Virginity obsession grows stronger and weirder. Also, Ariel Gore talks about women and happiness, and Andre Bauer advises starving people as forcible birth control.

 

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Links in this episode:

Bluebird

The New Virginity

Second virginity in her 40s?

Purity ball creepiness

This is why they're anti-choice

 

This episode of Reality Cast is largely going to be devoted to virginity.  I have a huge backlog of fascinating stuff exploring American culture's relationship to virginity, so I thought I'd devote two segments to it.  But that's not all!  The interview this week is with Ariel Gore, who has a new book out about happiness and women.

 

Rachel Maddow reported on the guilty verdict in Kansas v. Scott Roeder, and read the statement from the Tiller family, as well as noting next possible steps.

 

• tiller *

 

Roeder's extensive connections to the anti-choice community are nothing to blow off.  If some anti-choice activists did conspire with him, they shouldn't be able to get away with this, especially since there's already been anti-choice moves to target other doctors for harassment.

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Thanks to Jessica Valenti for letting me know that she was on a VH1 News Presents special called "The New Virginity".  The show was an investigation of this new-ish trend of making virginity a big deal in the public eye.  I say new-ish, because obsessing over the virginity of famous women has been a marketing tool since the 90s, at least, when there was a big deal made over Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson being virgins.  Now there's a new round of teenage pop idols that are doing the virgin thing as a way to market themselves.

 

• virginity 1 *

 

It's interesting, because obsessing over virginity is sold to the public as somehow being not about sexualizing young women.  Which makes a rough sort of sense, because the point of being a virgin is that you haven't had sex.  But in reality, the virgin thing is actually a very titillating thing.  The virgin has become an icon in a male-dominated society because she's a sex object.  Historically, virgins are cherished because the man who finally gets to marry and have sex with the virgin gets to feel like she's his and only his sex object.  Virginity obsession isn't about respecting women or looking at them as something other than a sex object at all.  It's about reducing women to their sexuality.  It's objectifying, and therefore it fits neatly into other kinds of objectification.

 

The provocative pictures of Miley Cyrus fit right into this.  She's naked, but pulling a sheet over herself, a little coy.  In this image, you really see that virginity is a specific sexual fantasy, and it's really kind of a misogynist one, because virginity only makes sense in the context of men owning and controlling women, as the segment after the interview demonstrates. But what's interesting to me is that the new virginity proponents are aware of the misogynist origins of the concept of virginity, and the fact that virginity is a sexual fantasy, and they're trying to find ways to redefine it to escape those implications.

 

For instance, they're promoting the relatively new idea of male virginity.  The Jonas Brothers are also being sold to tweens, and they made a fuss out of how they wore virginity rings.  Which meant that one of them got married really young.

 

• virginity 2 *

 

Well, not women.  Tween girls.  It remains to be seen if there will ever be a male figure of virginity not aimed at an audience that isn't mature enough to see how the obsession with virginity is a sexist sexual fantasy aimed at women.  For a tween girl, a male virgin to look up to is a man who isn't threatening, a guy you can fantasize about dating without worrying about the scary sex stuff.  So far, the adult public's relationship to famous virgins is to sexualize the gals and laugh at the guys, because male virginity is still contextualized as somewhere between a burden to the virgin and a joke to the rest of us.

 

And another way they're trying to redefine virginity to make it seems less sexist and less like a sexual fantasy is to create this concept of a "second virginity", where you get to be re-virginized by not having sex from here until you get married.  It's what Bristol Palin is on the road selling, and it's even being utilized by some shocking types.

 

• virginity 3 *

 

Staub sounds like the victim here, but of course, being a known sexual woman in the public is often fraught.  And so she's now embracing this new virginity, going public with how she's born again and saving herself until marriage.  Taking women who've had sex and granting them another virginity probably feels to the religious right that's pushing this like an excellent way to desexualize the concept of virginity.  But most of the public hee-haws at it, so I don't think they're going to get far with this redefinition project.  Also, at the end of the day, they can't escape the fact that virginity obsession is objectifying, and therefore will always roll up into creepy sexual fantasies, no matter how hard they deny it. 

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insert interview

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The last segment was about the mainstream obsession with virginity, and how the religious right that's interested in mainstreaming their ideas is trying to desexualize and defemininize the concept, in order to make it more palatable to a public that doesn't like to think of itself as sexist.  But within the subculture of American fundamentalism, sexism is not only not shameful, but expected.  And so they're getting away from simply using the word "virginity" and moving towards the word "purity", which is basically like old-fashioned virginity.  It's something only women have, it's explicitly about male control over female bodies.  And it's creepy.  The big trend, as you no doubt are aware, is for fundie fathers to take their daughters to these so-called purity balls, where they exchange vows, the girl vowing fidelity and the father vowing to control her sexuality until he hands it off to her husband.  TLC ran a documentary about it.

 

You learn a lot about where virginity obsession comes from.  For instance, a large part of it is this notion that women don't experience sexual desire, and that their motivation to have sex is strictly to please men.

 

• purity 1 *

 

Taken too literally, he's saying that if your daddy doesn't tell you that you're totally do-able, you'll go out and have some guy confirm it by doing you.  Again, there's no escaping the fact that virginity is a sexual fantasy, and so when you encourage men to think a lot about their daughters' virginity as this object that needs protecting, you are encouraging them to look at their daughters in an inappropriately sexual way, as this guy basically comes out and says.  But he has to, because the only other option seems to be admitting that women may have sex out of desire. 

 

What's interesting to me is that in this subculture, they seem to be much more explicit that this isn't so much about fighting back against a sexualized culture, which I think is kind of a silly goal anyway, or about defining young women as more than their vaginas, which is a great idea but one they're clearly against because they define your entire purity as a person by your vagina.  It's about control.  And boy hoo do they admit that this is about control.

 

• purity 2 *

 

It's not the sexual objectification.  It's the opposite that bothers them---that women have choices.  This is about stopping that and returning women to an objectified state, where their choices are limited, and the only desires they're allowed are those that pertain to being decorative, existing to be looked at by others and sexually desired by others.

 

• purity 3 *

 

When you literally cannot see women as having a purpose on this planet besides being an object that provides visual pleasure, sexual pleasure, and offspring to men, then it does introduce a serious problem in the father daughter relationship. 

 

• purity 4 *

 

People don't mean that it's literal incest.  It's just that this is a clear-cut case of a virginity fetish, since having sex with a virgin is the sexual fantasy underpinning this entire phenomenon.  These men see themselves in the role of sculpting sex objects to fit the fantasies of the kind of guys they'd like to have as son-in-laws, basically men who share their desire to control women.  And because they approach their daughters primarily as sex objects, it seems incestuous, even if they don't actually assault them.  We also have reason to believe that men who literally believe that women don't want sex at all, but just want to be wanted, may have real issues understanding the importance of sexual consent.  After all, if you think no woman really wants to, then all sex in your mind has an element of force to it.

 

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, they want to control all your choices edition. Lt. Gov. of South Carolina Andre Bauer is all for banning abortion.  According to his campaign website, the reason why is, "He believes every child deserves the chance to explore the world we live in and experience God's creations."  Then why did he say this in a town hall meeting?

 

• bauer *

 

He then went  on to shame a 10-year-old for giving birth, even though at 10, she's almost surely a rape victim.  This was never about life.  This is about shaming people, hating women, and above all, about control.