How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
April 15, 2009
Making a cult of virginity via media stereotyping and abstinence-only sex education damages young women, Valenti says, and rolls back womens rights by emphasizing sexuality and deprecating personal character. Furthermore, the books 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 womans primary value is sexual underlies the objectification and sexualization at the heart of the virginity movements agenda of controlling and defining women, Valenti maintains. When young women see their bodies and sexuality as commodities, that isnt 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 womens studies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)