Draft
Gratitude
Momma said, growing up, that we should be grateful
that Mary said yes to the angel, that Jesus died for our sins.
We had a roof over our head, shoes on our feet,
and, unlike starving children in China, had peas to refuse.
It was important that Ronald Regan had been president,
that Pa had the right to keep his rifles in the house.
I find, now, that I am grateful for her weekly phone call,
full of small-town gossip and family news.
Also, for her stuffed chicken recipe and my grandmother’s bread pans.
The soft kiss of summer air on my bare shoulders,
Friends stopping by to help paint the house
or plant the garden. Hot showers and coffee in the morning.
The sun streaming through the east windows, and the loons
announcing the start of a new day.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
The Abstinence Clown This Ain't. Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
As a sophomore in a Roman Catholic high school in rural Wisconsin, I equated sex with dirty duct tape.
Like thousands of young adults around the United States, I am the product of abstinence-only education. Abstinence-only education more or less formed my sexual paradigm and my images about my own body. As a sophomore in high school I was corralled into an overcrowded gymnasium and taught about how my virginity was a precious gift which belonged to my eventual husband. I cringe to write this now, but my thoughts about sex were deeply impacted by abstinence only educator Pam Stenzl’s illustration of how you get dirty from sex, like a piece of duct tape she applied to student’s arms and ripped off. The duct tape eventually would no longer stick to a person’s arm because of the attached skin, hair, and dirt. My vagina, it seemed, held on to bits of sexual partners much like this piece of tape. Icky? Unspeakably. Gross enough to make me scared of my vagina until my sophomore year in college?[1] Certainly. Repellant enough to scare me away from sex until marriage? Hardly.
As the result of this type of sex ed, my (mis)conceptions of sex lasted well into my twenties. I am more than a little embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t until I was twenty-one before I realized that, if treated, STI’s will no longer kill you, exactly what the HPV virus was, and that a woman could, in fact, get pregnant while on her period.
This particular brand of sexual education and the attending assumptions it makes about virginity, purity, and women’s sexuality is precisely what Jessica Valenti skewers in her new book The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. Valenti wants to revamp our collective (mis)conceptions about what sex means to women (and men!) in America by exposing how the virginity (or purity) movement infiltrates and influences American culture.
Valenti begins by exposing the purity movement at some of its most disturbing levels. She discusses the phenomenon of so-called “Purity Balls” where daughters as young as six[2] pledge their purity to their fathers until such time as an appropriate husband can be found to relieve them of it.[3] The result of right-wing Evangelical Protestantism, some of the balls contain a pledge that made this budding feminist theologian shudder:
The Pledge
I, (DAUGHTER'S NAME)'S FATHER, CHOOSE BEFORE GOD TO COVER MY DAUGHTER AS HER AUTHORITY AND PROTECTION IN THE AREA OF PURITY. I WILL BE PURE IN MY OWN LIFE AS A MAN, HUSBAND AND FATHER. I WILL BE A MAN OF INTEGRITY AND ACCOUNTABLITY AS I LEAD, GUIDE AND PRAY OVER MY DAUGHTER AND MY FAMILY AS THE HIGH PRIEST IN MY HOME. THIS COVERING WILL BE USED BY GOD TO INFLUENCE GENERATIONS TO COME.[4]
Even without the creepy incest vibe[5] the pledge is horrifying both from a theological and sociological standpoint.[6] Women’s virginity is commodified, a point Valenti drives home throughout the book. While the father presumably won’t receive a bride-price for his daughter, the implications of the pledge are not far off. The woman’s (girl’s, really) virginity is a precious gift, which should only be given to her husband. Without this “gift” to give, the woman will be undesirable.
Valenti reaches the book’s high point when she points out the preposterous conclusions to this commodification of women’s “purity” allows us to leap. The first is the assumption of heteronormativity (which, given the movement's connection with Evangelical Protestantism is unsurprising). As there is no medical definition of virginity[7] the movement relies on long-held religious and social definitions of it.[8] Consequently, are readers are left to speculate about the virginity of LGBT men and women. Something, Valenti points out, would come as great surprise to many of them. In addition to an assumption of heteronormativity, Valenti argues (appropriately) that the commodification of women’s sexuality leads to the devaluation of women of color. Valenti describes the poster-girl of the movement as: “young, good-looking, straight, and white.”[9] The commodification of women’s purity leads, not only to things like raunch culture, the commodification of a woman’s body, and the increasing emphasis on a woman remaining girlish, but serve to further long-standing racism and sexual objectification of minority women.
The Purity Myth, however, is not without its shortcomings. Valenti occasionally shoots a little wide of the mark. At times, the book veers too broadly from its main points (the hypocrisy of the Purity Movement, sexual double standards, and the repercussions of abstinence only education). While the chapters on porn, and manliness are interesting and well argued, but would ultimately be better explored in works of their own.[10] While I followed and appreciated her argument that all of these issues are interrelated with our concepts of purity and women’s sexual morality, it would have been nice to have seen the ideas fleshed out a little more.
It is also worthwhile to note that Valenti quotes from blogs, anthologies, and cultural texts to which she contributed/currently contributes. However, as she is one of the leading voices in contemporary women’s issues, this is a difficult issue to sidestep, and she takes care to disclose when she quotes from something to which she contributed. Some more persnickety folks are likely to get themselves into a twist over Valenti’s use of blogs and anecdotal evidence, but in an age where the feminist mantra “The personal is political” finds its voice in online communities and blogs in very real ways, these resources become increasingly important to mining women’s experience and bringing it to the forefront of dialogue.[11]
Ultimately, however, these shortcomings pale in comparison to what The Purity Myth offers its readers. Valenti illustrates the absurdity of our culture’s current ideas of purity and how these misconceptions are controlled and manipulated by a surprisingly small percentage of the population. Smart, funny, disturbing, and immensely readable, Valenti’s The Purity Myth is a must-read for those interested how and when we talk about women’s sexuality and what we say about it when we do. And for those of us who were scarred by the likes of Pam and her duct tape? Valenti gives us back what Stenzl and other abstinence only educators[12] took away from us—our sense of self-worth, dignity, and feeling that we’re more than the sum of our sexual partners.
[1] A heartfelt and deep thank you, Eve Ensler and the cast of The Vagina Monologues for pulling me out of this paradigm.
[2] Valenti, 67
[3] Curiously, many of these balls result in a purity ring rather than a chastity belt, which would surely be the more appropriate way for a father to ensure his daughter’s virginity.
[4]http://www.generationsoflight.com/generationsoflight/html/ThePledge.html
[5] And if you doubt the incest vibe from the language of covering and authority, see Valenti’s description of Daddy/Daughter dates taken from Focus on the Family’s website (Valenti, 68).
[6] Theologically, this “pledge” relies on positively medieval readings of Paul’s epistles, and Augustine’s completely antiquated views on sex. But this is another rant for another blog.
[7] Valenti, 19
[8][8] This is to say that the organizations which push the purity myth regard sex as strictly penis/vagina contact. Heteronormativity aside, this definition of sex and virginity allows young men and women to engage in equally “risky” behaviors in order to both be sexually active and maintain their “virginity” for their spouse.
[9] Valenti, 44
[11] Not to mention that much of the damage inflicted on those of us who operate under the paradigm of the Purity Myth can best be explained anecdotally.
[12] Rather than our first sexual partners
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