The Purity Myth
How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
ISBN-10: 1580052533
ISBN-13: 9781580052535
300 pages
Hardcover
$24.95 US
Published: April 2009
About the Book
The United States is obsessed with virginity—from the media to schools to government agencies. This panic is ensuring that young women’s ability to be moral agents is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. Jessica Valenti, executive editor of Feministing.com and author of Full Frontal Feminism and Yes Means Yes, addresses this poignant issue in her latest book, The Purity Myth. Valenti argues that the country’s intense focus on chastity is extremely damaging to young women. Through in depth analysis of cultural stereotypes and media messages, Valenti reveals that powerful messages—ranging from abstinence curriculum to “Girls Gone Wild” commercials—place a young woman’s worth entirely on her sexuality. Morals are therefore linked purely to sexual behavior, as opposed to values like honesty, kindness, and altruism.
Valenti approaches the topic head-on, shedding light on chastity in a historical context, abstinence-only education, pornography, and public punishments for those who dare to have sex, among other critical issues. She also offers solutions that pave the way for a future without a damaging emphasis on virginity, including a call to rethink male sexuality and reframing the idea of “losing it.” With Valenti’s usual balance of intelligence and wit, The Purity Myth presents a powerful and revolutionary argument that girls and women, even in this day and age, are overly valued for their sexuality, and that this needs to stop.
About Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti is the founder and Executive Editor of Feministing.com and the author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. She is also the blogger for BushvChoice.com, NARAL’s Pro-Choice America’s site. Jessica is the co-founder of The Real Hot 100, a national campaign aimed to bring attention to the work that young women activists are doing in the United States. She has a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and has worked for organizations such as Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), Planned Parenthood, the Women's Environment, and Development Organization (WEDO) and Ms. magazine. She has also volunteered at Mount Sinai's Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program (SAVI) as an emergency room advocate and taught Women's Studies at SUNY Albany.
Feministing.com is a well-established site in the feminist and blog communities—particularly with younger women. Feministing’s irreverent voice and sarcastic tone combined with its ability to cover hard news stories makes the site stand out from its online peers. Feministing is the most popular feminist blog, and is quickly becoming the most popular feminist website—it’s ranked higher than feminist.com or feminist.org. The site’s audience is growing at an extremely fast rate. Feministing has gained approximately 10,000 new hits a month since last year; the site now has about 150,000 unique readers every month. Feministing has been covered in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Dallas Morning News, The Ottowa Sun, and In These Times, and on Salon.com, Women’s eNews, and Slate.com. Jessica Valenti has been quoted extensively in print and has been featured on Air America Radio’s The Majority Report and in the popular podcast SexTalk. Jessica was also a recent speaker at the National Council for Research on Women’s annual Power Matters conference.
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