Chapter 3
THE UNHOLY TRINITY
The Virgin, the Slut, and the Empowered Girl
I am still desperate for male attention, and I feel unwanted, ugly, and needy. Sometimes, I don’t like aspects of my personality. Why am I so selfish? So loud? So unfocused?
THE VIRGIN
Winnie told me she was never “that girl” in high school. She was a virgin. She promised herself she would wait until she fell in love because, she knows now, her culture had promised her that this would get her what she wanted. She’d be loved. She’d be valued. She’d be good.
When she got to college, though, she decided one night she didn’t want to wait anymore. She wanted finally to be “put on a pedestal,” something she had ironically been promised she would get if she stayed a virgin. But what she really got as a virgin was invisibility. The girls around her who were putting out were the ones getting talked about and pursued. All this time had passed, and she had hung on to her virginity and still didn’t feel loved, or valued, or even necessarily good. What she felt was empty.
So one night she drank tequila and lost her virginity to a random guy. After that, as the weeks and months passed, she moved on to the next guy—and the next, and the next. Winnie says that she had underestimated the intensity of the high that she would get from the attention. She never had guessed how easily promiscuity would become a sort of addiction for her. Today, she says, she’s still a loose girl, and she’s so deep in it, she doesn’t have a clue how to get out: “I still haven’t been loved. I still give it away. I still feel empty when it’s over.”
While promoting Loose Girl, I was invited to appear on a morning show with three teens. They embodied the three sexual paths that girls can follow in our culture today: the virgin, the slut, and the empowered girl. In other words, girls can choose not to have sex; have sex but be shamed for it because it’s too much, or the wrong kind, or because it harms them; or have sex because they are trying to claim it as their own choice.
Believe it or not, the virgin was the girl who interested me most. The conviction behind her virginity drove her to tell fellow teen girls to retain their virginity. She was 100 percent sure that she was right. And she had proof! Most everyone in the audience lauded her. Her mother was so proud. Sex education—funded by abstinence-only programs—supported her. In fact those programs sent her to talk at other schools. The churches let her know she was doing the right thing. She was a good girl.
The virgin owns a mythic narrative that goes like this: She is more desirable to our culture in every way than the girl who has sex. She is lovable. She is girlfriend and wife material. She is prettier, cleaner, holier, and just all-around better than the girl who has sex. We say that virgins “respect their bodies.” (Although this is a concept that always has seemed misguided: Why does not sharing oneself intimately and physically with a partner mean respecting oneself? Why does respect equal denying one’s own physical pleasures?)
The virgin myth also assumes that girls have a much lower sex drive than boys, that they don’t want sex. It assumes, in fact, that girls are responsible for fending off boys’ out-of-control, aggressive libidos. (You can see how easily this notion leads to the deduction that girls can be responsible for their own rapes: “If you dress in sexy clothes, boys can’t control themselves,” or “If you let a boy kiss you or get sexually excited in any way, you shouldn’t be surprised when he can’t help himself, even as you say ‘no’”).
In this way, virgins are assigned a false strength. The virgin teen who was to be on television with me, as well as girls holding the title of Miss Teen America and other spokespeople for abstinence, often comment on how they believe they are stronger than those girls who “give in” to their sexual urges or need for attention. In other words, a girl’s strength comes from doing nothing, as opposed to from actually doing something in the world, such as being a powerful athlete or saying truths that are unpopular but necessary. This is especially troublesome because it also suggests that there is no possibility for healthy sexual exploration. In this scenario, all sexual activity equals giving away one’s power. There is no possibility that a girl can have sexual experiences and still be powerful. Having sexual experiences renders girls weak and helpless.
Most important, though, the virgin myth emphasizes the idea that a girl is only worth as much as she’s able to keep her legs closed. Forget compassion, honesty, integrity, or kindness. As Jessica Valenti notes in The Purity Myth, “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.”{35} She notes that this view is just one more way that we value women most for their bodies and sexuality, and for what they do with those.
We even throw virgins parties. In the past decade, we’ve seen the growth of “purity balls.” At such events, begun as a Christian response to rising teen pregnancy and STD rates, adolescent girls pledge their virginities to their fathers until they will wed, and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ chastity. There is white cake, exchanged vows, and a first dance, just like at a real wedding. Regardless of the creepiness of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls having commitment ceremonies with their fathers, the key point is that the balls don’t work. Out of a study of twelve thousand girls, those who had participated in purity balls had the same rate of STDs as those who didn’t pledge their virginity, and 88 percent break their pledges and have premarital sex.{36}
In so many ways, these sorts of ceremonies set girls up for failure. It might be easy for a twelve-year-old girl to say she won’t have sex before marriage, but three years later, she realizes how much she likes boys and sexual experiences. Or as her brain develops further, she begins to think, Wait a minute. How come I can’t have pleasurable physical interactions and boys can? (After all, where are the mother-son pledge balls? Good luck finding one.) Or, even more likely, she comes to know that her value as a girl is tied up with whether boys want to get with her, and to get boys’ attention, she will need to be sexy, and—well, combined with the fact that sex and attention feel good—you can see how easily those pledges become a distant, silly fantasy.
This is not to say that a girl choosing to stay a virgin isn’t a perfectly acceptable decision for a teen girl. But so is choosing to have sex. The girls are not to blame here. It’s the abstinence train, the coopting, once again, of a girl’s control over her own sexual choices.
That societal pressure to be abstinent has resulted in issues way more dangerous than a girl choosing to have sex: the pressure to exclude information about birth control in sex education and the refusal to supply condoms to sexually active teens. When girls don’t know enough about how to keep themselves safe, when they don’t have easy access to the very things that make them safe, then we’re complicit in the fact that they are unprotected from STDs and pregnancy. If we, the adults, are responsible for our teens’ physical safety, then we are failing them in this way.