The Purity Myth Response I am female- raised in a middle class home in northern Carolina, brought up Baptist but a self-proclaimed

d non-denominational panentheist. I am a virgin. I do not share these things because I enjoy sharing biographical facts about myself, but because they are among an infinite number of qualities and factors that define how I view concepts of purity and sexuality. Consequently, they are also vital in how I responded to our class viewing of The Purity Myth. As the film spends a great deal of time explicating, one of the most fundamental disservices that society inflicts upon its young people is the duality of desirable character traits between male and female paradigms. Young boys are taught curiosity, bravery, and courage. Girls are groomed in the realms of kindness, caretaking, and chastity. Boys are told to push limitations. Girls are given them. Young men are given magnifying glasses and helmets and given free reign to uncover the wealth of the human experience, while their female counterparts are put in white dresses, stood on pedestals, and told that they had better sit still and look pretty or else. This moral relativism manifests itself especially in any and all manners of sexuality. A woman who does not stay within the bounds of traditional sexuality: post-marital, monogamous, and what is colloquially referred to as vanilla sex is at best considered promiscuous. More commonly, she is called a whore. Men who do similarly are praised. The Purity Illustrates this phenomenon in a side-by-side comparison of two films- The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Easy A. In the former, a man is urged to renounce his sexual inexperience. In the latter, a young woman is judged harshly for supposedly doing the same. Abstinence only education is stressed within the film as being detrimental to the sexual and psychological health of teens and young adults. They are scared away from sex, given what are at least occasionally falsified statistics that more-or-less identify sex as a disease-riddled pastime of the weak and licentious that results in a broken heart and body 100% of the time. In my opinion, this method is more dangerous than any praising sexual exploration- it demonizes a natural and necessary part of human existence. The alternative method, what I would refer to as luring is only marginally better. In these instances, abstinence instructors attempt to bait teens into believing their message via humor or prizes, such as small tokens or destination conferences. Programs like this are fundamentally flawed. They attempt to remove sex from young people, but by forcing these ideologies on increasingly young audiences, they are by their own actions, sexualizing them. Telling a six year-old child that sex is bad is to tell a six year-old child that they should be thinking about sex. It is making the question of sex more important than the maths they have not learned yet, the words they still do not understand, the cultures they have not uncovered, and the person that they have yet to become. This flaw is also present in the growing prevalence of purity balls in which young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers. Besides being creepy, which it is, the balls also seem to promote pre-pubescent sexuality where young girls where evening gowns and makeup and participate in pseudo-ritualistic ceremonies pledging their sexuality to their fathers. It is unclear of what this means, of what owning a childs sexuality entitles allows a person to do.

I am not pro-abstinence, though people tend to assume so when they learn that I am both religious and sexually inexperienced. They raise their brows and attempt to educate me on the wonders of sex. They somehow unfailingly manage to attack my belief in God while doing so. They call me sweet, innocent. Pure. Somehow, it always comes of as derisive. At church, or among my older and more conservative relatives, they also raise their brows. They purse their lips and cross their arms when I show them nude drawings, when I speak against antihomosexuality, when I refuse to equate purity or godliness or womanhood with chastity. Free they call me. Blasphemous. And quietly, under their breath and in their eyes, whore. So- southern middle class, spiritually ambiguous, female. Aunt, sister, daughter. Reader of poetry, fantasy literature, and the beloved trashy romance novels. Brown like earth. Soft like the rain. Nave, optimistic, scared as hell. Virgin. Whore. All of the above in no particular order, though abstinence promoters would have me believe that to be a virgin is more important than being a loving daughter. That somehow not having sex is my greatest and most prevalent achievement, which is something that I take great offense to. More offense than I take to being seen as a blaspheming heretic tramp. I am all of these things and have the potential to be so much more. I maintain that I would not be half the person that I am if Id been raised by the sort of mother who thought that being a woman was the end all, be all of my existence, and that my virginity was the full capacity of my worth. Instead I was taught strength and kindness, curiosity and kindness- traits which are invaluable to all people, regardless of gender.