subtitle: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti.

Many of you, I'm sure, can guess why I picked this one up. As a refresher for others; I was raised in a highly conservative Christian patriarchal household. My father talked about sex constantly, in the thou-shalt-not way, and had several lovely analogies to convince me to stay 'pure.' Let me give you a few.

1) Your virginity is like a rose. Every time you make out with a guy, or kiss him, you're tearing a petal off that rose. And if you have sex with a man without being married there are no petals left. Your virginity is the greatest gift you can give a guy on your wedding night. Do you want to give him a bare stem and thorns?

2) Here is your heart (holds up heard cut out red construction paper). Now let's imagine you fall in love (insert air quotes) and give it, and your body, to a guy. But then he breaks it. (tears off a piece of the heart). Continue until heart is in pieces. Then take construction paper and try to tape it back together, ask now thoroughly cowed daughter if she really wants to give her husband a patched together, taped up heart on their wedding night?

I had the purity ring, went to the purity rallies (400 kids being told condoms don't work against semen, so why would they work against HIV?), the list goes on and on...

And Valenti addresses all of them in her book. It is a well-reasoned, at times bitingly sarcastic, analysis of the 'purity' movement in the U.S. I will not hesitate to say: EVERYONE who has a daughter, or even son, who might go through abstinence only education in their public school, needs to read this book. I'm going to do my best to distill some of its main points below, but it's definitely worth the read.

She starts off by highlighting the danger of the argument that a woman is 'good' solely on the basis of whether or not she's had sex. As she uses the actual statements of religious leaders and the like to illustrate - they are doing women a great disservice by tying morality to solely what one doesn't do . Her point is, basically, that by doing so we are not giving young girls the skills to make moral decisions and take moral action if needed. Notice that word 'action?' Because, at its heart, the notion that a girl is bad/good on the basis of her virginity is passive. Morality is tied to the girl doing...nothing. Not standing up and speaking up when her fellow man is abused, not marching for gay marriage, not many of the other actions I would consider to be moral. Nope. It's if she does nothing.

Which gets back to...those damn women need to get back in the kitchen.

She then delves into the extremely negative language and guilt (see my father's comments above) that the purity movement uses to convince young girls that sex is bad. And then takes it deeper to show how truly destructive these comments are to a woman's self-esteem and self-worth.

As a side note: I remember in college, when I was starting to question much of what I'd been taught, someone mentioned their virginity as what would make them attractive to a man. And I asked, honestly, "So if he's marrying you because you're a virgin, what happens after the first night? Are you not worth anything then?"

There are discussions of porn, the sexualization of women of color and how it ties to the higher levels of rape and abuse among them, the language of rape (she shouldn't have been in that part of town at night boils down to 'she should be home in the kitchen'), and where all the evangelical Christian rhetoric leaves homosexual youth, but the discussion I really liked was the one on abstinence education.

Government funded abstinence education, to be exact.

My previous attitude towards it was, "whatever, it can't hurt." Um, no. Not when the abstinence educators are spouting lies (condoms don't work) and other misinformation. As Valenti points out, what this means statistically is that young people don't chose not to have sex, they chose to have sex without condoms.

Oops.

This is not a book that says 'go out and have irresponsible sex with everyone you meet!' Nope, what Valenti argues for is a final break with the valuing of women solely on the basis of their sexual experience. With a doctrine that is essentially trying to shove women back to the idealized 1950's (guess what, people were having sex outside of marriage then, too).

In short: though I am not the best at reviewing books, I strongly urge all the feminist women on my friendslist to pick it up. Or request it at their local library. I'm posting this as public because I want it to reach as wide an audience as possible, but I am screening comments.

- D