RH Reality Check Interviews: Jessica Valenti, Author of The Purity Myth

Jessica Valenti is founder and Editor-In-Chief of the popular blog
feministing.com.  She has gone on to gain further public and media
attention through her books, Full Frontal Feminism, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and, just published in April 2009, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women.  RH Reality Check’s Laura Janoff talked with Jessica about her new book.

LJ: One of the central arguments of your book is that the obsession with virginity is entrenched in all of our lives.  What would you say to someone who contended that? 

JV: Unfortunately it's not as on the fringes as everyone would like to think. For example the purity balls are being planned in almost every state, and they're federally funded so of course that affects all of us, as does abstinence only education, although that's waning a bit. Really the obsession with virginity is not necessarily as explicit or as public as our pressure on sexuality and the hypersexualization of women. I don't think that makes it any less dangerous.  When you look at all of the anti-feminist and parent organizations that make up what I call the virginity movement, they are well funded, strong organizations that have a really specific agenda, and I don't think they're going anywhere.

LJ: When you say that the virginity movement is afraid of women's sexuality, what does that mean? What would the world look like if it were unleashed? 

JV: I don't know, but I'd like live in that world, I'd like to be in that world.  I guess what I mean is how the virginity movement uses this deeply imbedded fear of a young women's sexuality unleashed, and if you're not protecting it, if you're not enforcing it, and if you're not somehow containing it, what will happen?  And of course the fear for young women is that we'll all grow crazy, slutty and promiscuous if there aren't very stringent laws.  Yeah, but I don't know what that world would look like, I think we're so far from it it's hard to imagine.  

LJ: It almost sounds like it would attack someone. 

JV: It might. I think what's damaging about having this fear is it's not something that just hurts women, although it does disproportionally hurt women, but it still affects men as well, and it effects the way men think of masculinity. It affects the way men think of themselves, it affects the way men think of themselves in relation to women.  That's why I included that quote from the Primotologist where she said if women's sexuality is muted in contrast to men's, then why do countries the world over have laws that try to enforce it or destroy it? 

LJ: You wonder at the beginning of the book what about having sex makes women dirty. Do you feel like you found the answer? 

JV: I feel like I started to find the answer.  In so many different cultures and for so many years women have been thought of as inherently dirty.  Maybe that has to do with our anatomy or maybe it's just misogyny, or maybe a combination of both of those things and maybe a whole lot more. I think that outside of the psychological fear men maybe have of women's bodies, I think the positioning of women's sexuality as dirty and wrong is a really great policing method.  It's a way to keep women in check.  It's really smart of the church.  Because it lets you have things like abstinence only and reproductive rights laws.

LJ: You refer to fathers joking around about locking up their daughters until they're of age.  Even very liberal parents seem to do this.  Why do you think that happens?

JV: I think that the purity myth is so embedded in our culture and our psyches, it's hard to escape even for the most progressive people, the most progressive parents. You don't have to be forcing your daughter to take a virginity pledge in order for the fiction of virginity to affect your life.

LJ: What do you think you achieve from using your relatively colloquial tone?

JV: It's certainly not as colloquial as my last book. Writing in a really accessible way has always really important to me in terms of my politics and in terms of what feminism should be about. I think politics should be accessible to people no matter their level of education or political engagement for that matter. It wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice; it's just the way I do it. 

LJ: In your footnotes you make amusing asides, often cracking jokes about what you're writing about.  What made you think of this and why did you decide to do it? 

JV: I complete ripped that off from Mary Roach who wrote Bonk as well as Stiff. Bonk is a book about defiance behind sex and stuff like that. I just found it incredibly hilarious and she had a thing where she would put her asides in her footnotes. And of course I am a big fan of parentheticals and asides, but I didn't necessarily want it to interrupt the flow of writing in the text. It seemed like it'd be a good strategy.

LJ:  It seemed like you sequestered off women of color issues to a few pages at the end of each section.  Why not devote a full chapter? 

JV: I'm anti the idea of separating out women of color as if they're different, or "here's the real story, and then I'll have an aside on them," that kind of freaks me out. 

LJ: But that's kind of what I feel like you were doing. 

JV: Oh really? Maybe it's because of the nature of what the virginity movement.  Three quarters of what the virginity movement is is upholding this idea of what the perfect virgin is.  What the perfect virgin is is a skinny white heterosexual woman. And that's where they center all that work.  But that said I think that the women who are punished the most under the purity myth are the women who are perceived as impure. And that's everyone else. My feeling is that the punishments are doled out disproportionately to  women of color, low income women, immigrant women -  they're not painted as this perfect virgin therefore not worth of discords or pedestals or anything like that.  Maybe that's why it's seen that way, because of the way the virgin name has been tested in their work. They don't consider themselves centered on whiteness but they certainly are.  I think for the virginity movement, after a full education, your ideal of a virgin is white.  And this is something that bell hooks and other authors have written a lot about, about the idea of certain women's bodies being inherently impure and already damaged and un-virginal and inherently promiscuous.  So I think that for the virginity movement the majority of those worth saving are all white. 

LJ: What's the deal with the concept of the sexy school girl? 

JV: I realized after I'd written the book that I should have written about barely legal porn too. All that I think is related to fetishized virginity. It's a way to make it personally acceptable to find little girls sexually attractive. 

LJ: But why do people want to find little girls sexually attractive? 

JV: Oh why do they want to? Ooh.  God knows. I think though part of it is girls are not fully formed, they're easier to control, whereas grown women are more likely to have their own opinions, and maybe less easy to control. I think that ideal of girlishness, even if it's not the reality of girlishness, is very much innocent, impressionable, even meek maybe.  I think it's pretty much mired in misogyny. 

LJ: To throw one of your own discussion questions back at you: what do you think it means to be a man? 

JV: I don't know that there's such a thing.  I mean not really. I mean I think if you ask me what I think it means culturally to be a man, what it means to be a man in US culture is just not to be a woman.  It's just this oppositional definition, which is really too bad.  But if you ask me what do I personally believe what it means to be a man, my answer is I don't know, because it's all the way we perceive it. It's the way we perceive it ourselves, and entrenched all of these stereotypes, old gender roles that are hard to pull apart.