Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [8]
If you’re like me, you’re probably in the fetal position on the floor right now, trying to make that image go away. But this isn’t unusual—there are virginity cards, rings, ceremonies, you name it. The one thing they all have in common is that girls’ virginity and sexuality don’t belong to them.
Not only are virginity pledges sooo creepy and wrong, they’re not exactly effective. Recent studies have shown that teens who take virginity pledges are actually more likely to have oral and anal sex.
Their logic is that because it’s not intercourse, it’s not real sex. Somehow I don’t think the folks who made up the whole pledge thing had sodomy in mind. (You would think the idea of good Christian girls taking it in the ass would motivate some change in the whole pledge system, but they’re sticking to their guns.)
What kills me is that we’re falling for this crap. Women feel so bad about losing their virginity that some of them are actually deluded by the idea that they can become “born again” virgins. Like a self-imposed dry spell. For fuck’s sake, there are even women who are getting plastic surgery to get fake hymens put back in! Who the hell wants their hymen back?
And the people who are just shocked—shocked!—that younger women are looking to oversexualized pop culture to define themselves are the very same ones that are shoving virginity down our throats. (Not literally, of course. Ew.) For folks who are trying to tell us we shouldn’t define ourselves by our sexuality, they certainly can’t get past the whole dick-meets-vagina thing. And really, if you want to attach young women’s worth to their virginity, you can’t be surprised when they follow suit and attach all their worth to their sexuality. You can’t have it both ways.
Getting Carded for Sex
In addition to the fact that it’s pretty much never okay for women to have sex (unless you’re married and doing it to procreate, of course), there’s a special emphasis placed on younger women. We’re really not supposed to have sex.
The logic is pretty simple: Girls aren’t supposed to like sex, especially teenage girls. So if you’re having sex, either you’re a slut or you’re a victim who’s being taken advantage of. Neither are particularly attractive options. It’s like the virgin-whore complex on crack. The idea that teen girls want to have sex is just too much for some people to handle. Girls are supposed to think sex is icky and make excuses about headaches.
I’ll never forget the first time I realized just how nutty people could get over the idea of a teen girl’s choosing and wanting to have sex. I was watching Oprah a while back, when Dr. Phil (pre-self-help empire) was a regular. He was discussing the “problem” of teenage sex. There was one seventeen-year-old on the show talking about how she and her boyfriend had oral sex. She was superarticulate and smart, and made her position very clear. She said she had been with her boyfriend a long time, and they loved each other but weren’t ready for intercourse, and so they had decided to have oral sex instead. Dr. Phil ripped into her like a maniac, saying, “A friend doesn’t ask you to go in the bathroom, get on your knees in a urine-splattered tile floor, and stick their penis in your mouth.” The girl looked at over at her mom and said, “That’s not what happened to me,” but she was ignored. Nice, huh? But insults and scare tactics against teen sex are par for the course these days.
The U.S. government is expanding abstinence only programs to target not just students, but unmarried adults. Soon they’ll expect everyone to abstain!
One conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family, is so concerned about teens having sex that it came out with a study (a very dubious one at that) concluding that having sex before you’re eighteen makes you more likely