The inimitable MsFits (whom I once described as the Hunter S. Thompson of Australian blogdom) recently posted on losing her virginity:
Out at dinner the other night we were having the usual ‘getting to know you’ friendship discussion where everyone looks coy and reveals at what age they lost their virginity. As the numbers weaved around the table towards me I realised with growing alarm that I might fall somewhere in the ‘17th Century child prostitute’ age bracket.
I was reminded of this when watching a doco on SBS on the redefinition of the meaning and significance of virginity, and its politics, on Friday night.
A singular feature of US society over the last decade or so has been the explosion of the Virginity Pledge movement among Christian teens, originating with Southern Baptists in the early 1990s. Of course, a lot of teens who make the pledge go on to have sex, and are less likely to use contraception than those who don’t when they do. One other important aspect of the movement is that many forms of the pledge contain a promise not to have sex until the promissor enters a covenant marriage.
Why should this matter? Surely it’s just a personal choice and an expression of individual religious beliefs?
Well, maybe so, but it’s led in the US to the eclipse of sex education in schools in favour of abstinence-only education (the consequences of which are also felt in the international effort against the spread of HIV/AIDS):
Abstinence-only education is one of the religious right’s greatest challenges to the nation’s sexual health. But it is only one tactic in a broader, longer-term strategy. Since the early 1980s, the “family values” movement has won the collaboration of governments and public institutions, from Congress to local school boards, in abridging students’ constitutional rights. Schools now block student access to sexual health information in class, at the school library, and through the public library’s Internet portals. They violate students’ free speech rights by censoring student publications of articles referring to sexuality. Abstinence-only programs often promote alarmist misinformation about sexual health and force-feed students religious ideology that condemns homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and contraception. In doing so, they endanger students’ sexual health.
Interestingly, an early pinup girl for the Bush administration’s abstinence education push was Britney Spears. Despite the fact that Britney now prefers serial heterosexual marriage, the SBS doco raised an interesting issue here - the comparison between Madonna’s representation of herself as having an empowered and autonomous female sexuality and Britney’s stripper/slut persona which represents her purely as an object of male lust. Focussing on virginity is one way to restrict sexuality purely to genital penetration, and one powerful way to reinforce cultural norms which subordinate women and girls to men and boys. The discourse of purity, and the linked promise of covenant marriage, reinforce this subordination.
ELSEWHERE: More at Ausculture Jess’ place and Rob’s.
This sounds like it was an interesting doco. SBS often has interesting ones on sexuality/gender, I find.
I agree about the continued subordination of women through the presentation of stereotypes such as Britney. It really presents a very narrow view of women and sexuality generally.
As for the virginity pledges - the thing that really bothers me about those is that they seem more designed to appease parents, teachers, church groups than to represent an assertion of the promissor’s actual intention. Who thought them up in the first place?
While I think it would be patronising of me to suggest that they are not the product of the promissor’s free will - I do believe 17/18 year olds often have very firmly held independent beliefs of their own on these matters - it’s difficult to see them as encouraging independent thought, or a well-thought out decision about what is ultimately an intensely personal decision to make.
I see these pledges as creating confusion and guilt above all, I suppse. I’m very cynical about them. I understand the theory, which goes along the lines that people will remember their promise before deciding to lose their virginity, and that this will perhaps deter them from making a decision they regret, and that is /morally wrong/ according to their beliefs, or the beliefs of their community.
However, I don’t believe that this reminder/pressure is necessary or desirable. I can’t see that it adds anything positive (I mean positive in that it’s a valuable contribution to informed thought, rather than positive as in ‘yeah, have sex, it’s great’) to the decision about whether or not to lose one’s virginity, but is rather more likely to create stress. And to me, it’s a decision that you should be able to make free of guilt about what other people might think of you, what you might have believed yourself a year or two ago, and without any pressure additional to that which already comes with being responsible about sexual activity.
Sigh. I don’t know - these things simply baffle me. I think this is clear from the illogical presentation of the words above!
And as for abstinence-only education…completely irresponsible. There’s simply no other way to look at it, as far as I’m concerned.
Ausculture Jess brings to light some interesting research into the effects of abstinence pledges.
Participants are significantly more likely than their non-pledge peers to engage in oral and anal sex without a condom, and are consequently no less likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases. However, they are less prepared to go to the doctor about their STD.
88% of pledgers have sex before marriage.
Conservatives are working hard to spin it:
“Conservative academics said the paper overlooked earlier important findings about adolescents who take virginity pledges, most notably that they have fewer pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births.”
Well, yes, because they’re having unprotected anal sex instead of unprotected vaginal sex.
You’re completely incorrigible! This ‘testing’ business doesn’t fool me for a minute
Larvatus Prodeo is an interesting choice but I fear that those without your grasp of Classics could well deliberately misuse it and locate various unpleasant variations on insects, homosexual rodeo participation and the like, therein. There’s no accounting for twisted trolls - even ‘lardass’ is possible…..
I look forward to the son et lumiere launch on the 28th.
Interesting ‘test’.
These pledges apparently have a failure rate of around 80% according to a study that was cited in The Australian last year.
People can choose to do as they wish, but there is something obsessive about the pledgers that gives them an obsessive “I’m not going to think about it, I’m not going to think about it” quality.
This desire for “purity” and certainity is not that different from the reasons some women in the United States gave in an article in Bust magazine as their reasons for converting to Islam.
Of course, even the Baptists don’t make women cover their heads so as not to attract sexual attention.
Interestingly, though, a lot of Islamic women say that they feel empowered by wearing the hijab/headdress - it means that men are not able to look at their features, and thus less able to see them as sexual objects. Because men cannot observe anything except, often, the person’s eyes, or at any rate just their face, the focus is then on the conversation, the more substantial intellignence of the women with whom they are talking.
I do think, however, that there remains a large element of marginalisation and dehumanisation in the requirement that women wear the hijab. (Of course, again, it is not a requirement for all muslim women necessarily).
I also wonder whether that old idea that the more left to the imagination, the more imagining there is left to do, and the more imagining that will happen, plays any part in the equation.
I remain open to debate on this issue.
In Indonesia, in my experience men tend to fetishise and eroticise women wearing the jilbab. It is partly the image of purity/virginity, and partly the way it focuses men’s thoughts on imagining what’s underneath. It’s also widely held that jilbab-wearing young women are often wearing it just for the image, and are in fact ‘very naughty’. This is of course frowned upon, in one of those doublethinks that men are so good at. What can I say, we’re incorrigible.
It’s nice that women can feel empowered by wearing them, but from conversations I’ve had with men there, their reasons are at variance with reality. Still, if it makes them feel better, that is ample reason to do it.
“It‚Äôs also widely held that jilbab-wearing young women are often wearing it just for the image, and are in fact ‘very naughty‚Äô.”
It’s not much different to the stereotypical “Catholic schoolgirl” then.
The concern I have about the use of the hijab or more significant coverings to avoid the male sexual gaze is the same as the concern I have about the requirement that queer people be “discreet”. There is an assumption that a woman who does not wear that covering is fair game for sexual ogling, despite the fact that she is doing something completely non-sexual. It is a double-standard because men don’t share the burden of covering up to avoid being sexualised.
Absolutely agreed, Rob.