The Purity Myth

The date seemed so important to us at the time, even though the event itself was hardly awe-inspiring. There was the expected fumbling, a joke about his fish-printed boxers, and ensuing condom difficulties. At one point, his best friend even called to see how things were going. I suppose romance and discretion are lost on sixteen-year-olds from Brooklyn. Yet we celebrated our “anniversary” every year until we broke up, when Josh left for college two years before me and met a girl with a lip ring.

I’ve often wondered what that date marks—the day I became a woman? Considering I still bought underwear in cutesy three-packs, and that I certainly hadn’t mastered the art of speaking my mind, I’ve gotta go with no. Societal standards would have me believe that it was the day I became morally sullied, but I fail to see how anything that lasts less than five minutes can have such an indelible ethical impact—so it’s not that, either.

Really, the only meaning it had (besides a little bit of pain and a lot of postcoital embarrassment) was the meaning that Josh and I ascribed to it. Or so I thought. I hadn’t counted on the meaning my peers, my parents, and society would imbue it with on my behalf.

From that date on—in the small, incestuous world of high school friendships, nothing is a secret for long—I was a “sexually active teen,” a term often used in tandem with phrases like “at risk,” or alongside warnings about drug and alcohol use, regardless of how uncontroversial the sex itself may have been. Through the rest of high school, whenever I had a date, my peers assumed that I had had sex because my sexuality had been defined by that one moment when my virginity was lost. It meant that I was no longer discriminating, no longer “good.” The perceived change in my social value wasn’t lost on my parents, either; before I graduated high school, my mother found an empty condom wrapper in my bag and remarked that if I kept having sex, no one would want to marry me.^a

I realize that my experience isn’t necessarily representative of most women’s—everyone has their own story—but there are common themes in so many young women’s sexual journeys. Sometimes it’s shame. Sometimes it’s violence. Sometimes it’s pleasure. And sometimes it’s simply nothing to write home about.

The idea that virginity (or loss thereof) can profoundly affect women’s lives is certainly nothing new. But what virginity is, what it was, and how it’s being used now to punish women and roll back their rights is at the core of the purity myth. Because today, in a world where porn culture and reenergized abstinence movements collide, the moral panic myth about young women’s supposed promiscuity is diverting attention from the real problem—that women are still being judged (sometimes to death) on something that doesn’t really exist: virginity.

“One of the questions that kept coming up was ‘I did such-and-such. Am I still a virgin?’” Blank told me in an interview. “They desperately wanted an authoritative answer.”

But she just didn’t have one. So Blank decided to spend some time in Harvard’s medical school library to find a definitive answer for her young web browsers.

“I spent about a week looking through everything I could—medical dictionaries, encyclopedias, anatomies—trying to find some sort of diagnostic standard for virginity,” Blank said.

The problem was, there was no standard. Either a book wouldn’t mention virginity at all or it would provide a definition that wasn’t medical, but subjective.

“Then it dawned on me—I’m in arguably one of the best medical libraries in the world, scouring their stacks, and I’m not finding anything close to a medical definition for virginity. And I thought, That’s really weird. That’s just flat-out strange.”

Blank said she found it odd mostly because everyone, including doctors, talks about virginity as if they know what it is—but no one ever bothers to mention the truth: “People have been talking authoritatively about virginity for thousands of years, yet we don’t even have a working medical definition for it!”

Blank now refers to virginity as “the state of having not had partnered sex.” But if virginity is simply the first time someone has sex, then what is sex? If it’s just heterosexual intercourse, then we’d have to come to the fairly ridiculous conclusion that all lesbians and gay men are virgins, and that different kinds of intimacy, like oral sex, mean nothing. And even using the straight-intercourse model of sex as a gauge, we’d have to get into the down-and-dirty conversation of what constitutes penetration.^b

Since I’ve become convinced that virginity is a sham being perpetrated against women, I decided to turn to other people to see how they “count” sex. Most say it’s penetration. Some say it’s oral sex. My closest friend, Kate, a lesbian, has the best answer to date (a rule I’ve followed since she shared it with me): It isn’t sex unless you’ve had an orgasm. That’s a pleasure-based, non-heteronormative way of marking intimacy if I’ve ever heard one. Of course, this way of defining sex isn’t likely to be very popular among the straight-male sect, given that some would probably end up not counting for many of their partners.

But any way you cut it, virginity is just too subjective to pretend we can define it.

Laura Carpenter, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences, told me that when she wrote her book, she was loath to even use the word “virginity,” lest she propagate the notion that there’s one concrete definition for it.²

“What is this thing, this social phenomenon? I think the emphasis put on virginity, particularly for women, causes a lot more harm than good,” said Carpenter.³

This has much to do with the fact that “virgin” is almost always synonymous with “woman.” Virgin sacrifices, popping cherries, white dresses, supposed vaginal tightness, you name it. Outside of the occasional reference to the male virgin in the form of a goofy movie about horny teenage boys, virginity is pretty much all about women. Even the dictionary definitions of “virgin” cite an “unmarried girl or woman” or a “religious woman, esp. a saint.”⁴ No such definition exists for men or boys.

It’s this inextricable relationship between sexual purity and women—how we’re either virgins or not virgins—that makes the very concept of virginity so dangerous and so necessary to do away with.

Admittedly, it would be hard to dismiss virginity as we know it altogether, considering the meaning it has in so many people’s—especially women’s—lives. When I suggest that virginity is a lie told to women, I don’t aim to discount or make light of how important the current social idea of virginity is for some people. Culture, religion, and social beliefs influence the role that virginity and sexuality play in women’s lives—sometimes very positively. So, to be clear, when I argue for an end to the idea of virginity, it’s because I believe sexual intimacy should be honored and respected, but that it shouldn’t be revered at the expense of women’s well-being, or seen as such an integral part of female identity that we end up defining ourselves by our sexuality.

I also can’t discount that no matter what personal meaning each woman gives virginity, it’s people who have social and political influence who ultimately get to decide what virginity means—at least, as it affects women on a large scale.

Blank posits that a long-standing historical interest in virginity is about establishing paternity (if a man marries a virgin, he can be reasonably sure the child she bears is his) and about using women’s sexuality as a commodity. Either way, the notion has always been deeply entrenched in patriarchy and male ownership.

That’s why women who had sex were (and still are, at times) referred to as “damaged goods”—because they were literally just that: something to be owned, traded, bought, and sold.

But long gone are the days when women were property . . . or so we’d like to think. It’s not just wedding traditions or outdated laws that name women’s virginity as a commodity; women’s virginity, our sexuality, is still assigned a value by a movement with more power and influence in American society than we’d probably like to admit.

I like to call this movement the virginity movement.^c And it is a movement, indeed—with conservatives and evangelical Christians at the helm, and our government, school systems, and social institutions taking orders. Composed of antifeminist think tanks like the Independent Women’s Forum and Concerned Women for America; abstinence-only “educators” and organizations; religious leaders; and legislators with regressive social values, the virginity movement is much more than just the same old sexism; it’s a targeted and well-funded backlash that is rolling back women’s rights using revamped and modernized definitions of purity, morality, and sexuality. Its goals are mired in old-school gender roles, and the tool it’s using is young women’s sexuality. (What better way to get people to pay attention to your cause than to frame it in terms of teenage girls’ having, or not having, sex? It’s salacious!) And, like it or not, the members of the virginity movement are the people who are defining virginity—and, to a large extent, sexuality—in America. Now, instead of women’s virginity being explicitly bought and sold with dowries and business deals, it’s being defined as little more than a stand-in for actual morality.

It’s genius, really. Shame women into being chaste and tell them that all they have to do to be “good” is not have sex. (Of course, chastity and purity, as defined by the virginity movement, are not just about abstaining sexually so much as they’re about upholding a specific, passive model of womanhood. But more on this later.)

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer—the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e., “moral”) girl and therefore worthy of praise.