The Purity Myth Read online

  The idea that virginity (or loss thereof) can profoundly affect women’s lives is certainly nothing new. But what virginity is, what it was, and how it’s being used now to punish women and roll back their rights is at the core of the purity myth. Because today, in a world where porn culture and reenergized abstinence movements collide, the moral panic myth about young women’s supposed promiscuity is diverting attention from the real problem—that women are still being judged (sometimes to death) on something that doesn’t really exist: virginity.

  THE VIRGINITY MYSTERY

  Before Hanne Blank wrote her book Virgin: The Untouched History, she had a bit of a problem. Blank was answering teens’ questions on Scarleteen1—a sex-education website she founded with writer Heather Corinna so that young people could access information about sex online, other than porn and Net Nanny—when she discovered that she kept hitting a roadblock when it came to the topic of virginity.

  “One of the questions that kept coming up was ‘I did such-and-such. Am I still a virgin?’” Blank told me in an interview. “They desperately wanted an authoritative answer.”

  But she just didn’t have one. So Blank decided to spend some time in Harvard’s medical school library to find a definitive answer for her young web browsers.

  “I spent about a week looking through everything I could—medical dictionaries, encyclopedias, anatomies—trying to find some sort of diagnostic standard for virginity,” Blank said.

  The problem was, there was no standard. Either a book wouldn’t mention virginity at all or it would provide a definition that wasn’t medical, but subjective.

  “Then it dawned on me—I’m in arguably one of the best medical libraries in the world, scouring their stacks, and I’m not finding anything close to a medical definition for virginity. And I thought, That’s really weird. That’s just flat-out strange.”

  Blank said she found it odd mostly because everyone, including doctors, talks about virginity as if they know what it is—but no one ever bothers to mention the truth: “People have been talking authoritatively about virginity for thousands of years, yet we don’t even have a working medical definition for it!”

  Blank now refers to virginity as “the state of having not had partnered sex.” But if virginity is simply the first time someone has sex, then what is sex? If it’s just heterosexual intercourse, then we’d have to come to the fairly ridiculous conclusion that all lesbians and gay men are virgins, and that different kinds of intimacy, like oral sex, mean nothing. And even using the straight-intercourse model of sex as a gauge, we’d have to get into the down-and-dirty conversation of what constitutes penetration.b

  Since I’ve become convinced that virginity is a sham being perpetrated against women, I decided to turn to other people to see how they “count” sex. Most say it’s penetration. Some say it’s oral sex. My closest friend, Kate, a lesbian, has the best answer to date (a rule I’ve followed since she shared it with me): It isn’t sex unless you’ve had an orgasm. That’s a pleasure-based, non-heteronormative way of marking intimacy if I’ve ever heard one. Of course, this way of defining sex isn’t likely to be very popular among the straight-male sect, given that some would probably end up not counting for many of their partners.

  But any way you cut it, virginity is just too subjective to pretend we can define it.

  Laura Carpenter, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences, told me that when she wrote her book, she was loath to even use the word “virginity,” lest she propagate the notion that there’s one concrete definition for it.2

  “What is this thing, this social phenomenon? I think the emphasis put on virginity, particularly for women, causes a lot more harm than good,” said Carpenter.3

  This has much to do with the fact that “virgin” is almost always synonymous with “woman.” Virgin sacrifices, popping cherries, white dresses, supposed vaginal tightness, you name it. Outside of the occasional reference to the male virgin in the form of a goofy movie about horny teenage boys, virginity is pretty much all about women. Even the dictionary definitions of “virgin” cite an “unmarried girl or woman” or a “religious woman, esp. a saint.”4 No such definition exists for men or boys.

  It’s this inextricable relationship between sexual purity and women—how we’re either virgins or not virgins—that makes the very concept of virginity so dangerous and so necessary to do away with.

  Admittedly, it would be hard to dismiss virginity as we know it altogether, considering the meaning it has in so many people’s—especially women’s—lives. When I suggest that virginity is a lie told to women, I don’t aim to discount or make light of how important the current social idea of virginity is for some people. Culture, religion, and social beliefs influence the role that virginity and sexuality play in women’s lives—sometimes very positively. So, to be clear, when I argue for an end to the idea of virginity, it’s because I believe sexual intimacy should be honored and respected, but that it shouldn’t be revered at the expense of women’s well-being, or seen as such an integral part of female identity that we end up defining ourselves by our sexuality.

  I also can’t discount that no matter what personal meaning each woman gives virginity, it’s people who have social and political influence who ultimately get to decide what virginity means—at least, as it affects women on a large scale.

  VIRGINITY: COMMODITY, MORALITY, OR FARCE?

  It’s hard to know when people started caring about virginity, but we do know that men, or male-led institutions, have always been the ones that get to define and assign value to virginity.

  Blank posits that a long-standing historical interest in virginity is about establishing paternity (if a man marries a virgin, he can be reasonably sure the child she bears is his) and about using women’s sexuality as a commodity. Either way, the notion has always been deeply entrenched in patriarchy and male ownership.

  Raising daughters of quality became another model of production, as valuable as breeding healthy sheep, weaving sturdy cloth, or bringing in a good harvest. . . . The gesture is now generally symbolic in the first world, but we nonetheless still observe the custom of the father “giving” his daughter in marriage. Up until the last century or so, however, when laws were liberalized to allow women to stand as full citizens in their own right, this represented a literal transfer of property from a father’s household to a husband’s.5

  That’s why women who had sex were (and still are, at times) referred to as “damaged goods”—because they were literally just that: something to be owned, traded, bought, and sold.

  But long gone are the days when women were property . . . or so we’d like to think. It’s not just wedding traditions or outdated laws that name women’s virginity as a commodity; women’s virginity, our sexuality, is still assigned a value by a movement with more power and influence in American society than we’d probably like to admit.

  I like to call this movement the virginity movement.c And it is a movement, indeed—with conservatives and evangelical Christians at the helm, and our government, school systems, and social institutions taking orders. Composed of antifeminist think tanks like the Independent Women’s Forum and Concerned Women for America; abstinence-only “educators” and organizations; religious leaders; and legislators with regressive social values, the virginity movement is much more than just the same old sexism; it’s a targeted and well-funded backlash that is rolling back women’s rights using revamped and modernized definitions of purity, morality, and sexuality. Its goals are mired in old-school gender roles, and the tool it’s using is young women’s sexuality. (What better way to get people to pay attention to your cause than to frame it in terms of teenage girls’ having, or not having, sex? It’s salacious!) And, like it or not, the members of the virginity movement are the people who are defining virginity—and, to a large extent, sexuality—in America. Now, instead of women’s virginity being explicitly bought and so
ld with dowries and business deals, it’s being defined as little more than a stand-in for actual morality.

  It’s genius, really. Shame women into being chaste and tell them that all they have to do to be “good” is not have sex. (Of course, chastity and purity, as defined by the virginity movement, are not just about abstaining sexually so much as they’re about upholding a specific, passive model of womanhood. But more on this later.)

  For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer—the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e., “moral”) girl and therefore worthy of praise.

  Present-day American society—whether through pop culture, religion, or institutions—conflates sexuality and morality constantly. Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women’s morality means that nothing else matters—not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That’s all.

  Just look at the women we venerate for not having sex: pageant queens who run on abstinence platforms, pop singers who share their virginal status, and religious women who “save themselves” for marriage. It’s an interesting state of affairs when women have to simply do, well, nothing in order to be considered ethical role models. As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Har vard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.”6

  But for plenty of women across the country, it is special. Staying “pure” and “innocent” is touted as the greatest thing we can do. However, equating this inaction with morality not only is problematic because it continues to tie women’s ethics to our bodies, but also is downright insulting because it suggests that women can’t be moral actors. Instead, we’re defined by what we don’t do—our ethics are the ethics of passivity. (This model of ethics fits in perfectly with how the virginity movement defines the ideal woman.)

  Proponents of chastity and abstinence, though, would have us believe that abstaining indeed requires strength and action. Janie Fredell, one of the students quoted in the above-mentioned New York Times Magazine piece, penned a college newspaper article claiming that virginity is “rooted . . . in the notion of strength.”

  “It takes a strong woman to be abstinent, and that’s the sort of woman I want to be,” Fredell told the magazine.7 Her rhetoric of strength is part of a growing trend among the conservative virginity-fetish sect, which is likely the result of virginity movement leaders seeing how questionable the “passive virgin” is in modern society. Now we’re seeing virginity proponents assert their fortitude. Conservative messages aimed at young men even call on them to be “virginity warriors,” driving home the message that it’s men’s responsibility to safeguard virginity for their female counterparts, simultaneously quashing any fears of feminization that boys may have surrounding abstinence.

  Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture, it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: If this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to—as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence—wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself. But women who have sex are often denigrated by those who revere virginity. As feminist blogger Jill Filipovic noted in response to Fredell:I appreciate and applaud the personal strength of individuals who decide abstinence is the best choice for them. But what I can’t support is the constant attacks on sexually active people. People who have sex do not feel a constant need to tell abstinent people that their human dignity has been compromised, or that they’re dirty, or that they are secretly unhappy, or that they’re headed for total life ruin.8

  And that is exactly what young women are taught, thanks in no small part to conservative backlash. In 2005, for example, the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family came out with a study reporting that having sex before the age of eighteen makes you more likely to end up poor and divorced.9 Given that the median age for sexual initiation for all Americans—male and female—is seventeen, I wonder how shocked most women will be when they learn that they have a life of poverty-stricken spinster-hood to look forward to!

  But it’s not only abstinence education or conservative propaganda that are perpetuating this message; you need look no further than pop culture for stark examples of how young people—especially young women—are taught to use virginity as an easy ethical road map.

  A 2007 episode of the MTV documentary series True Life featured celibate youth.10 Among the teens choosing to abstain because of disease concerns and religious commitments was nineteen-year-old Kristin from Nashville, Tennessee. Kristin had cheated on her past boyfriends, and told the camera she’d decided to remain celibate until she feels she can be faithful to her current boyfriend. Clearly, Kristin’s problem isn’t sex—it’s trust. But instead of dealing with the actual issues behind her relationship woes, this young woman was able to circumvent any real self-analysis by simply claiming to be abstinent. So long as she’s chaste, she’s good.

  Or consider singer and reality television celebrity Jessica Simpson, who has made her career largely by playing on the sexy-virgin stereotype. Simpson, the daughter of a Baptist youth minister, started her singing career by touring Christian youth festivals and True Love Waits events. Even when she went mainstream, she publicly declared her virginity—stating that her father had given her a promise ring when she was twelve years old—and spoke of her intention to wait to have sex until marriage. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, Simpson was being marketed as a major sex symbol—all blond hair, breasts, and giggles. Especially giggles. Simpson’s character (and I use the word “character” because it’s hard to know what was actually her and not a finely honed image) was sold as the archetypal dumb blond. Thoughtless moments on Newlyweds, the MTV show that followed her short-lived marriage to singer Nick Lachey, became nationally known sound bites, such as Simpson’s wondering aloud whether tuna was chicken or fish, since the can read “Chicken of the Sea.”

  Despite Simpson’s public persona as an airhead (as recently as 2008, she was featured in a Macy’s commercial as not understanding how to flick on a light switch), women are supposed to want to be her, not only because she’s beautiful by conventional standards, but also because she adheres to the social structures that tell women that they exist purely for men: as a virgin, as a sex symbol, or, in Simpson’s case, as both. It doesn’t matter that Simpson reveals few of her actual thoughts or moral beliefs; it’s enough that she’s “pure,” even if that purity means she’s a bit of a dolt.

  For those women who can’t keep up the front as well as someone like Simpson, they suffer heaps of judgment—especially when they fall off the pedestal they’re posed upon so perfectly. American pop culture, especially, has an interesting new trend of venerating and fetishizing “pure” young women—whether they’re celebrities, beauty queens, or just everyday young women—simply to bask in their eventual fall.

  And no one embodies the “perfect” young American woman like beauty queens. They’re pretty, over whelmingly white, thin, and eager to please.d And, of course, pageant queens are supposed to be as pure as pure can be. In fact, until 1999, the Miss America pageant had a “purity rule” that barred divorced women and those who had obtained abortions from entering the contest—lest they sully the competition, I suppose.11

  So in 2006, when two of those “perfect” girls made the news for being in scandalous photos on the Internet, supposed promiscuity, or a combination thereof, Americans were transfixed.

  First, twenty-year-old Miss USA Tara Conner
was nearly stripped of her title after reports surfaced that she frequented nightclubs, drank, and dated. Hardly unusual behavior for a young woman, regardless of how many tiaras she may have.

  The New York Daily News could barely contain its slut-shaming glee when it reported on the story: “‘She really is a small-town girl. She just went wild when she came to the city,’ one nightlife veteran said. ‘Tara just couldn’t handle herself. They were sneaking those [nightclub] guys in and out of the apartment’ . . . Conner still brought boyfriends home. . . . Soon she broke up with her hometown fiancé and started dating around in the Manhattan nightclub world. . . . ”12

  Instead of having her crown taken away, however, Conner was publicly “forgiven” by Miss USA co-owner Donald Trump, who appeared at a press conference to publicly declare he was giving the young woman a second chance.13 In case you had any doubts about whether this controversy was all tied up with male ownership and approval, consider the fact that Trump later reportedly considered giving his permission for Conner to pose for Playboy magazine. He played the role of dad, pimp, and owner, all rolled into one.14 Mere days later, Miss Nevada USA, twenty-two-year-old Katie Rees, was dethroned after pictures of her exposing one of her breasts and mooning the camera were uncovered.15 When you’re on a pedestal, you have a long way to fall.

  And, of course, it’s impossible to talk about tipped-over pedestals without mentioning pop singer Britney Spears. Spears, first made famous by her hit song “Baby One More Time” and its accompanying video, in which she appeared in a Catholic schoolgirl mini-uniform, was very much the American purity princess. She publicly declared her virginity and belief in abstinence before marriage, all the while being marketed—much like Simpson was—as a sex symbol. But unlike Simpson, Spears fell far from grace in the eyes of the American public. The most obvious indications of her decline were splashed across newspapers and entertainment weeklies worldwide—a breakdown during which she shaved her head in front of photographers, and various pictures of her drunk and sans panties. But Spears began distancing herself from the virgin ideal long before these incidents hit the tabloids.