if our intention is to attack the purity myth, our goal is to push young women toward promiscuity.dr

  So here’s my challenge to the organizations and individuals who are working so hard to enforce the purity myth, and to roll back women’s rights as part of that work: Be honest about what your goals are. Sure, you may think that traditional gender roles are what’s best for society, but be up-front abou
t the fact that those roles require women to be restricted in ways that men aren’t in most regards. And please be honest about what this book, and work like it, are actually saying and doing. Don’t fall back on hackneyed talking points about feminists’ wanting girls to be slutty. Instead, try actually responding to the points we’re making.

  I have a similar challenge for those of us who are trying to dismantle the purity myth: Let us continue to tell the truth about what this myth means for young women, and to address our opponents not with derision and hate, but with understanding. Because for every person I’ve met who believes fully in the purity myth, I’ve met another who simply needed to hear the truth, compassionately and without their being judged, in order to break free from it.

  And the fact is, we do have truth on our side: the truth that young women are suffering under this unrealistic model of sexuality and morals. And the truth that we are so much more than our ability to not have—or have—sex. We’re more than virgins and whores. We’re students, we’re activists, we’re parents, we’re workers, we’re people who care about the world around us.

  We’re women like Sandy Shin, a program coordinator at Breakthrough USA, an international human-rights organization that “uses media, education, and pop culture to promote values of dignity, equality, and justice.” Shin was the legal advocate project director of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and has long been involved with community-driven social movements.

  We’re women like Megan Kocher and Heather Ites, who own and help run Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis, the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America.

  We’re women like Avideh Moussavian, the director of immigration policy and advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition.

  We’re women like Jessica Yee, a youth activist who works on Native women’s issues; or Deidra, who started the blog Black and Missing but not Forgotten, dedicated to all the missing black women, children, and men in America13; or Texas-based Noemi Martinez, who created the zine Hermana Resist, and who works by day as the human trafficking outreach coordinator at Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.

  These are the kinds of women who make up America—diverse, engaged, smart, interesting, moral agents of change. Take a look at the work these young women and others are doing. Now tell me it matters whether they’re virgins or not (it doesn’t), or that their contributions to society have anything to do with their sexuality (they don’t). So let’s use these examples of amazing young women to remind ourselves why we’re fighting to end the purity myth—a myth that denies our value as whole human beings—and move forward with their work in mind. And let’s spread this message about all young women across the country: that we’re more than the sum of our sexual parts, that our ability to be moral and good people has to do with our kindness, compassion, and social engagement—not our bodies—and that we won’t accept any less for any longer.

  purity myth facts at a glance

  • There is no working medical definition for “virginity.”

  • “Vaginal rejuvenation”—in which a woman’s labia is trimmed and her vagina tightened, or her hymen is completely replaced (a “revirginization”)—is the fastest-growing form of plastic surgery in the U.S.

  • Over 1,400 federally funded Purity Balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers in a promlike event, were held in 2006 across the United States.

  • Violence against women is going down, unless you’re not white. Between 2003 and 2004, the incidents of intimate partner violence among black females increased from 3.8 to 6.6 victimizations per 1,000 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 1,000 women.

  • A 2007 report from the American Psychological Association found that nearly every form of media studied provided “ample evidence of the sexualization of women,” and that most of that sexualization focused on young women.

  • Over 80 percent of abstinence programs contain false or misleading information about sex and reproductive health, including retro gender stereotypes like: “A woman is far more attracted by a man’s personality while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.”

  • Abstinence-only education programs, which cannot mention contraception unless to talk about failure rates, have received over $1.3 billion dollars since 1996, despite the fact that 82 percent of Americans support programs that teach students about different forms of contraception.

  • Students who take virginity pledges are more likely to have oral and anal sex.

  • Between 1995 and 2007, states enacted 557 anti-choice measures—43 in 2007 alone. Since President George W. Bush took office, state legislatures have considered more than 3700 anti-choice measures in total.

  • FDA approval for Plan B, the morning after pill that prevents pregnancy, was held up after a FDA medical official wrote in an internal memo that over-the-counter status could cause “extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”

  • More and more laws are cropping up that attempt to curb pregnant women’s rights, and even punish them. In 2004, a Utah woman was charged with murder after refusing to have a cesarean section and one of her twin babies was delivered stillborn. One legislator in Virginia even introduced a bill in 2005 that would make it a crime—one punishable by a year in jail—for a woman not to report her miscarriage to the police within 12 hours.

  questions for discussion

  • How do you define virginity? Where do you think this definition came from (i.e. society, parents, friends)?

  • How do you think the ethics of passivity affected your life, or how do you see it play out around you?

  • What values—other than “purity”—should we be instilling in young women to ensure that they grow up to be active moral agents?

  • Were you brought up to think of female sexuality as somehow dirty? How did it affect you?

  • How can we create a more positive vision of women’s sexuality? What about younger women’s sexuality—how can we do the same while not falling into the trap of sexualizing youth?

  • How can we battle back against mainstream pornography that degrades women while still valuing women’s sexuality and feminist expressions of it?

  • Did you (or does your child) attend abstinence-only classes? What did you think?

  • How can we get the word out in our communities and beyond that abstinence-only education teaches more than “don’t have sex”—but sexist gender roles?

  • How do you think the purity myth manifests itself in violence against women?

  • In what ways can we use dismantling the purity myth to also fight back against rape culture?

  • What do you think it means to “be a man”? Do you think that definition is useful, dangerous, etc.?

  • How do you think masculinity contributes to the purity myth? How have you seen this play out in your own life?

  • What are some tangible ways we change the culture of virginity fetish?

  • Who are some young women in your life who counteract the current notion of apathetic, un-engaged youth?

  • Imagine a world without “purity” and virginity. What does it look like?

  notes

  introduction

  1 Jocelyne Zablit. “No sex please, we’re daddy’s little girls,” The Raw Story, March 22, 2007.

  2 PBS Online NewsHour. “South Dakota Abortion Ban,” March 3, 2006, www.pbs.org/newshour.

  CHAPTER 1 the cult of virginity

  1 www.scarleteen.com

  2 Laura M. Carpenter. Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (New York: New York University Press, November 2005).

  3 Laura M. Carpenter. Interview with the author, March 2008.

&nb
sp; 4 Dictionary.com definition of “virgin,” http://dictionary.reference.com.

  5 Hanne Blank. Virgin: The Untouched History (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2007), 29.

  6 Feministing.com. “Ivy Hymens: Why glorifying virginity is bad for women,” March 31, 2008, www.feministing.com/archives/008913.html.

  7 Randall Patterson. “Students of Virginity,” New York Times Magazine, March 30, 2008.

  8 Jill Filipovic. Response to “Chastity Clubs: Bringing the Hymens to Harvard Since 2001,” Feministe, March 31, 2008, www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008.

  9 Advocates for Youth. “My ths & Facts about Sex Education,” www.advocatesforyouth.org.

  10 MTV. “True Life: I’m Celibate,” July 2007, www.mtv.com/videos.

  11 Denise Felder. “Miss America ‘Purity Rule’ Change Halted,” September 14, 1999, www.ktvu.com/entertainment.

  12 New York Daily News. “Miss USA Tara Conner Sex & Cocaine Shame,” December 17, 2006, www.feministing.com/archives/006220.html.

  13 Mark Coulton. “Trump deals disgraced Miss USA a new hand,” The Age, December 21, 2006, www.theage.com.au/news.

  14 Page Six. “Duck and Cover,” New York Post, January 4, 2007,www.nypost.com/seven /01042007/gossip/pagesix/duck_and_cover_pagesix_.htm.

  15 Fox News. “Miss Nevada Katie Rees Fired Over Raunchy Photos,” December 22, 2006, www.foxnews.com.

  16 Abstinence Clearinghouse. Online store, www.abstinence.net/store.

  17 Feministing.com. “Shit . . . I’m out of petals,” September 27, 2006, www.feministing. com/archives/005775.html.