- Rating:
- 80%
- Format:
- Book
- Year:
- 2009
- Predominant Genre:
- Non-fiction
- Plot:
- None
- Theme(s):
- Personal change
- Self-expression
- Compassion
- Totalitarianism
- Ethical Politics
- Similar Title(s):
- Unknown
- Best Performance(s):
- None
How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
Interesting book about the medical non-existence of sexual virginity - whose mere abstraction is designed by White men to oppress White women.
Such a concept of virginity is also a backdoor means of discussing and defining sex – the same similarly problematic concept that ex-US president Bill Clinton discovered after claiming he did not have sex with that woman!
What Whites consider to be sex also determines what they deem to be the point at which we lose our virginity; leading to all such definitions being essentially subjective. It is also impossible to accurately define someone in terms of what they have not done rather than in terms of what they have.
Because the purity myth is essentially a Christian fundamentalist moral crusade, virginity is associated with ethics and morality. This, to the extent that what you have not done, allows you to consider yourself good no matter what else you actually have done. This means that a woman’s moral value is determined by Whites via her sexuality and by nothing else. This misogyny and gynophobia is hypocritical since men are not so judged; trying to force women into a passive role as a backlash against the achievements of feminism.
This White purity myth also only extends to the young, White, skinny, affluent and able-bodied girls - who nost-often give the impression of being vacuous, silly and vapid.
The attempt is being made to try to infantilize White girls to make them easier to control and lessen the White adult fear of adolescent sexuality. Christian fundamentalists are objectifying women’s bodies and pathologizing women’s sexuality in a way that directly mirrors the misogyny and gynophobia such people claim pornography indulges in. The essential belief here is that White women are inferior, in some way, to White men.
The problem with the Christian definition of virginity and sexual activity is that is does not include homosexuals. The latter are always virgins since their sexual practices lack positive recognition as acceptable sex.
Such fundamentalists also claim that feminism – despite its gains for White women in the West – is to blame for women’s enjoying sex on their own terms and is allegedly, thus, unfeminine. In this view, only “pure” women can be raped; sex workers and women who enjoy sex cannot. This gives rapists carte blanche to rape any woman who is not a virgin, since they are not really being raped because they “asked for it” by being sexually active in the first place. It also tells virgins that such assault is not really considered a crime, but the inevitable price they would have to pay for losing their virginity; that is, what they do not actually possess.
The purity myth is thus something that insecure White men clutch at as a means of resisting the fact that White Western masculinity is in crisis.
The basic problem with this book is that it is an attempt to abolish a concept: Virginity.
Like the War on Terror, you cannot abolish the idea of terrorism unless you abolish all humans, since that is the only sure way to abolish the ideas they keep in their heads. You can only kill the terrorist – never the terror; you can only create the virgin, but not kill the underlying concept.
Moreover, the author’s anger sometimes gets in the way of making her often extremely-valid points about the essential White inconsistency of claiming that those seeking sexual fulfillment are studs if male, but sluts if female.
The book’s ethnocentric focus is also the source of some amusement, if you are not Caucasian; suggesting, as it does, that White men do not like White women very much. In addition, the book would have benefited from being shorter and less repetitious but, all in all, a very good read for those of a political bent.
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