Auctioning Off Virginity
Jessica Valenti’s new book says the abstinence model is bad for young men and women.By Caroline Hagood
March 23, 2009
Jessica Valenti’s latest book.Natalie Dylan may have shocked people by auctioning off her virginity for $3.7 million to “help her pay for college,” but a new book by Jessica Valenti argues that Dylan’s case is merely another instance in a long history of the commodification of virginity. Today’s abstinence activists are still trying to put a value on virginity that harks back to the days when a dowry was negotiated between a woman’s father and husband. By viewing her sexuality as a commodity, Dylan may have more in common with abstinence activists than you may think.
Valenti’s new book is called The Purity Myth. In it, she takes issue with the inert view of femininity and ethics that links female identity to virginity, as though all a woman has to do in order to be a good person is keep her legs closed. Valenti is the executive editor of Feministing, and the author of He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know and Full Frontal Feminism. As a proponent of a more active and egalitarian interpretation of female sexual politics, she stresses that the problem isn’t women’s sexuality, but how that sexuality is constructed as a passive commodity.
Valenti’s argument isn’t new. Women’s sexuality has been deconstructed for centuries with varying degrees of sophistication, but the topic really came to prominence in the 1950s with Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. One of the problems with many of the early studies—feminist texts such as Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s 1970 The Female Eunuch—is the treatment of female sexual identity as a passive, or aberrant non-male sexuality. What is different about Valenti’s book, however, is that it places the solution to this problem in the hands of both men and women by acknowledging the problem of constructions of male sexuality, and arguing that men should be part of the fight for gender equality as well.
In place of the dogmatic perspective of virginity proponents, Valenti asks us to dwell in a more nuanced middle ground. Feminism is a mode of thought that eschews the intolerance or abuse of any group, even those perceived as being on the other side of the debate, including men. In keeping with this, Valenti’s obvious respect for men should make it hard for naysayers to uphold the typical feminist man-hating accusations. She writes: “It’s because I care so much for the men in my life that I advocate a rethinking of masculinity. It’s also because I want a better world for women.” The way we think about women’s virginity is damaging to men, too.
As part of her quest for that better world, Valenti acknowledges that the construction of masculinity that posits women as the compliant sexual others of men hurts both men and women. Indeed, men are often taught to think of their masculinity as a kind of anti-femininity, making the womanly something that must be stomped out in order to attain manhood; Valenti observes that the forbidding of the “feminine” in men, which usually refers to emotion and vulnerability, oppresses them as well.
To illustrate the purity movement’s problematic treatment of women’s sexuality, Valenti focuses on Purity balls, events put on by abstinence activists in which young women pledge their virginity to their fathers (the ownership of which he will later turn over to her husband). These “balls” are symptomatic of the commodity paradigm of female sexuality. Under this paradigm, women become damaged goods after they have sex. The term takes on a literal significance in the eyes of a society in which purity purveyors deal in t-shirts that say, “Notice: No Trespassing on this property, my father is watching.” Valenti’s implication seems to be that it’s difficult for women to make personal sexual decisions when their bodies are treated as products that belong to the public at large.
One of Valenti’s strengths is that she offers an alternative to the abstinence model that posits both men and women as sexual decision makers. Instead of the scenario in which women are defined by a sort of negative space, not by what they are, but by what they are not—sexually active—Valenti advocates Thomas Macaulay Millar’s performance model of sexuality in which sex is not the success of a man to get a woman to not say no, but a source of mutual enjoyment in which both partners say yes.
There are the rare times that Valenti takes her critique of abstinence efforts too far, as in the case where she wonders if the creepy romantic tone of the father-daughter Purity balls is an indicator that the fathers are taking liberties in private. This kind of insinuation feels excessive and takes focus away from her generally equitable analysis. The majority of the book, however, offers a cultural criticism whose insights on human relations are as finely tuned as its wry humor.
Ultimately, Valenti’s approach to sexuality is timely. Even if you are not a fan of feminism, Valenti’s book points to a deeper issue in our sociopolitical environment—an outdated, polarized mode of thought that must be transcended. With this in mind, she doesn’t combat the marginalized view of women that Greer and de Beauvoir critiqued by marginalizing men. Rather, The Purity Myth forces us to ask the crucial question: If the boxes that we put men and women in harm us all, then isn’t it time to step outside of them?
Caroline Hagood graduated from Vassar College in 2004. She recently received her Master’s in English Literature from Buffalo State University and has applied to PhD programs for 2009.
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