As promised, a little something about the larger agenda of the folks I call the "virginity movement" in the book. Because as much fun as it is discussing virginity as a concept, and as baffling as it is reading some of the comments about how it's just natural that women should be chaste (lest dudes don't want to marry them), there's a lot more to the purity myth than sex or no-sex. This myth is informing conservative policy and activism regarding women - and it ain't good. While, as Katha points out, it's not as overt as it was back in the day, the message is still the same and it's still affecting young women's lives. I would even argue that the fact that it's not as overt makes the myth that more dangerous - because we don't always see it...

(FYI: This is based on a speech I gave at Emory & Henry College)

There is a moral panic surrounding "girls gone wild," but the truth is tamer than the media would have us think. When I was writing The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, I noticed in a trend in the media and pop culture - they were talking about young women and sex. A lot.

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One of the ongoing problems in discussing remaking society so it has healthier, less misogynist attitudes about sex is that the conservative frame that claims that sex is dirty still dominates the conversation. Most debates I see about the very existence of sex (or to be more specific, unmarried women having sex without being punished by ill health, unintended pregnancy, legal consequences, or social admonishment with words like "slut") tend to fall on a continuum where conservatives support the idea of controlling sex through punishment, and liberals tend to argue in the language of human weakness, as if we need to avoid punishing sex because it's just an unavoidable part of human existence. It's the "might as well give them birth control, because they're going to do it anyway" argument. That's using the language of failure to describe sexuality, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Recent example: A column denouncing Ross Douthat where I wrote, "it's the commitment to being realistic about how people really are so you can help real people where they're at, instead of setting impossible standards and then just letting the majority of people who can't meet them suffer."

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The more women have sex before marriage, the more Americans worry about virginity. It's like weight: the fatter Americans get, the more they fetishize thinness. But here's the thing: no matter how much Americans long to be slender and shame each other for those extra pounds, the social conditions that make them overweight will keep most of them that way. And no matter how much handwringing and slut-shaming and purity lecturing and silver-ring-promising Americans direct at teenage girls, the way we live ensures that girls will continue to have sex. Twenty years from now, young women will no more be shy virgins on their wedding night than average Americans will be as trim and slim as Parisians.

Think of the conditions that kept large numbers of middle-class girls virgins until marriage in, say, the 19th century, and ask yourself how many of them still prevail. Back then, girls were closely chaperoned and stayed close to home with their mothers and sisters; they were rarely alone, they didn't have their own cars or money or go out on dates. They didn't have many opportunities to even meet the kind of boys or men who might not "respect" them. A girl who overcame these obstacles and was known to have lost her "virtue" would have a hard time marrying, which meant social death; if she got pregnant, she might be cast out by her family. Even so, plenty of girls had sex before marriage. So how likely is it today that any force in society -- church, state, school, family -- is going to have much effect on the ability and desire of girls to begin their sex lives before the grownups think they are ready?

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I just wanted to pass on a quote I use in the book (shamelessly stolen from Natalie Angier's wonderful book, Woman: An Intimate Geography) that I think could be useful fodder for the conversation happening:

"If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?" - Barbara Smuts, primatologist

It occurred to me that calling women in the traditional view the 'gate-keepers' of sex (as has been pointed out in comments here) probably evokes in most minds the view of someone opening a garden gate, under a pergola of red roses. But the gate in that image should really be replaced by the goal in a soccer or ice-hockey game and the woman with the keeper of that goal, if we are to understand the traditional game of sex properly.

This is the context in which women are asked to keep the gates closed or to open them, and this is the context which may show what is wrong with the current competing views of sex, men and women. On the one hand we have the purity myth. On the other we have the popular culture which judges young women almost completely on their sexual attractiveness and which offers young men almost nothing but encouragement for the game of sex. Go for the goal!

What makes the game especially difficult for the women is that they are sexual creatures themselves. Indeed, they might not want to play this particular game in the first place, because it is a rigged game and because it takes a lot of time and energy to play. That time and energy would be better used elsewhere in life and on other ethical concerns.

Jessica's delightful and on-point comment-riposte this afternoon, coupled with Emily's reflections about effecting change in the sexual culture, have been making me think about one of the big issues feminists and progressives face in working on these issues: it's hard to express complex messages about egalitarian, liberationist goals in clear, succinct, media-friendly ways.

The more complicated the statement, the easier it is to twist around, misquote, and mischaracterize. The more complicated the statement, the harder it is to remember.

There is enormous power, as the ad industry has been showing us for a couple of generations now, in statements that are short and simple enough that people will repeat them verbatim. Likewise there is huge power in having your statement be memorable. (If you need a refresher: "Yes we can.") Crafting statements and slogans that are distinctive and catchy buys shares in the public imagination. The more of the public imagination you can buy, the less work it is to sell your agenda.

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There's something about virginity that really gets folks talking (and writing!). I have to say, I'm so thrilled to be reading the incredibly smart posts that have come out of this discussion. What's been just as interesting however, is reading through the comment threads on all of these posts. Some of the responses reveal just how ubiquitous the myth of sexual purity is - and how invested some people are in it and the sexual double standard.

Shooter242, for example, believes that the virgin ideal is in place because of "the simple idea that guys want to marry women they can trust" and that a virgin has "the discipline and foresight to retain something she considers valuable." Shooter actually proves my point - why is it that a woman who has sex is someone not to be trusted? Or that in this day and age, someone can still talk about "retaining" virginity and chastity as "valuable" as if it was a commodity.

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Lucky for Jessica, the week her book The Purity Myth comes out, the Bristol Palin/Levi Johnston circus introduced some more clowns and elephants into the ring. Levi Johnston, virgin despoiler, went on the Tyra Banks show to act exactly as you'd imagine he would, at least if you grew up in a rural community like theirs and knew redneck dudes just like him. The whole debacle really shows how the themes that Jessica teases out are playing out in real time, and to make the whole thing more interesting (and frankly hilarious), these themes are playing out against the backdrop of increasing tensions within the Republican party about defining itself going forward.

Prior to the Palin blow-up, the evangelical wing and the traditional upper crust WASP wing of the party had a pretty basic agreement about the value of pure white virgin daughters. Having a few of these hanging around on podiums made politicians look good, and preserving the myth of the pure white virgin was of the utmost importance. Everyone thought they agreed on this topic. But Bristol Palin had to go have a baby, and the difference of opinion on what to do about girls who don't live by the standards of purity became harder to deny.

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Reading The Purity Myth, I was struck by the clarity of Jessica's call to arms. America, you're obsessed with women's sexuality in general and with virginity in particular--get over it! The strength of the book lies in the connections it makes. Jessica convincingly argues that there's a link between the hundreds of millions spent on abstinence-only education (ah, gift of the Bush administration), squeamishness about giving girls the HPV vaccine, and purity balls and rituals. (Best example, from page 32: a dad gives his daughter a gold rose pin with the note, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in pre-marital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.")

I'm less certain of the book's prescription for change. I agree with Jessica in general terms: Quit fetishizing virginity. Separate the question of a woman's ethics from when she first had sex or how many partners she has had. I also agree that there's no need to condemn teen sex across the board. One of my favorite things about the TV show Friday Night Lights, which I've been writing about for Slate, is that it depicts teen sex that's affectionate and awkward rather than eroticized or disastrous.

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One of the issues I was glad to see Jessica raise in The Purity Myth was the problem of socioeconomic class. It struck me many times when researching my own book on virginity--and many more when reading Jessica's--just how tightly tied to classism the contemporary virginity movement really is. (I note as well, and without conflating the two, that this classism is also profoundly racist.)

Jessica repeatedly makes the very useful point that the idealized virgin of the virginity movement is white, thin, conventionally pretty, young, middle class, and at least in theory both sexually inexperienced and sexually available. Women of color, disabled women, poor women, and, frankly, women who are simply considered unattractive from a mainstream perspective really need not apply to join the virgin club, except insofar as they'd like to avoid being labeled as sluts (not, as Leora Tanenbaum notes, that it necessarily helps).

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The Purity Myth convincingly and rather disturbingly details out how much momentum you can get behind a social movement by invoking people's fear and loathing of female sexuality, particularly young women's sexuality. What's interesting about this movement is that two different arguments have developed from anti-feminists on what specifically makes female sexuality so dangerous, and why it needs to be controlled. I'm going to quickly describe them with the caveat that many conservatives switch seamlessly between these two arguments, depending on their own perceptions of what the audience needs to hear right then. These arguments work together for the final goal of bringing state power to the task of controlling women and punishing independent sexual choices, and aren't really in competition with each other on a functional level.

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Thanks for inviting me to take part in this discussion and thanks to Jessica for writing the book on which it is based: The Purity Myth.

As Jessica notes in the book, purity of women is a very old ideal which may have its roots in the exchange value of young women in traditional societies. It is also part of the three important traditional ethical rules for women: purity, chastity and obedience. That at least two of these three are about sex is noteworthy. That all of these are still operative rules in some contemporary cultures is equally noteworthy. Just think of honor killings, say.

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Hello everyone, I wrote a book about girls labeled "sluts" by their peers in junior high and high school, called Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation. I did the research in the mid- to late-1990s; the book was originally published in 1999. I continue to meet and speak with girls and women who are currently experiencing slut-bashing or who have experienced it in the past. A few quick observations:

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First of all, I just want to thank TPMCafe for hosting this discussion and the participants for agreeing to join in on the fun...

The Purity Myth is a book that I've been thinking about for a long time; the sexual double standard has irked me since I was a teenager and the framing of sexually active women as "dirty" has fascinated me for just as long. But it was really the work I do on Feministing that led me to write this book. I started to notice a trend emerging in the stories we were covering - whether it was pop culture or policy, there seemed to be an obsessive focus on young women's sexuality. Not exactly news, I know. But this focus went beyond your run-of-the-mill objectification. Hundreds of moral panic articles about "girls gone wild" and spring break madness were popping up around the same time books about "modesty" and the dangers of "hooking up" were all the rage.

On the policy end of things, the FDA was holding up emergency contraception and conservatives were driving themselves into a frenzy over the HPV vaccine - all because of fears that young women would become promiscuous. And that's how The Purity Myth was born. I wanted to look at how the conservative movement uses the fear of young women's sexuality to promote a regressive agenda for women, and how cultural messages about chastity and virginity influence the way young women are perceived (by themselves and society).

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Feministing.com founder and editor Jessica Valenti joins us this week to discuss her new book, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. In it, Valenti dissects America's obsession with "purity" in young girls and relays how damaging the myth is to adolescent development. She deconstructs the "virginity movement" and demonstrates the danger in how young women are overwhelmed with conflicting messages everyday: abstinence-only education at school, and "Girls Gone Wild" TV commercials at home.

From a recent interview with Valenti:

The purity myth is the lie that virginity or sexual abstinence has some bearing on who we are as people, as good people, women in particular. More specifically, what the book talks about is how that lie and how that myth is really a driving force in a lot of the conservative moves to regress women's rights and to reinforce traditional gender roles. So, how they're using this myth of sexual purity, this fear of young women's sexuality, to promote their agenda for women.

Joining the discussion this week are an impressive host of women whose accomplishments and publications are too numerous to list (but we'll try to hit the highlights): Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History; Katha Pollitt, essayist and author of Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time; Emily Bazelon, senior editor at Slate and research fellow at Yale Law School; Amanda Marcotte, blogger and author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments; J. Goodrich, the voice behind political blog Echidne of the Snakes and contributor to The American Prospect; Jennifer Baumgardner, most recently author of Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism; and Leora Tanenbaum, author of Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, among other books.

Join us.