I also knew that virginity had never been a concrete and easily delineated abstract. As a quality pertaining to a human being’s sexual behavior, it often was construed as having to do only with penis-in-vagina intercourse, an admittedly limited subset of what could be called partnered sexual activity. As an abstract quality pertaining to a person’s sexual knowledge or awareness, it might indicate ignorance, innocence, naiveté, or merely lack of personal experience. In relation to a person’s sense of sexual identity or selfhood, it could mean not only very different things but even contradictory ones: Is a virgin a good and morally superior person, or just a loser who can’t get laid? It rather depends on your context and perspective, no?
Furthermore, I knew that over the history of the concept, virginity was “observed”—and I use the scare quotes advisedly—in things as various as the color of urine, the timbre of the voice, the width of one’s neck or hips, and whether or not a girl has the audacity to look a man in the eye. Virginity was, and had always been, as elusive as the proverbial unicorn. This conveniently malleable vagueness was, as my work had repeatedly shown, the key to its effectiveness as a tool of misogynist control and terrorism, the thing that had for centuries let virginity be used as both carrot and stick—and meant that no woman, however sexually untouched she might be, could ever be entirely safe from the threat of sexual misconduct.
This panoply, as I noted at length in my book, was the best possible illustration that virginity was not a natural, elemental state or quality of the human animal at all. It had no intrinsic
thingness
of its own. It was a wholly social entity, and, furthermore, one that really made sense only in the context of patriarchy. None of this was news.
So why had I initially gotten so riled at the idea of young women repurposing and redefining virginity for their own ends? The answer, clearly, was that on some level I had unwittingly bought into the patriarchal conceit that virginity was something, and a particular sort of something at that, that had a natural identity . . . and that its identity had to be at least broadly congruent with the traditional (misogynist, patriarchal) definitions I had been studying and writing about for so long.
Silly me. Like I say, I should’ve known better. That I didn’t, even at that stage in my work on virginity, is tremendously telling about just how firmly and deeply ingrained these notions are in our culture.
This is not to say that process-oriented virginity is the ultimate answer to the problem of how virginity and its rhetoric shape and sometimes damage women’s lives and sexualities. Certainly, using the notion of lost virginity at all still pays lip service—no matter how glib—to the notion that there is, by necessity, this thing called “virginity” and an event in which it is lost, and that this loss is inevitably a watershed in a woman’s life. All of these are debatable, at the very least, both in terms of their accuracy and in terms of their politics.
Too, it raises issues of mutual intelligibility when discussing sexual histories. Process-oriented virginity leaves open the possibility that a person could claim virginity, yet have substantial sexual experience. The emotional and interpersonal train wrecks can easily be imagined. Perhaps more to the point, the potential for medical and infectious-disease mishap seems high, too. Though, arguably, a process-oriented approach to virginity might not introduce a greater than normal amount of misunderstanding or risk. Research shows that people routinely lie about their sexual histories, both to their partners and to people like doctors and researchers.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in a process-oriented approach to virginity is that in so many cases it seems to be so profoundly unconscious. When it is unconscious, it is easy to see it not for what it is, but precisely in the light in which I initially saw it: as self-serving revisionism. This is because when process-oriented virginity is presented unconsciously and without self-awareness, it appears to be nothing more than a reactionary, and unfeminist, attempt to avoid sexual transparency. This transparency, particularly in the face of the AIDS pandemic, is perhaps our most central contemporary sexual virtue, one whose ability to help save lives makes it even more relevant, to more people, than the woman-centric sexual virtues that process-oriented virginity often celebrates.
But in the end, I must confess that I remain a devoted fan of the destabilizing, radical, feminist potential of process-oriented virginity. It would be a massive step in very much the right direction, I think, if it became a cultural constant that “losing your virginity” was a subjective, not an objective, transition. It would be fantastic if we could learn to view the formation of our sexually active lives as something that has a learning curve, that encompasses a variety of experience, that doesn’t happen all at once. And it would, of course, be wonderful if men and women alike internalized the value of engaged, sane, pleasure-embracing, mutually positive sex of whatever variety, and used that as their baseline for what sex should be. Transparency and honesty would become part of the package.
Imagine if losing your virginity meant learning how to do all that: absorbing all those egalitarian lessons, learning how to regard your sexual life as a holistic enterprise that encompassed pleasure, introspection, and caring mutuality. Think about what your own relationship to virginity might’ve been like had you been able to set the terms for it and decide for yourself what it meant to you, rather than having those decisions made for you, perhaps violently, by a parent, an abuser, a doctor, a church. It would change sexuality, gender roles, and maybe the world. Perhaps these process-oriented virgins—these confusing, audacious, arrogant women who are virgins until they say they’re not anymore—are merely a piece of the process.
If you want to read more about ELECTRIC YOUTH, try:
• Hooking Up with Healthy Sexuality: The Lessons Boys Learn (and Don’t Learn) About Sexuality, and Why a Sex-Positive Rape Prevention Paradigm Can Benefit Everyone Involved BY BRAD PERRY
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
• Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture BY JESSICA VALENTI
If you want to read more about MUCH TABOO ABOUT NOTHING, try:
• Queering Black Female Heterosexuality BY KIMBERLY SPRINGER
• The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t) BY STACEY MAY FOWLES
• Why Nice Guys Finish Last BY JULIA SERANO
25
Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture
BY JESSICA VALENTI
UNTIL 2008, THE LAW in Maryland stated that if a woman wanted to stop in the middle of intercourse and her partner refused, it wasn’t rape, because once a woman is penetrated, “the damage is done.” A Peeping Tom case in Florida, in which a man took pictures up a teen’s skirt, was dismissed because the court ruled that the young woman had no “expectation of privacy” while wearing a skirt. And in California, a rape trial resulted in a hung jury—even after they saw a videotape of the passed-out victim being raped by multiple men, and penetrated vaginally and anally with pool sticks, a Snapple bottle, and a lit cigarette. The defense argued the teen was eager to make a “porn video.”
The common theme in these stories, and in so many others, is the myth of sexual purity and how it reinforces rape culture. The purity myth—the lie that sexuality defines how “good” women are, and that women’s moral compasses are inextricable from their bodies—is an integral part of rape culture. Under the purity myth, any sexuality that deviates from a strict (generally straight, male-defined) norm is punishable by violence.
It’s not exactly news that women who transgress are punished (and there are certainly more consequences to the purity myth than sexual violence). But we’re in a peculiar cultural place in the United States right now—where sexualized pop culture and a conservative movement to reinforce traditional gender roles are colliding to form a modernized virgin/whore complex. We’re getting abstinence-only education during the day and
Girls Gone Wild
commercials at night, and women are suffering as a result. Because whether it’s sexualized pop culture or abstinence class, the message is one and the same: Women’s sexuality is to be defined (and policed) by educators, legislators, and media makers,
not
by women.
And, overwhelmingly, what institutions want women to be is virginal. Pure. Innocent. Sure, they may demand that we perform sexuality—be visually appealing and always available for consumption—but, à la Britney Spears, what is expected from women is sexy
virginity.
Be pure . . . for as long as I want you to.
Of course, at the heart of the purity myth is
who
gets positioned as “pure.” The perfect virgin as imagined in U.S. culture 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. She’s never a woman of color—who are so hypersexualized in American culture that they’re rarely positioned as “the virgin.” She’s never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She is never differently abled. “Virgin” is a designation for those who fit into what a certain standard of women, especially younger women, are supposed to look like. The positioning of one kind of girl as good and “clean,” of course, implies that the rest of us are dirty.
And if we’re not “pure,” or don’t want to be, our bodies are considered open for business. That law in Maryland, for example, was based on prior precedent, a law that said after the moment of penetration, “a woman could never be ‘re-flowered,’ [and] that gave rise to the principle that, if a woman consents prior to penetration and withdraws consent following penetration, there is no rape.” Once our purity is gone, it doesn’t really matter what happens to us! Similarly, in the California gang-rape case, the jurors were swayed by the idea that the victim somehow “wanted it” (or maybe deserved it?) because of her past sexual history and the idea that she wanted to make a porn video. The myth of sexual purity not only enables sexual violence against women, it forgives it and renders it invisible.
Of course, it’s not just women who are positioned as not pure who are privy to violence—the purity myth also allows for violence against the “innocent.” Because “purity” is the desired norm, it’s fetishized. And sexualized—which is particularly dangerous for those who are seen as the most innocent: children.
In 2006, parents were outraged when the nationwide superstore Target started selling “bralettes,” padded (yes, padded) bras with cartoon characters on them marketed to girls little older than toddlers. A similar reaction erupted when it was revealed that Wal-Mart was selling panties in its juniors’ section with “Who needs credit cards . . . ” emblazoned across the front. But inappropriateness surrounding girls’ sexuality doesn’t end with tacky underwear. There are stripper poles being sold in toy stores, “modeling” websites featuring prepubescent girls posing in lingerie, and girls as young as seven being forced to participate in purity balls, where they vow chastity to their fathers. Mainstream pornography has caught on: In 2006,
Playboy
listed
Lolita,
Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a pedophile who falls in lust with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter, as one of the 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written. I love Nabokov, and I thought
Lolita
was brilliant—but sexy? A twelve-year-old?
A 2007 report from the American Psychological Association (APA) found that nearly every form of media studied provided “ample evidence of the sexualization of women,” and that most sexualization focused on young women.
1
The report further showed that this sexualization did not come from media alone— girls’ relationships with parents, educators, and peers also contributed greatly to the problem:
“[P]arents may convey the message that maintaining an attractive physical appearance is the most important goal for girls. Some may allow or encourage plastic surgery to help girls meet that goal. Research shows that teachers sometimes encourage girls to play at being sexualized adult women or hold beliefs that girls of color are ‘hypersexual’ and thus unlikely to achieve academic success. Both male and female peers have been found to contribute to the sexualization of girls—girls by policing each other to ensure conformance with standards of thinness and sexiness and boys by sexually objectifying and harassing girls.”
I’d take this a step further. Sexualizing girls isn’t just about enforcing beauty standards—it’s also about reinforcing traditional gender roles and the purity norm. Take purity balls, for example. At these promlike events, fathers escort their young daughters to a party where at some point—between the dancing, the food, and the entertainment—the girls will recite a pledge vowing to be chaste until marriage, and will name their fathers as the “keepers” of their virginity until a husband takes their place. The fathers will also pledge to “cover” their daughters and protect their purity: