Mr. Pinup

Why is our culture so obsessed with girls’ chastity? Author Jessica Valenti talks about how purity balls and “barely legal” porn both feed the same idea: That a woman’s worth is between her legs.

May 16, 2009 | The world wants a piece of 22-year-old Natalie Dylan — and not because of her glossy pout, smoky eyes or heaving chest. It’s something far more coveted than beauty: her virginity. In a bold move that made headlines around the world this fall, Dylan put her purity on the auction block, promising Mr. Right Price a chance at deflowering her. The current high bid for this supposedly priceless commodity: $3.8 million.

That’s just a sideshow in pop culture‘s chastity circus: Take 16-year-old “Hannah Montana” star Miley Cyrus, who has publicly vowed to wait until marriage, or the raft of other tween idols — the Jonas Brothers, Disney’s Selena Gomez and “American Idol” winner Jordin Sparks — who like to flash their silver purity rings for the cameras. Toss in the popularity of “barely legal” porn, purity balls and costly “hymen repair,” and you might start to wonder: What’s with the virginity fetish?

That’s the question Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com, answers in “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.” As Valenti, the current poster girl for third-wave feminism, writes in her typically snarky tone: It’s not like we can just put our “Saran-wrapped hymens away in a freezer” or paste them “in a scrapbook.” (Well, we could, but who would want to?) Those types of, uh, vivid arguments are also found on her popular feminist Web site, which bears a logo of the classic mud-flap girl giving the finger. Mixing rude-girl slang with the academic jargon of a feminist textbook, the 30-year-old Rutgers University lecturer knows how to make feminism accessible to a young, apathetic audience: Her first book, “Full Frontal Feminism,” featured a generous heaping of the F-word (not the one found in the title) and a butt-naked lady on the cover.

via The virginity fetish | Salon Life.

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