If you’re looking for The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women quotes about sex, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people and sources. And in this article we share a list of the 11 most interesting The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women quotes about sex from Jessica Valenti. Let’s get inspired!
The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women quotes about sex
If being premenstrual is “innocence, ” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren’t about lost innocence; they’re about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn’t want women to be adults. Despite the movement’s protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn’t a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women’s sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl’s sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
In addition to shaming sexual-assault victims, positioning abstinence as women’s domain further promotes the notion that it’s women’s morality that’s on the line when it comes to sex, men just can’t help themselves, so their ethics are safe from criticism.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won’t have sex, but rather that they’ll have it without pleasure.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically ’empowered’ or ‘feminist.’ I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting womenis a radical act.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
By erasing any nuance and complexity about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn’t seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there’s no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
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 decision to have sex, or not, shouldn’t impact how she’s seen as a moral actor.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity, ” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can’t help themselves not only drives home the point that women’s sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men’s sexual behavior.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
When abstinence curricula contain information about sexual abuse or assault (though they often don’t), the message is similar: The onus of preventing sexual assault is on girls, not on men.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
When women’s sexuality is imagined to be passive or “dirty, ” it also means that men’s sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men’s minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we’re encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that’s detrimental to both men and women.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
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