The Purity Myth: How America s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women - Hardcover

Jessica Valenti is the founder and Executive Editor of Feministing.com, and the author of Full Frontal Feminism and The Purity Myth. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The Guardian, and in 2007 she was named one of Elle magazine's 2007 IntELLEgentsia. She lives in Astoria, New York.

Making a cult of virginity via media stereotyping and “abstinence-only” sex education damages young women, Valenti says, and rolls back women’s rights by emphasizing sexuality and deprecating personal character. Furthermore, the book’s most thought-provoking chapter points up an insidious connection between chastity and pornography: “the porning of America” is vital to those in the virginity movement, which needs increasingly available hard-core porn to justify its extreme regressivism. The dangerous belief that a woman’s primary value is sexual underlies the objectification and sexualization at the heart of the virginity movement’s agenda of controlling and defining women, Valenti maintains. When young women see their bodies and sexuality as commodities, that isn’t caused by porn culture but by “a larger societal message that . . . their sexuality is not their own.” So, is a “post-virgin world” possible? Full of piercing insight and wit (recalling her own sexual initiation, Valenti quips, “I fail to see how anything that lasts less than five minutes can have such an indelible ethical impact”), this is an important addition to women’s studies. --Whitney Scott