Careful, my book may give you VD!
I figured that my new book would get some negative attention from conservative blogs, but I kinda thought that would happen once the book was, you know...published.
But it seems that there's no reason to wait for pesky things like the actual content of the book to start blogging about what The Purity Myth is all about. So apparently, the purpose of my book is to "turn America's teenagers into raging whores." Woo hoo!
Right Wing News: "But, these hardcore liberal feminists? 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."
Say Anything Blog: "The point is that because of feminists, our society is becoming one huge "Girls Gone Wild," with even little girls being sexualized in our culture."
The Network of Enlightened Women (remember them?): "The feminist movement has formed a strong alliance with the sexual liberation movement, although it wasn't necessary. This book represents this alliance."
Dad Reformed: "The cover says it all. I mean...... who is going to read that garbage??? Is it geared toward a mother and father to push their kids to refrain from abstinence???? I can barely type right now I'm so fired up. ...I can only wonder where she comes up with her standards, or lack there of. ALL of her stances are selfish. What is good for me RIGHT now. I am going to puke."
House of Eratosthenes: "Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one."
But Cassy Fiano's post was my fave, "Putting out is SO much better for girls than abstinence." (And it's not just because her blog design uses a rose/gun combo that speaks volumes.)
Fiano writes that I have an "obsession with sluttiness."
Why is it so many feminists are so obsessed with turning teenage girls into raging whores? How is that something you tell girls they should aspire to?...I honestly think that what most of this is about when it comes to feminists like Jessica is self-loathing... you know, misery loves company and all. I can't help but see someone extremely misguided, bitter, and angry in Jessica and the feminists like her. What's truly pathetic is that they aren't content with screwing up their own lives. No... they've got to ruin the lives of American teenage girls as well.
What I find most interesting about Fiano and the other posts is that they're the ones who are talking about 'sluts', 'whores' and women being promiscuous. (In fact, one of Fiano's classy commenters suggests that I'm promiscuous and that's why I wrote the book.) The book cover says nothing about sex, promiscuity or the like - they make that jump. Why? Because for conservatives and purity pushers, the only alternative to being a virgin is being whore. There's no in-between for them, there's no complexity or nuance when it comes to sexuality. And that's why I wanted to write this book. Seriously, these bloggers are making my point for me!
Another thing I found amusing about these responses was that almost all of them took the subtitle to mean that I think virginity is hurting young women, when what when I actually wrote is that "America's obsession with virginity" is what's damaging. (But I guess that's not as exciting as blogging that feminists hate virginity.)
So for the record: I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's sexual choices - no matter what they be - shouldn't have a bearing on how they're seen as moral actors. I also believe that slut-shaming and fetishizing virginity is not just about only valuing women for their sexuality (or lack thereof), but that it's also part of a larger agenda that seeks to regress women's rights and return to traditional gender roles. But if you want to know more about that, you'll have to read the book. (Or, if you're a conservative blogger, just make stuff up in the meantime I guess.)
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Nice poster. I like how it's the girls who spread VD, not the servicemen.
And Say Anything Blog clearly doesn't read you, but here on Feministing there are regular posts critiquing both GGW and the hypersexualization of young girls. But why ruin a good story with the facts?
I love how the Say Anything Blog blames feminists for sexualizing young girls, while they are the people having "purity balls" so 7-year-olds can pledge their virginity to their dads. No, that isn't sexualizing young girls AT ALL...
Also, if we're not supposed to sexualizing women here, how come all these conservative blogs repeatedly use language like "sluts" and "whores" when referring to women? I see so much hypocrisy in their thinking; it really makes me angry.
And once again, why is it that only WOMEN'S moral character is based on their virginity, and not men's, according to them? Oh that's right, it's because girls who have sex are "sluts," but if a guy doesnt have (or doesn't want to have) sex with a bunch of girls he might be...gay!... How terrifying!
A lot of the commentators on those blogs are talking about "Jessica and her ilk." I like it! Jessica, I'll be your ilk any day.
What sucks is, I bet none of them will even bother to read the book.
Hi Jessica,
I like your site and what you're setting out to do. I think these crazy conservatives do have an interesting underlying point, though, despite the fact that they so completely misunderstand you and the important ideas you're trying to get across.
There is this frightening celebration and glorification of the "slut" archetype, if you'll allow me to use the ugly term just for this purpose. As a 26 year old male participator in the MySpace/Facebook cultural wave and also one who analyzes cultural trends, I can't help but be disgusted at the empowerment some women appear to find in living up to the "stud" standard.
I agree that people should be allowed to define and conduct their sexuality in any way they see fit, however I do think it is an ugly reflection on our society to see that both sexes are associating promiscuity with empowerment. That doesn't even include the gratuitous photos that some post of their bodies (sometimes in the hundreds) on their personal sites and the undeniable vanity and self-centeredness that comes with that.
What do you think?
Wait, wait. I thought feminists were supposed to be man-hating dykes, not raging sluts who want to corrupt the youth of America? Make up your minds, right-wingers!
If your work is riling people up to this extent, you're hitting a nerve by poking something they don't want poked (no pun intended).
If people aren't reacting, you're doing it wrong.
Clearly, you're doing it right. Keep up the awesome work, Jessica. Your books (as well as this site) make a difference.
Wait a minute!!! I thought feminists were responsible for SHUTTING DOWN sex and sexiness. That's why we hate Palin, and wear comfortable shoes.
Which is it!?
GMTA WickedAnnabell. It took me forever to sign in and comment, so I hadn't seen your comment yet!
When they associate Girls Gone Wild with feminism, you know they seriously don't have a clue what they're talking about.
ignornace impresses me sometimes. i mean, making shit up and then feeling strongly about said shit takes a LOT of effort! w2g, neocon bloggers.
Oh, I *love* this one: "No... they've got to ruin the lives of American teenage girls as well."
Yeah, because the state of the American teenage girl is sooooo healthy as it stands right now. Give me a freakin' break. TV, commercials, and the "aren't you going to wear makeup to the..." comments from Mom and Dad do more damage in a day to a young girl's self-worth than the concepts purported to be in this radical new book. :)
The Right sees no problem in their culture and religion(s) browbeating their young girls to make them conform to being a beauty-queen-turned-Stepford-wife drone, so long as they submit their virginity to that One Special Man after they get married. Yeah, what a great standard to live by.
(I weep for our future.)
I think their collective responses to this book should be viewed as a complement. They obviously see it as a threat, and frankly, they should feel threatened.
These silly people aren't worried about girls becoming "tramps" and "sluts". They are worried that their daughters might be "infected" with the Commonsense Virus. Symptoms include critical thinking skills and intellectual independence.
The final stages of this horrible "infection" can be seen in those young women who have discovered that there is no bridge connecting sexuality and morality. As a result, they go off infecting other girls with the desire to live their lives on their own terms, which would ultimately lead the a world of empowered women.
OH, THE TRAGEDY! THE HORROR! *faints*
For the record, I'm glad you're coming out with this book. I really am. I used to be one of those girls who was scared into not having sex, because having sex before marriage would make me a bad person. I had to get to college to realize that being sexual is okay, and that being a virgin (which I am) is *my* choice and DOES NOT make me a better person.
Okay, wanted to get that off my chest.
Carry on!
Who cares what Jessica Valenti has to say about sex? She is downright hideous, and therefore doesn’t have to worry about anyone wanting to have sex with her. For someone who describes everything as “creepy,” Jessica Valenti has a creepy smile and a lazy eye. So does sis Vanessa. She’s all-around yucky.
The right wing seems to assume that "virginity" and "purity" are the same. Let us perform a thought experiment and see if they are right.
Imagine a rape victim who was previously a virgin. Is she now "impure?" Obviously not. (And if you said 'yes,' you are a tremendous asshole with no morals.)
Now imagine me back in high school. Young Yawgmoth was 'saving it for marriage,' and so my boyfriend and I used to get each other off orally and manually. Yes, naked. We were both virgins. Were we "pure?" I suggest to you that we were not!
We now see that "virginity" and "purity" are unrelated. So, then, what is "purity?" (Hint: the book title is correct!)
hey, these bloggers are obviously just concerned with defeating the Axis...
@Paul - Here's an interesting idea about the cult of promiscuity ala MySpace/Facebook - do you think it's a hyperactive response to the Purity Myth. Like, young women realizing that they can't live up to that ideal, so they swing all the way in the other direction.
Just a thought I had when reading your post.
I mean, ideally we should all just be able to do what we want with our bodies, and not be judged by it. Obviously, that's at the core of feminism. I guess people are just afraid to acknowledge that sex is something that women really do want to do with their bodies.
If we acknowledge that women like sex, what will become of us all? **back of hand to forehead**
And that's why they're afraid of lesbians . . . because the thought that women could have sex with each other messes with their narrow view that women are just having sex to make baaayyyyybeeeeeessssss!
I'm having an overstate the obvious day, aren't I?
Jon22's comment just made my day. Transparent trolls are TEH BEST.
Paul:
I don't think that de-emphasizing virginity in any way casts promiscuity as empowerment. If anything, that seems to be exactly the harmful virgin-whore dichotomy that Jessica's trying to debunk!
These conservatives mentally configure any state other than virginity as Girls Gone Wild exhibitionist promiscuity. These are the two models of female sexuality in our culture and women are expected to imitate one or the other of them. Without seeing that there are viable options in between, many girls feel pressured to act in those extremes.
The tacit message sent to young women is this: if you're going to be impure anyways, you'd better go all the way. And as you point out, it's just as bad to push women to be more sexual than they'd like as it is to push them to be less. That pressure, however, is not the result of feminist displeasure with the virginity icon, but rather of the virginity icon itself.
a friend just notified me that this post was linked on http://www.eschatonblog.com/
a friend just notified me that this post was linked on http://www.eschatonblog.com/
Huh, I thought Jon22 was trying to parody the stupidity of trolls who try do discount someone's ideas by attacking their appearance. Sometimes it's so hard to tell...
I agree very much that the whole "purity" thing is fetishizing virginity. My Mom told me when I was 11 to, "have sex with a man before you marry him. After sex everything changes." This didn't prompt me to go out a'whorin'. I didn't do the nasty until I was in college, and I do think it's a good idea to wait, even if just for the reason that teens tend not to use contraceptives as faithfully as adults and getting pregnant shouldn't be something that happens to you by accident.
The emphasis on virginity (from women, men - not so much) is very creepy and seems to further emphasize that women were created for men's pleasure.
If you haven't seen this parody yet, you'll laugh your ass off. http://ironhymen.com/
I can't wait to read the book.
In above post, I meant the IDEA that women were created for men's pleasure! Yikes.
Also, the virgin/whore dichotomy is very old, and certainly predates feminism. Most feminists I know argue against the idea that the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon is about empowering women...it is merely an extension of the traditional idea that a woman's value is based on her body and that men are the appraisers who determine that value.
Okay. So I happen to be a virgin, and it's not because I think sex is evil or wrong, or because I'm afraid of being labeled a "slut." It's a choice I made in the context of my life. It doesn't define me, and it really has nothing to do with anything else.
Jessica's book is on my side, too. Why? Because our culture's obsession with virginity hurts ME too!! It's amazing the assumptions some folks will make about you when they discover you're still a virgin. Like, that I'm religious. Or conservative. Or a sex-hating prude. Etc. Why do people make those assumptions? Because of the virgin/whore dichotomy, and what our culture teaches us to assume virginity "means" -- When really it means nothing. It's that attitude that needs to change.
Jessica, thanks for writing this book!
I'm starting to wonder if conservatives can really interpret reality at all without hypocrisy? In Cassy Fiano's bio she starts off with "My name is Cassy Fiano, and I’m a twenty-something Florida native who started blogging solely on a whim."
A paragraph later she says that she was told to blog from some right wing bloggers and... "After a lot of consideration, I took the leap and started blogging!"
So, of course feminists are man-hating, hairy legged lesbians AND over sexed promiscuous whores. Just don't say it in the same breath and then it's totally fine.
Paul's question and PeggyLuWho's response gave me an idea: it'd be cool if this were the first of a trilogy. I know the problem of sexuality in our culture has been taken on a lot, but I think "How America's (or American media's) obsession with sex is hurting young women," written from a feminist perspective would be a good answer to this book. We're hearing from one side that we're only good women if we're pure, and from the other side that we're only good women if we're hypersexual for men's benefit only (and not for our own pleasure). The final part would be how some people are trying to change the culture around sex and sexuality, and how to do it so that it doesn't hurt young women, including support for abstinence-by-choice, sex-by-choice, etc.
Not only would it be really cool to have all of these ideas together, but maybe it'd shut up the antifeminists for a few seconds. unlikely they'd ever shut up, but can't hurt to dream...
" I believe that a young woman's sexual choices - no matter what they be - shouldn't have a bearing on how they're seen as moral actors."
Really? Because I think there are lots of sexual choices people--men or women--make that do have moral implications. Choosing to have unprotected sex when you know you have an STD would, for example, be an immoral sexual choice.
Partnered sex is a human interaction, and the way we treat others matters morally, so the decisions we make about sex also matter morally.
And that's the core of the problem I have with the pro-abstinence people: By making sexual morality all about abstinence until marriage, they've created a false choice between "abstinence" and "immorality" making it very difficult for people in this society to think carefully about and have honest conversations about what it means to be moral in how one deals with others sexually.
Honestly, how can these people fail so badly at reading comprehension?
You have to try really, really hard to not get it as much as they do. That's an impressive amount of sucking, for real.
Oh, wait, no...they just hate women.
TheSoyMilkConspiracy, I was totally looking for a "reading comprehension: ur doing it wrong" image on google while I was writing this post. Alas, none exist! ;)
It takes someone with a truly twisted view of sex and sexuality to come up with a turn of phrase like "refrain from abstinence."
I just think that those blogs you linked to are funny. They fail to see all the hypocrisy on their side! The comments are even better than the blogs themselves, if that's possible.
It pisses me off to no end that right wingers misunderstand what anyone who disagrees with them, and makes it come off like we poking babies with pointy objects...gods forbid that we disagree with whatever they are spewing...without even knowing or reading your book they are condemning it as proof that feminists promote anonymous sex...not true at all...feminists or at least as far as I've seen, but what do I know I have both or Jessica's other "parodies" feminists do not place a woman's power or her worth in her sexuality...feminists tend to believe that women's sex lives are her business and her business alone...and whether she's slept with hundreds of men/women or none it does not make her any better or worse person...it is her body her decision, and no one has the right to say she's a slut or a prude because of her choices...
new reader, first time poster, and SO excited about your book.
this topic was a huge focus of my college studies (mandatory and not) and i do not understand why any woman would choose to continue to push for the "hymen-is-worth" mentality. the problem with "purity balls" (i snicker everytime...) and "purity rings" and "purity pledges" is the implicit assupmtion that one's hymen is owned by one's father. THAT is what makes them disturbing. oh, and the inherent commoditization of said body part upon the "exchange" between father and husband at the altar. i have been to a wedding where they literally discussed how the father was "giving" his new son-in-law his daughter's virginity, complete with purity ring, etc. i think my (completely unexposed to whacko religion) boyfriend almost vomited.
sorry for the long rambling post. i am very excited to read this book and cannot comprehend the ignorance of some.
Is it too late to add these comments to your book to help you make your point?
Congrats, Jessica, for getting "Reformed Dad" so fired up he can't type and he wants to puke. Just his name is creepy. My dad never got involved with my sex life. He just saw that as a line that he wasn't going to cross as a father. I feel so sorry for people whose daddies don't have a real life and believe it is their duty in life to keep guard over their daughters' panties.
Wow, I only read the Fiano thing, but, fuck! am I living in a happy bubble, here in Europe...
I mean, I saw troll comments here and on other sites like this before, but that ignorance was just astonishing. It reads as if she skimmed through your post and just got some buzz words which she then used to repeat the same drivel those anti-sex conservatives seem to have learned by heart. Not too attentive...
By the way, does anyone even get, what comment #6 there is trying to say? (And yes, may I, too, be your ilk?)
PS @Misspelled; I had to chuckle at that one, too...
And another PS (to get annoying in my first comment, heh): Sorry for my mail, obviously figured out, how to post now...
This is why I'm so grateful that this book is coming. I have to work everyday to make people more comfortable with talking about sex, sexuality and that people of all genders can be sexually autonomous and proud of it in a university (you'd think that a liberalizing place like university wouldn't graduate students that just don't 'get' that condoms aren't hilarious, they're useful and important). It takes so much work to help people unlearn the madonna/whore complex that these right wing folk hold so dear.
If it's anything like the posts that have been on here for as long as i've been visiting, it will be an incredibly useful resource.
I attended a Christian Bible camp from the ages of 6 - 14. The teen camp (ages 13 - 18) indoctrinated campers with abstinence-only education and "encouraged" us to take abstinence pledges. I use quotes because if you didn't raise your hand and take the oath, you were pretty much announcing your promiscuity before the camp, its staff and Jesus himself.
The problem here was not so much with the abstinence-only education as it was that the abstinence oath wasn't just a pledge, it was presented as a binding pact with god. Break the pact, go to hell was the message I remember taking. You know, because nothing says promoting abstinence quite like instilling the fear of god and loss of one's mortal soul and eternal afterlife in an impressionable 13-year-old.
Looking forward to the new book!