I'm a Virgin!

I’m a virgin!

The obssesion with purity and virginity

A Perfect world Pure Myths explained Credits

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Suffering

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. 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. This 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.

Commodity, morality or farce ?

Its goals are mired in old-school gender roles, and the tool it’s using is young women’s sexuality. t’s genius, really. Shame women into being chaste and tell them that all they have to do to be “good” is not have sex. 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” girl and therefore worthy of praise. 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:

glory

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 at tack s 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.

Another look at the phenomena of girls “going wild,” choosing to focus on the supposed decline of dating. Arguing that hook-up culture has dangerous emotional consequences for young women, they are using every trick to shame women for having premarital sex. In the book Unhooked from Laura Sessions Stepp, she interviewed only a handful of young women—mostly

white, upper class, and attending private school—over the course of a year. During that time, some of the women hooked up and some were in more serious relationships, but instead of listening to the women she interviewed, Stepp pontificates about why they’re not happy and what they should be doing. In a nutshell,

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be a rape victim,

savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she wats married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as

- Bill Napoli

“A real-life

to me would

brutally raped,

bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.”

Americans—male and female—is seventeen, wonder how shocked most women will be when they learn that they have a life of poverty-stricken spinsterhood to look forward to!

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. Given that the median age for sexual initiation for all

POP!

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. 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. c. 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. First, Spears got some press for moving in with then-boyfriend and the fellow pop star Justin Timberlake. But the sexist brouhaha began in earnest when Spears was no longer considered “attractive,” because she started to gain weight, got pregnant, and no longer looked like a little girl. Pictures of her cellulite popped up on websites and gossip magazines nationwide, along with guesstimations about her weight and jokes about her stomach.

Because “purity” having sex, it’s and instead being girlhood.

“purity” isn’t just about not about not being a woman being in a state of perpetual

“Your body When you have unwraps sucks

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She’s young, white, and skinny. She’s a cheerleader, a baby sitter; she’s accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!).

She’s never a woman of color. She’s never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She’s never disabled. “Virgin” is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially younger women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best

Dolores Hazean eponymous nymphet. An adolescent, she is seductive, flirtatious, and capricious, and she initially finds herself attracted to Humbert, competing with her mother for his affections. However, when his demands become more pressing, and as she spends more time with children her own age, she begins to tire of him. Eventually, she runs off with Clare Quilty, but he abandons her after she refuses to participate in child pornography. She eventually marries Dick Schiller and dies in childbirth.

PURE MANLINESS

As much as the virginity movement is based on the idea that a woman’s worth is dependent on her sexuality, It’s also mired in the belief that traditional masculinity is superior, and its preservation is necessary. In fact, the movement is so concerned about maintaining the masculinity status quo that it’s staging an imaginary backlash. Organizations, pundits, and purity pushing academics are up in arms about the supposed feminization and destruction of American men. And while a national crisis regarding masculinity is undoubtedly happening, it has nothing to do with feminization— hypermasculinity and femophobia are hurting men. But questioning these norms means disrupting the gender power balance, something the virginity movement just won’t have. In fact, all of the people who claim to be so concerned about men’s decline don’t offer anything in the way of advice, outside of bashing women’s social and political progress.

Take Harvey Mansfield, perhaps one of the bestknown proponents of traditional masculinity and purveyor of feminization fear. A professor of government at Harvard University and author of Manliness, Mansfield argues that the decline of society—and of all-important manliness—is due to

Women can’t want to be like men, because that would mean that men are like women— a femiphobic’s nightmare

women’s desire for equality and success outside of the domestic sphere, which he sees as disruptive to the gender binary system.

Women today want to be equal to men, equal in a way that makes them similar to, or virtually the same as, men.

They do not want the sort of equality that might result from being superior at home if inferior at work. They have decided that work is better than home. In all of the media and virginity-movement hoopla concerning girls’ supposed promiscuity, one of the main talking points is a fear of women’s “becoming like men” sexually.

bound to

women play the men ’sgame.

. they

“women”: passive, chaste, and accepting of male dominance and superiority

because women need

Mansfield, of course, is no exception. In a 2005 lecture, he blamed “radical feminism,” which, he said, seeks to “lower women to the level of men” in terms of sexual behaviour. “By the age of thirty, you see men who are used to getting free samples [of sex],” he said. And like the men of Kimmel’s Guyland, the men in Mansfield’s world believe that women exist simply for male pleasure. In the same lecture, Mansfield noted that when “women play the men’s game . . . they are bound to lose. “Without modesty, there is no romance— it isn’t so attractive or so erotic.” (Why young women—to whom he is specifically referring—would care about what Mansfield thinks is “erotic” is beyond me.) In order to please men like Mansfield, and to be accepted by women like Parker and Crouse, women need to be “women”: passive, chaste, and accepting of male dominance and superiority. So, while virginity-movement operatives continue to promote the idea that men and masculinity are somehow in trouble, it’s clear that what’s really endangered are the patriarchal standards that they’re so attached to. That’s why feminism is always to blame. These books, articles, and arguments aren’t a defense against an assault on masculinity—they’re an offensive attack on progressive social change that allows women to be complex human beings, rather than purity-princess automatons.

.

are

lose,

to be

At least half of my sexual experiences make me cringe when I think about them today. Many times I made out with female friends in bars when I was in my early 20s... I’m embarrassed, but if I didn’ t have those moments, I’m not sure I ever would

have found my way to the real long-term relationship. If all my sexual behavior had to be evolved and reciprocal and totally revolutionary before I had it, I’d never have had sex.

Imagine a world where trusting young women means truly trusting all young women, imagine a world where we believe young women know when it is the best time to have a child, imagine a world where we have a moral high ground

Making sex moral and doing away with the myth of sexual purity are about more than trusting young women’s sexual choices. They’re about trusting women, period. Because if you can’t trust women with sex, then you can’t trust them with choices about family, about relationships, about anything. In a perfect world, our moral choices would not be seen through a filter that always includes sexuality, In a perfect world, queer women’s sexual and life choices would be seen as moral, too. Young women of colour wouldn’t be sexualized to the point of being dehumanized. Low-income women wouldn’t be automatically misjudged as irresponsible. In a perfect world, these women would be seen as women— nothing less. The laws affecting women other than the perfect virgin are built on distrust: mandatory waiting periods for abortions that disproportionately affect low-income and rural women who can’t take time off from work (or who need to travel long distances to get to their nearest provider); or the

A Perfect World

Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal Medicaid funding for abortion; or laws regarding violence against women that define some women as “acceptable” victims and others as asking for it just by existing. In a perfect world, all women would be trusted.

Pure ex P lained Myths

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.

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 lan B.”

Over 80 percent of abstinence programs contain false or misleading information about sex and reproductive health, including retro gender stereotypes like:

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 caesarean 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.

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.

“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.”

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.

People who experience sexual violence, including sexual assault and rape, can be left with very difficult feelings. This might include feeling like their virginity has been taken away from them. Their friends and family might feel this way too. Understanding about virginity can help give back a feeling of control to survivors of sexual violence. If we understand that the idea of ‘virginity’ is ours to decide about, then it’s not something that someone can take away from us.

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.

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.

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