Where’s my prurience ball?
I’m massively creeped out by the purity movement and abstinence culture. You know how religious parents and teenagers– mostly daughters–buy into virginity in a big way with purity pledges, purity balls, purity rings, and… I dunno, probably chastity belts? That’s creepy.
I’m not even going to get into how I hate the fact that we’re teaching young women that their worth depends on their ability to withhold sex and/or to provide an unsullied sexual vessel to some schmuck in the future. I’m not even going to mention that. Well, barely.
What specifically makes my flesh crawl is the concept that somehow fathers are supposed to be the custodians of their daughters’ virginity. The implication that a man can more or less own his child’s sexuality at all is unspeakably corrupt, and giving her a little extra attention in the form of jewelry and dressed-up dancing doesn’t sanitize the concept or make it any easier to swallow. It’s still creepy as hell.
Take a look at this sample purity pledge, culled from the Hollywood Purity Ball’s website:
I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, my future/husband and my Creator. I recognize that virginity is my most precious gift to offer to my future husband. I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind before marriage but will keep my thought and my body pure as a very special present for the one I marry.
…Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but what business is it of this girl’s father, future/husband, or Creator to care so damn much about stifling her emerging sexuality? These three guys are heroically falling all over themselves to bellyflop on some catastrophic grenade, but it’s actually just this poor girl. Now that she needs a training bra she might want to think about sex at some point and do other things associated with puberty. The pin has been pulled! Horrors! “Save yourself, Creator! Future/husband and I have got this. You have other virgins to make.”
And as “precious gifts” go, I think that if I were a guy I’d value other things in my future wife above her absolute lack of experience. Some examples that spring to mind:
- An awesome sense of humor that still manages to pretend I’m funny from time to time
- Compassion
- Wit
- A terrific ass (I’m an ass guy)
- A sense of adventure in and out of the bedroom
- Unfuckingbelievable blowjob skills
- Independence, self-agency, and the ability to make up her own mind instead of just listening to her daddy all the fucking time
- A good DVD collection
- A ravenous intellect
- A ravenous sex drive
If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you like, you should date and have some fun figuring it out. Being clueless isn’t your cue to go get married. Maybe it’s okay to give some virginity to your husband as a very special present, but for heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be yours!
I remember that shit from high school. I think I was the only person in the class with the integrity to refuse to sign a damn pledge card. And most of those that did sign only did it avoid the hassle. It annoys the hell out of me the guilt trip women go through because of this crap.
Your list of things for a guy to worry a out is damned near my list. You will not find a woman’s virginity anywhere on my list of concerns for a partner.
@Robert Having a virgin as a partner would certainly concern me, but not in the way the religious right would like it to. Experience is sexy. I’m not opposed to teaching, but I’d prefer to learn a thing or two as well. Ugh, and imagine if we were both virgins! Amateur hour ’til death do us part.
Hi. I lurk sometimes and I love your writing.
Another real problem with the whole abstinence movement is that it takes away valuable time from (and de-legitamizes–if that’s a word–to some extent) teaching kids about safe sex. Most teenagers are going to experiment to some extent and making something a forbidden fruit only entices them to think (rightly so, in this case) that it’s delicious, so it’s important to educate them about potential consequences and how to avoid them. I have a friend who, in his mid-twenties, told me he’d used plastic wrap the night before when he didn’t have a condom, as though it worked just as well.
I return now, to the shadows.
But who wants to pay full price for a used vagina? You know, they say the value goes down the most the day you drive it off the lot.
A prurience ball would be awesome.
K, so this begs the question…. where’s the purity pledge for young men and how are mothers expected to safeguard their sons’ virginity? Also, how does one survive adolescence without ever having any “impure” thoughts? :P
@Brock F’in Samson Thanks for reading! I totally agree with you about the sex ed thing. This is how we get absurd things like saddlebacking, and (sweet Jesus) people using plastic wrap instead of condoms. I’ve also heard about guys insisting that they can’t keep condoms around or ever buy them because then the sex would be premeditated and that’s far more of a sin than just slipping up in the heat of the moment. I just love purity logic.
@Holly Pervocracy But you know that with vaginas you’re just paying for advertising, right?
I badly want to organize a prurience ball, with its own pledge. And then get lynched by a Focus on the Family mob. Big damn dreams.
@Flitter Oh, you know, males have higher uses than being bedded and bred, so their purity is less vital. Also, mothers can’t really be in charge of their sons. That might make them gay, or gender-confused!
Impure thoughts should be a varsity sport.
I tend to think it’s a backlash against the very creepy sexualization of younger and younger girls, of which Baby Bratz are the demonic avatar. Okay, good, making being a little girl (and eventually teenage girl and then woman) all about how attractive she is and eventually her worth as a sex objeect is BAD, mmkay, and I get that. Fifteen year old girls shouldn’t feel like they’re lesser if they haven’t sat down and seriously considered blowjob technique.
But instead we get… this. Women as these vessels filled with all the worth they will ever have, and they better not lose it, because only one guy out there is destiny-bound to own her worth and if she fucks up there’s no going back. And it’s her dad’s job to own her worth before Mister Destiny.
Meanwhile, teenage boys get a sort of “ha ha, kids will be kids” with the nodding acknowledgement that if they do something really stupid there’ll be huge consequences, but nobody guards them or thinks action figures with big crotch bulges are a good idea. If you want to backlash against the creepy sex culture pushing on kids, why not treat girls more like boys instead of like Saudi girls?
@LabRat I very much agree. I feel like if we could somehow stop fetishizing virgin (females) as a culture and tacitly agreeing that a woman’s greatest worth is as a broodtoy, we’d get a lot fewer representations of sexualized little girls. I’ve been informed by at least three guys that the male mind (at any age) is “biologically programmed” to find 15-25 year-old girls/women most attractive, but even suspending all disbelief and allowing for that “imperative”, we can surely leave the 15-18 year-olds to sexualize themselves as they see fit and not do it for them as a society. And teaching your daughter that her virginity is the most precious thing about her is sexualizing her. It really, really is.
It’s also clear that these purity mongers are never going to be interested in promoting healthy attitudes about sex. Their agenda just won’t ever allow that, and I can only hope that one day a generation will come along that uniformly resists it and finally breaks the shame cycle. Until then, at least pure young Fundamentalists in the bloom of denial are getting pretty dresses and sterling silver rings.
@quizzical pussy
I agree, given a little more thought.
LMAO! Good one.
Sex is a skill, and you should be paying accordingly. Would you pay high dollar for an electrician or plumber to work on your home if they’d never done that kind of work in their life? Only if your an idiot. Same should go when seeking a sexual partner, male or female, unless you are willing to teach them.
I think that particular pledge is creepy, though I believe in abstinence outside of marriage as well. I agree with the people here that that example is tied in with fetishizing virginity, which is a fetish I don’t get at all, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea; you only have virgin sex once, but you’re married forever. All downhill after the wedding night?
Where’s your prurience ball? I think you won’t find it under that name the same way you don’t find generic “non-vegetarian” events. You find something specific instead: barbeque or a fetish event for example. Some of my friends recommend Wicked Faire, which is apparently a whole lot sexier than this link would indicate: http://www.wickedfaire.com/2010/
Flitter, it’s not just virginity for women. For men, there’s Promise Keepers and other organizations.
I was not looking for virginity when I got married, and would not if I were to go back and do it over again. On a related note, I asked my future wife if she masturbated, and would not have married her if the answer was no. I wanted to make sure she had at least some sex drive independent of the glow of new romance, and that’s something I would do again.
But I don’t think virginity is a BAD thing, to be gotten rid of ASAP. In the experience argument I think everyone here is missing part of the point; some people are looking to be monogamously married “until death do us part”. Over that kind of time period skill from previous experience is irrelevant. If you’re going to spend 50 years driving the same Ford, a few hundred previous experiences with Hondas and Chevys will not help in the long term. And comparisons are invidious. “My wife and I have the best sex ever, but I still miss that one thing Sheila did with her tounge”.
@Mousie00 I definitely did pick the most absurd purity pledge I could find, but while some other virginity pledges are less unsettling it’s still going to bug me that people are asking young women (and yes, my personal experience with the Fundamentalist community has overwhelmingly convinced me that female sexual purity is a made into a much bigger deal, although male purity isn’t completely ignored) to make a commitment to wait until marriage. My last meant-to-be-humorous paragraph aside, I believe this should be a personal choice. I don’t like peer pressure to have sex early and I don’t like parents and other authority figures convincing a young woman that she’s somehow damaged if she wants to–or does– experiment with sex. I really dislike portraying fathers as the stewards of their daughters’ virginity.
And I agree, virginity isn’t a bad thing. I can respect believing in abstinence outside of marriage for yourself, just like I respect different sexual orientations and asexuality. I think the trouble comes when people start expecting to see their values reflected in other people, and trying to enforce that through manipulation or fear or other means. Personally I value experience and I would like to, if possible, learn the thing that Sheila did with her tongue, preferably from Sheila! But I understand that not everyone feels this way and I actually DO want people to wait for marriage if they legitimately want to, and not just because of outside pressures. The outside pressure involved here can be terrible and cause a lot of pain. Seems like your choice worked out for you, though. Thanks for your comment!
@quizzical pussy
My choice to remain a virgin until married was mostly my choice. I certainly was under no pressure from my parents; my father handed me a pack of condoms when I took a class trip at 15 years old, and my sisters were both pretty active without drawing criticism. However, during high school I was too socially awkward, too much of the sexually passive ‘nice guy’, to have an opportunity until after I decided to marry as a virgin in college. So in that sense it wasn’t my choice. The decision was based on the Bible rather than family or social pressure (which was the opposite way if anything) or my own opinions. If you’re going to follow a God who is supposed to be wiser and better than you, and he never tells you anything you disagree with, you are fooling yourself about following him; you’re just using him as a justification for your own thoughts and predjudices. BTW, from my current point of view I was not successful with the ‘marry as a virgin’ thing; before I married I had Clintonesque ideas about what consituted ‘not having sex with that woman’, which I have changed since.
It seems to me to be utterly cruel to to promote virginity in one sex more than the other. Virgin boys are made to feel like losers (which in my case was true at first.) When I decided to remain a virgin I was defiant about it, wanting to make other virgins feel better; at 6’3″ dressing in leather and looking like a biker complete with a length of heavy chain, I could get away with all the defiance I wanted. I’d meet disparaging comments about virgins with “I’m a virgin; got a problem with that?” And obviously putting pressure on boys to have sex and girls to remain virgins doubles the pressure on the girls, though I don’t have the personal experience with that pressure.
I think, though, that teaching both sexes to be slow to lose their virginity is good. The thing about it is that you can always lose it later, but you can’t get it back later, and everyone makes better decisions as they get older.
I have to admit though that I’d worry about sexual incompatibility in two virgins getting married. I lucked out. But for example, Holly Pervocracy doesn’t get much from cunnilingus and loves penetration, I love performing cunnilingus and don’t like penetration (an artifact of the “Coitus is punishment” type of feminist that I’m trying to get over.) If we were to marry and were both virgins, we wouldn’t know that beforehand. There are some things that you can understand from honest and forthcoming discussion of fantasies before marriage, but that has severe limits. You can work around such incompatibility (as I do with my penetration aversion), but how much better not to have to.