The Purity Myth

So, as a reward for finishing my written exams, I borrowed the new book The Purity Myth from my school's library and read it.  The book quite firmly labels itself as a feminist book - it sees itself as promoting healthy living.  The author is Jessica Valenti, founder of feministing.com (one of my favorite feminist sites), and she uses information from feministing.com freely.  My major gripe about the book - Valenti is so completely immersed in the feminist community that every time she cites information from books written by the feminist community she has to admit that she is either friends with them, or a co-editor on the book, or any number of other disclosure footnotes.  It's distracting and gives the impression that she's not entirely citing some unbiased sources (if there are unbiased sources in this debate).

A poster on Ladyblog actually does quite a good job of summarizing Valenti's book - 

Valenti tends to rail against the fetishization of virginity—the abstinence programs that compare having sex with a girl who’s already had sex to chewing everyone else in the classes’ used gum, the purity balls that make girls promise their daddies will be the “keepers” of their “purity” until they give it as a “gift” to their husbands. She has written that these things make girls feel shame about having sex, deemphasize women’s agency be reducing their “greatest gift” to what’s between their legs, putting undue emphasis on the girl being transferred from father to husband, and make sex seem like something women “give” to men and couldn’t possibly enjoy themselves. Her general belief (and, of course, I’m completely paraphrasing here) is that, ultimately, these things are bad for young women because they don’t encourage a healthy view of sex, within or without of the context of marriage, and could possibly be dangerous because they may reduce girls’ ability to assert themselves in sexual matters, to have adequate information about or confidence in the use of condoms, birth control, etc.

Aside from the above, which is her main point, Valenti also discusses more conflicted territory - pornography and the connection between it and the religious right, abortion and the pro-life movement, birth control and the pro-life movement, and the connection between rape and commodified views of female sexuality (I'll talk about rape issues at some other point - it's an issue I feel strongly about and don't want to delve into now).  

Valenti is clearly conflicted about pornography - on one level she maintains that most of the industry is horrendously anti-feminist, pretending to be pro-woman but actually just taking advantage of women's insecurities.  But she also knows many feminists who believe in a much more sex-positive message and who are trying to create female-positive pornography (i.e. pornography that doesn't involve group banging or horrendously unhealthy acts that I really really don't want to describe here).  She refuses to have the discussion of what female-positive pornography is or what it might be if it were to exist.  She says "let's have a discussion about it" without ever suggesting some starting points.  Given what I've seen lately of politicians trying to get around supporting torture or not... they say the same thing "let's get a group together and discuss it" - never actually putting a foot down one way or the other.  They don't want to go on record as supporting anything.  As soon as she said that phrase I lost a lot of respect for her.

She never has the discussion of what female sexuality ought to look like.  It is clear that she doesn't believe that women ought to just hook up with and have sex with whoever whenever no matter how dangerous.  That's not what she's saying.  But she also doesn't seem to support a woman who has chosen, with full and deliberate thought to have a sex-free life.  She ignores what the feminist connotations of someone who declines to have sex might be.  Just as she ignores the not-sexually active women, she doesn't acknowledge the tremendously sexually active women.  Even if we don't place an automatic value on chastity, should there be or ought there to be a value placed on restricting one's sexual partners?

Overall, I left the book feeling somewhat gipped.  There was a huge huge discussion out there about what a feminist, non-commodified community might look like - pornography and all.  She attacked the (or a) problem, but didn't discuss what the answer might be.  The new waves of feminism have a very different idea of what the "right" kind of society might be - it's definitely not one ruled and governed by women to the detriment of men.  But Valenti never approaches that issue in this book, which I found sad.