Radicle Gardening

This paper was written for one of my classes last semester, it's not perfect because I was racing against the clock and had to turn it in online the same night. I plan on revising and extending this paper in the future, especially the conclusion, but until then I'm pretty proud of it and decided I'd share what I found in my research.

The Failures and Consequences of the "Purity Movement"

When I first became aware of the concept, “there is no capital ‘T’ truth,” by way of my high school English teacher, I was 16, and as a female, lived in an environment thick with gender roles. With subliminal, sometimes even blatant assertiveness, the interactions of my peer were formulaic of such roles, which we inadvertently used as scales to gauge social acceptability. The socialized reinforcement we received from birth by such gendered myths has caused much of America’s youth to internalize them as “Truth” in often devastating ways. With little question, these “Truths” were accepted as just the way things were, like social absolutes that were void of practical reasoning and yet ridged and taboo to subvert. I was always taught, even from a young age, that teenage boys were raging with hormones and only had one thing on their minds…SEX! This maybe very true of most guys, but statements like that conveniently leave out an equally prevalent reality; girls think about sex too! Some ALL the time even (I know! Gasp)! Borrowing from the Victorian understanding of femininity as being, "virginal and almost childlike, with 'a shrinking timidity of speech, a humility of voice, a shy glance, a hesitating gesture', " (qtd. Clarke 49) a woman in society today who is assertive, independent and engages in pre-marital sexuality would be seen as “impure,” a girl “gone wild,” or trying to be “one of the guys.” During my teenage days for example, never could a girl openly share the same smug pride as a guy for her sexual adventures. Significantly less stressed on men, for women in conservative society, premarital sex is seen as shameful and as the loss of a “gift” to her future husband. The direct association of sexual “purity” with moral value is, to this day, an unfortunately common paradigm, partnered with the institutionalized skewing or suppression of accurate information about contraceptives and STIs. Through out our culture’s history a disproportionate amount of concern has been placed especially on women and their sexual experience or inexperience, creating a distinctly “pure virgin vs slut” dichotomic view of female sexuality. This dichotomy has been engaged in that of a moral tug-of-war over the virtue of a woman based on her sexual choices. One side to this tug-of-war which has long sustained presence is that of the religiously based abstinence, or “purity” movement, a movement which claims to poses the capital “T” truth about morality and sexual health. The issue I take with this idea of purity is not someone’s individual choice to take such a path, but the fact that this movement’s perpetuation of myths about what makes a woman “pure” are based not on objective reasoning but the sexist and manipulative belief that a woman’s sexual status is directly related to her morality and value as a person. Such assertions aid in ensuring ignorance about the preventative methods for pregnancies and STIs, information which abstinence-only education sees as merely enabling promiscuity, teen pregnancy, and STI contraction. Claiming the “True” key to “moral purity” and health, staying a virgin till your wedding night is the only way to go, so they say. What I’d like to dispel is the myth that the “purity” movement is with only pure intention and that abstinence-only sex education is effective in preventing pregnancies and STIs.

Let’s first examine the intent behind the abstinence movement. What I’ve collected from surveying many abstinence sites is a common mission statement that claims a concern for the self-esteem, purity, and health of our youth. But as history has shown, such “altruistic” intentions are easily cast aside once a woman breaks her abstinence promise, revealing a tradition of violence and shame upon the no longer chaste woman. As it’s American roots lie deep in Christianity, attitudes and rules about virginity stem from primarily from biblical texts. Setting the stage for the evolution of current perspectives, in Deuteronomy 22:20-21, if, for a newlywed woman, “no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. You must purge the evil from among you” (New International Version, Deut. 22.20-21). As time has passed the abuse has shifted towards more psychological, rather than physical means to sustain the potency of it’s message. Darren Washington, an abstinence educator affiliated with the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a database for abstinence literature, was quoted stating a very clear message about a woman’s position in pre-marital sexual activity. Perpetuating the dehumanizing “subject-verb-object” view of sex, Washington declares, “Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it. It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker”(Valenti 41). Essentially what Washington seems to be proposing is that a woman is a single-use object that after she has been had sex with once, is too dirty to be worthy of a next partner. She is no longer the fetishized vision of innocence and naïveté – she’s a “sucker”, a fool, “sloppy seconds.” Also, it is ever clear that such matters are not up to debate for women within the context of religion, for example Corinthians 14:34-35 reads, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience to men as also saith the law. And if a woman wants to learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church” (New International Version, Cori. 14.34-35.) With such blatant misogyny, it’s understandable that a woman brought up within this faith and movement would experience an incredible sense of shame if she were to disobey. Together within the aforementioned quotes it appears suspiciously obvious that a woman’s transgression and grasps for autonomy are an immediate threat to the patriarchal foundations of abstinence. But under faith, fear, and shame, the reality hides in secrecy.

Although this movement presents itself as rejecting the hyper sexualization of woman in media and pop culture, it effectively reduces women to the status of sexual property by the labeling a woman’s sexual inexperience as a “gift” to give her future husband, sounding eerily similar to a dowry. A virginity pledger presented as an example through The Abstinence Clearinghouse, exemplifies the importance placed on having the husband the first and only one to unwrap her virginity like present. The then 16 year old Ashley Dial explained, in reference to her virginity, “I don’t want to show up empty handed on my wedding night. I want to have the whole package to give to my husband and my husband only” (Abstinence Clearinghouse.) What kind of message does this send to young girls? That the most important gift on their wedding night is not passion and commitment but their sexual inexperience? What if they are not virgins for their marriage? Will their husbands view them as the “poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker?” The question of where this leaves the value of non-virgins has been a devastating prospect for many women within abstinence culture. Case in point, Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen years old Utah girl who was kidnapped from her home in 2002 by a 57 year old man named Brian David Mitchell and held captive for 9 months, had been so profoundly effected by her conservative society’s views on female sexual purity that escape for her had lost it’s urgency. Having been repeatedly raped by her captor, Smart’s internalization of the abstinence-only education she received became impossible to disregard as a psychological barrier to her liberation. In an interview subsequent to her escape, Smart recalled before her kidnapping, a teacher’s comparison of a sexually active woman to chewed gum, Smart thought, " 'Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.' And that's how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value. ‘Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value’ “ (qtd. Dominguez.) A heart wrenching example of the dehumanizing effects of abstinence-only education, Smart’s freedom and road to recovery eventually brought clarity to the roots of her shame and gave her the courage to speak out against the very education that delayed her freedom.

The abstinence movement often likes to take a step back from it’s moral claims by utilizing pseudo-statistical, scare tactics in attempt to gain secular relevance. It is claimed by the abstinence movement that because of sex education the, “number of premarital pregnancies and abortions has skyrocketed. It is only with the introduction of authentic abstinence education in schools during the 1990s that the rates declined” (Abstinence Clearinghouse.) But in fact the opposite is true. In the Netherlands, a country with a very practical view on sex, “liberal sexual attitudes, excellent sex education, free supplies of contraceptives, and legal abortion,” have earned them the world’s lowest teen pregnancy and abortion rates (Grimes 5). By removing the taboo around sex, the Dutch recognize that, “adolescents are sexual beings and provides them with both information and services in a nonthreatening way,” creating an open line of communication as opposed to shame (Grimes 5). But despite the fact that, “no […] abstinence-only-until-marriage program has been found in a methodologically rigorous study to positively impact teen sexual behavior” (Dreweke) it still holds a firm position in education. When it comes to STI rates Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi were rated as the top 5 states in cases of syphilis, while Mississippi and Louisiana also placed in the top 5 for states with Gonorrhea and Chlamydia (Avert). What is particularly telling is the fact that all of the above mentioned states stress abstinence education and only Alabama provided information about contraceptives (Guttmacher 3). In a video by Youtuber, sex educator, and crisis counselor, Laci Green, a clever analogy is drawn between sex and swimming to demonstrate the irrationality of abstinence-only sex education. The video begins with a fictional parent expressing fear over the risks that are associated with kids swimming. Taking an abstinence-only approach to avoid the associated risks, “we decided to hide the life vests. We did not want to send the message that it was ok to be going in in the first place…would you believe that some of the parents at the school want to have swimming lessons during the school day? It’s as if they want to see their kids drown” (Green 0:09-0:26). If for the majority of people this argument against swimming makes no logical sense, then why is the same abstinence based logic on sexuality being stressed in 27 states (Guttmacher)? Not to mention that only 12 states are required to provide medically accurate information about sex (Guttmacher). Think: if hiding life vests and forbidding swim lessons is to swimming as inaccessibility to contraceptives and comprehensive sex-ed is to sex, our society has some real priority rearranging to do.

The controversiality of sex before marriage has continued to rage on since before biblical times. Whether or not it will ever become a matter of personal choice void of shame or fear, I think, will be dependent upon the prevalence of the institutions that utilize those tactics. The greatest enemy to myth is reason, which I feel has shot down the myths of the abstinence education’s concern for mental and physical well-being.

Works Cited

“Abstinence 101.” Abstinence Clearinghouse. n.p. 2011-2013. web. 28 September 2013.

Advert. “STDs in America.” Adverting HIV and AIDs. web. 1 October 2013

Dominguez, Alex. “Elizabeth Smart Speaks on Human Trafficking.” The Christian Science Monitor. Associated Press, 4 May 2013. web. 25 September 2013.

Dreweke, Joerg. “Review of Key Findings of “Emerging Answers 2007” Report on Sex Education Programs.” Guttmacher Institute. November 2007. web. 28 September 2013.

Green, Laci. “A IS FOR ABSTINENCE.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 18 January 2013. web. 19 January 2013.

Gross, George. "Mary Cowden Clarke, the Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, and the Sex Education of Victorian Women." Victorian Studies, 16 (1972): 49.

Grimes, David A. MD. “Updates in Contraception From The XVI World Congress of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.” MedScape. 20 September 2000. Pg. 5. web. 27 September 2013.

Guttmacher Institute. “Sex and HIV Education.” Guttmacher Institute. web. 1 October 2013.

New International Version (NIV). “Deuteronomy 22:20-21.” “Corinthians 14:34-35.” Biblica Inc.. 2011. web.