The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession With Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Jessica Valenti
Seal Press (2009)
Reviewed by Ernesto Aguilar

Though you might not know it judging from the tenor of “post-feminist” discourse, young women’s positive conceptions of themselves and their futures are the result of the first- to third-wave feminist movements. Such is the blessing and curse of many a successful campaign — gains are so positive, people can take them and the organizing, fearlessness and sacrifice that got us here for granted.

Conservative religious and political forces were handed defeats during this period, as modern capital adjusted to economic demands brought on by globalization, not to mention internal and external labor shifts. However, such defeats have not meant these factions have changed their message. The gloss may be different. The phrasing may be retouched. Women’s place in such a lexicon stays the same.

In The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession With Virginity is Hurting Young Women, author Jessica Valenti explores an ideology punishing women for sex.

Control of women through gendered forms of victimization is well documented. Susan Faludi’s 1992 book, Backlash, is perhaps the best known contemporary text addressing many of these topics. Blaming women for social ills because of their perceived violations of traditional social mores is nothing new, but connotations of such in the Internet age, where messages about young women’s corruptibility spread quickly, have the power to be tremendously damaging. Such victimization, in the end, is often intended to reshape women’s vision of themselves as fully informed and functioning participants in civil society.

The Purity Myth painfully illustrates how the dirty wars against women are robustly fought around matters of female sexuality. Women’s activism in reclaiming their humanity, and efforts by other women to derail feminist actions rather the actions of a sexist society, are also on display here. Valenti’s contributions in deconstructing the advent of online media are also noteworthy; though there is a good criticism online of “men’s” websites (including at Valenti’s own Feministing blog), seeing it in print is valuable. Readers of works like Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique will find Valenti’s findings to be tragically familiar, though incredibly relevant for new generations to comprehend.

Many sexist posits, as Faludi noted in her book, have acutely racist or white supremacist undertones. Guarding young (white) women from the savage (Third) world is intimated at many turns. The racialized nature of such arguments needs to be more comprehensively investigated, as many women of color have pointed out of works by white feminists, which will get read far more than writings of women of color. Still, there are many valuable insights on race and gender’s intersectionality to take away from The Purity Myth. Just not enough.

No stranger to pseudoscience, the Right has made a cottage industry out of abstinence-only culture. The purveyors of chastity seem not above making a buck off absurd and frankly creepy schemes, from attempted debunking of condom reliability to hymen reconstruction plastic surgeries to purity merchandise and balls, the latter being prom-style events in which young women promise in the presence of their fathers to hold their virginity until marriage. Female sexuality is commoditized to a variety of purposes, from political to financial, and Valenti writes passionately not only about the surreal nature of these issues, but also how profoundly young women are impacted by such cynical ploys.

Blaming women for what befalls them, as many feminist scholars and Valenti write, is much simpler to do than to hold men, society and patriarchy accountable. Thus, it is far simpler to pin a woman’s worth on her sexuality than it is to see women as fully realized human beings with complex needs and agendas that are outside the bounds of some individuals’ range of acceptability. At points, The Purity Myth only further muddles complex topics, such as pornography, but at different moments, cognizance of the most difficult cases herein could be no more poignant.