House of Eratosthenes

Jessica Valenti says I can’t give her book a fair hearing unless I buy a copy of it and read it for myself. Sounds reasonable. It also sounds suspiciously convenient.

Anti-feminists tell me what my book is about: Turning teens into sluts!

I figured that my new book would get some negative attention from conservative blogs, but I kinda thought that would happen once the book was, you know…published.

But it seems that there’s no reason to wait for pesky things like the actual content of the book to start blogging about what The Purity Myth is all about. So apparently, the purpose of my book is to “turn America’s teenagers into raging whores.” Woo hoo!
:
House of Eratosthenes: “Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one.”

But Cassy Fiano’s post was my fave, “Putting out is SO much better for girls than abstinence.” (And it’s not just because her blog design uses a rose/gun combo that speaks volumes.)

Fiano writes that I have an “obsession with sluttiness.”

Why is it so many feminists are so obsessed with turning teenage girls into raging whores? How is that something you tell girls they should aspire to?

…I honestly think that what most of this is about when it comes to feminists like Jessica is self-loathing… you know, misery loves company and all. I can’t help but see someone extremely misguided, bitter, and angry in Jessica and the feminists like her. What’s truly pathetic is that they aren’t content with screwing up their own lives. No… they’ve got to ruin the lives of American teenage girls as well.

What I find most interesting about Fiano and the other posts is that they’re the ones who are talking about ‘sluts’, ‘whores’ and women being promiscuous. (In fact, one of Fiano’s classy commenters suggests that I’m promiscuous and that’s why I wrote the book.) The book cover says nothing about sex, promiscuity or the like – they make that jump. Why? Because for conservatives and purity pushers, the only alternative to being a virgin is being [a] whore. There’s no in-between for them, there’s no complexity or nuance when it comes to sexuality. And that’s why I wanted to write this book. Seriously, these bloggers are making my point for me!

Another thing I found amusing about these responses was that almost all of them took the subtitle to mean that I think virginity is hurting young women, when what when I actually wrote is that “America’s obsession with virginity” is what’s damaging.

So for the record: I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don’t really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that’s the point. I believe that a young woman’s sexual choices – no matter what they be – shouldn’t have a bearing on how they’re seen as moral actors. I also believe that slut-shaming and fetishizing virginity is not just about only valuing women for their sexuality (or lack thereof), but that it’s also part of a larger agenda that seeks to regress women’s rights and return to traditional gender roles. But if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read the book.

Oh, I see, so it’s not virginity that is damaging, it is the obsession with virginity. Feminists aren’t about young girls having as much sex as possible, they’re about people minding their own business. It all seems so clear now!

Except…it doesn’t. As Yoda said, “This one, a long time have I watched.” We are frequent visitors to Feministing. It’s one of the most entertaining sites on the net. Back in July, the site chose to attack Brad Henning, who gives abstinence-only presentations at schools. Now, I don’t have much of an opinion about Mr. Henning one way or another, and I don’t know how you feel about abstinence-only presentations.

But I was fascinated at Feministing’s choice of spokesperson against Mr. Henning. It was a girl who used to sit through Henning’s lectures, grown up into an older girl who’d lost her virginity, grown up still further into a married lady living in an open marriage, screwing another eight guys since tying the knot. She didn’t make much of a point with her letter, other than that she didn’t believe in abstinance-only education…a point lots of others could make. But good heavens, all the pats on the back she got from screwing lots of other guys, with her hubby’s consent, and with that background daring to boldly confront that awful Brad Henning!

As a point of interest, our marriage is open. My husband was the seventh man I slept with, and now that number has almost doubled to 15. Our marriage is more happy and healthy since we’ve opened it than it was before. This is because it is not sex which binds us together, but our commitment to each other. We are not wearing sex blinders. The key to a good marriage is trust and communication, two things that HAD to grow exponentially when our marriage opened up. If you wish to prepare students for solid marriages, then exercises in building trust and communication skills will take you much farther than telling the kids to just wait to have sex until they’re married.

Huh. I know quite a few married couples. I haven’t made the acquaintance of any open-relationship folks, since my days in Seattle…some twenty years ago. Wouldn’t it have been easier to find someone in a normal, monogamous union to offer this kind of personal testimony? Wouldn’t that message then be much clearer? I’d say if Feministing is concerned about confusion between its attacks on virginity, and obsessions with virginity — it’s only concerned about this to a certain extent. Not exactly losing sleep over it.

I don’t think there’s been any such confusion at all. This is pure backpedaling.

It’s not really about minding your own business; it’s about anybody who can be a slut, being one. Feminists may want others to mind their own business with respect to whether a young lady is keeping herself intact or not. But that doesn’t mean they themselves intend to mind their beeswax with regard to same. And yes, we have more than adequate reason to believe third-wave feminists in general, and Ms. Valenti & fellow modmins in particular, are infatuated with the idea of nubile young ladies ridin’ the baloney pony. The more the better. Cassy’s words ring true, and I’ll stand behind my own as well.

They aren’t hostile to the idea of chastity? I’ll take on that debate. But only with people who are familiar with the Feministing website. In the world of Feministing, parents must take absolute zero interest in whether their children are coming to sexual maturity in a responsible way. If they pay any attention to this at all, it is called “fetishizing.”

I nearly lost my mind when I read this gushing piece from Time Magazine about purity balls.

What was amazing to me about the reporting of this article was despite hearing all of these creepy anecdotes – and admitting that girls as young as four are participating in a ceremony about their virginity – writer Nancy Gibbs still managed to be smitten over the whole shebang.

But first…a creepy anecdote.

Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She’ll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today’s world,” she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet–a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. “On my wedding day, he’ll give it to my husband,” she explains. “It’s a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I’m supposed to be loved.”

Paging Dr. Freud! But Gibbs is loving it.

Leave aside for a moment the critics who recoil at the symbols, the patriarchy, the very use of the term purity, with its shadow of stains and stigma. Whatever guests came looking for, they are likely to come away with something unexpected. The goal seems less about making judgments than about making memories.

And making sure young women think their worth is dependent on whether or not they’re sexual. So, no Ms. Gibbs, I think I won’t “leave aside” that very real and very dangerous message. Thanks anyway!

Gibbs continues to totally miss the point:

Purity is certainly a loaded word–but is there anyone who thinks it’s a good idea for 12-year-olds to have sex? Or a bad idea for fathers to be engaged in the lives of their daughters and promise to practice what they preach? Parents won’t necessarily say this out loud, but isn’t it better to set the bar high and miss than not even try?

Are families who don’t expect their daughters to promise their virginity to their dads promoting sex for 12 year-olds? Can’t dads be engaged in the lives of their daughters without worrying about the state of their hymen? And is telling women that their moral compass lays in between their legs really setting the bar high?

Flowery language and valorizing these days doesn’t change what purity balls are about: the ownership and fetishizing of young girls’ sexuality.

Funny. If you open up the Time Magazine article and read it for yourself, what you find doesn’t have an awful lot to do with four-year-old girls being told their “worth” is measured by whether they have sex or not. You don’t even read anything, contrary to what you might expect, about contingencies laid down upon a young lady’s worth as a person. Quite to the contrary, what you read about is such pre-conditions being removed…as in…the girls are made to understand they don’t have to hook up with a guy in order to be worth something. I guess Valenti didn’t want you to read that part for yourself.

Kylie talks with an unblinking confidence about a promise that she says is spiritual, mental and physical. “It’s something I’m very proud of. I plan to keep pure until marriage. It’s a promise I made to myself–not pressure from my parents,” she says. She speaks plainly about what she wants in her life, what she thinks she has the power to control and what she doesn’t. “I’m very much at peace about this,” she says, and looks out across the twirling room. “I don’t feel like I need to seek a man. I will be found.”

Irony. This used to be what feminism was all about. Jessica Valenti says it’s creepy. What she means by “fetishization,” I don’t know for sure, and I’m not sure shelling out a bunch of greenbacks for her latest book will clear it up for me.

I do know one thing for absolute sure.

The brand of feminism practiced at Feministing, has very little, or nothing, to do with minding your own business. Feminists there regularly get involved, get their cackles up, write their letters, when old magazines are dug out of dusty archives that they find displeasing; or when advertisements for household cleaning products are aimed at women; or when private citizens choose to form their own opinions about Sarah Palin being a liberated woman (since she is one); or when said private citizens form other disturbing opinions, such as marriage being between a man and a woman.

Nope. Feministing’s brand of feminism has nothing to do with minding your own business.

Not unless the Feministing-feminists can keep an exemption from such a rule, for themselves.

About everything.

Having said that — glad they think us worthy of mention over there. Now we know we’ve arrived. Maybe by the end of next week we’ll be Keith Olberman’s Worst Person in the World.

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Valenti BackpedalsThursday, October 9th, 2008

Valenti Backpedals
Thursday, October 9th, 2008