The Purity Myth (11 page)

* As if a woman’s vagina were simply exhausted before the surgery.

jessica valenti
73

surgeries may be leading women to have “misguided assumptions” about what is normal.
27
The ACOG even went as far as to release a warning about the sur- gery, noting that it is “deceptive” for doctors to give patients the impression that these procedures are “accepted and routine surgical practices.”
28

But “normalcy” in this regard is hard to define, given our porned culture. The Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute, for example, says on its website that “many women bring us magazines such as
Playboy”
to show the doctor the aesthetic they’re looking for. “Normalcy” is no longer defined by women—it’s defined by porn magazines and movies that feature young girls and uniform-looking vulvae.

Psychologist and sex therapist Laurie Betito, speaking in Montreal in 2005 at the 17th World Congress of Sexology, said that “the pathologizing of changes associated withagecreatesasurgicalesthetic,” evenwhenitcomestoourvaginas. Women in America
already
pathologize aging, so it’s no surprise that they’d be so keen to fall in line to alter the next body part we’re meant to obsess over.

The real disservice to women here is that despite the fact that the plastic-surgery industry frames vaginal rejuvenation as “freeing” and benefit- ing women, the procedure’s real purpose is rarely for women’s pleasure—it’s almost always done for either men’s physical pleasure or aesthetic acceptance.* Most of the personal stories on surgeons’ websites and in media coverage recall women’s getting the surgery as a “gift” for their husbands or male partners.

Thirty-two-year-old Lisseth Figueroa of Los Angeles, for example, said in
The Washington Post
that she got the surgery to save her marriage. “I did it for both of us. . . . Before the surgery I felt really old . . . and ugly. Since the surgery, that’s changed. I’m very happy with it—and so is my husband.”
29

• It occurs to me that when this surgery is performed on women in Africa, we call it female genital mutilation, but in the oh-so-enlightened United States, we call them designer vaginas. You know, because American women are
  empowered.
  

• 74
  the Purity myth
  

  Another woman, on an online forum for women who have gotten or are considering the surgery, says she underwent a hymen replacement so that her husband could “take [her] virginity again.” This goes to show just how silly the notion of virginity really is. After all, these women aren’t
  actu- ally
  becoming virgins, they’re just getting the supposed physical character- istics thereof—and even that’s questionable. As Hanne Blank points out in her book
  Virgin,
  the hymen is not really an indicator of virginity at all: “Hymens and vaginas vary considerably, as do reactions to vaginal penetra- tion.” In other words, there really isn’t any way to tell if a woman has had sex. So why the hymen obsession?
  

  We became aware of hymens because we are aware of something we call
  

  virginity. We found the hymen because we found reasons to search women’s bodies for some bit of f lesh that embodied this quality we call “virginity,”
  

  some physical proof that it existed.
  30
  

  Interesting to consider, isn’t it, that someone somewhere, at some point in history, decided to figure out a way to measure a woman’s virginity— regardless of the fact that there are certainly other ways to break a hymen? It’s no surprise, then, that hymenoplasty in particular is so intensely tied up with the purity myth: Despite the fact that a virginity/hymen connection is not absolute, women are desperate to have a physical indicator of virginity. That’s how embedded the myth is in our psyches.
  

  Unfortunately, trying to turn women into little girls doesn’t stop at ter- rifying genital surgeries. Lest women be seen as too womanly, they can also get “mommy makeovers” right after they give birth. This postpartum plastic surgery gives new moms a tummy tuck, breast lift, and liposuction, all to get
  

  jessica valenti
  75
  

  their younger, non-mom bodies back. Or there’s also the MILF (mom I’d like to fuck) trend in pop and porn culture, in which “hot moms” are those who look more like college students than mothers. Or schoolgirl outfits for grown women (think Halloween or the popular girl “band” the Pussycat Dolls— those short plaid skirts are everywhere!). And, of course, there’s the preva- lence of virgin porn, in which young-looking actresses pretend to lose their virginity (generally to much older men). The valorization of youth, and espe- cially of virginity, is everywhere.
  

  But for some women, young or old, plastic surgeries and Bratz bralettes are the least of their worries. Too many women struggle just to be seen.
  

  i n v i s i b l e g i r l s
  

  Certain kinds of sexualization, terrifying kinds, affect girls daily and yet rarely make the news or appear on the virginity movement’s radar. When it comes to girls who are trafficked or forced into the sex trade, there’s relatively little outrage or talk about “lost innocence.” Perhaps that’s because these girls weren’t considered innocent in the first place.
  

  Approximately two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand ado- lescents are sexually exploited—through prostitution, trafficking, child sex tourism, or pornography—annually in the United States.
  31
  According to Rachel Lloyd,* founder and executive director of Girls Educational & Men-
  

  

• Lloyd’s own story is worth telling: When she was thirteen years old, she left school to take care of her alcoholic mother. After working in factories and restaurants in her home country of England, she quickly turned to criminal activity as a way to make money. It wasn’t long before she got heavily involved in drugs and relationships with older men. By age seventeen, Lloyd had moved to Germany and was turning tricks in a Munich strip club. It wasn’t until her pimp tried to kill her that she turned to a local church for help. Years later, in 1999, she founded GEMS, which provides preventative and transitional services to young, mostly teenage women who are involved in prostitution or sexually violent situations.
  32
  

toring Services (GEMS) in New York City, many of the girls who are being exploited and have no place to go for help are often overlooked because they don’t qualify as “perfect virgins.”

In a report on how to best advocate for girls who are sexually exploited and trafficked for money, Lloyd notes that in areas like New York City, such victims are often young women of color from low-income communities “who are perceived as inherently ‘loose,’ unredeemable, and hopeless.”

“These young women are often not just absent from public debate, but actively denigrated and seen as complicit in their abuse,” Lloyd writes.
33

Instead of receiving help, these girls are often persecuted—they’re arrested and punished by a system that sees them not as victims, but as criminals.

Ironically, if the girls Lloyd helps were smuggled in from China or trafficked from some eastern European country, rather than having grown up in the Bronx, they’d be given federal protection under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But in New York, the girls Lloyd works with are considered prostitutes—criminals who should be locked up no matter how young they are or how dire the circumstances they come from might be. And because they are overwhelmingly young, low-income women of color, the system is all too happy to oblige. Try to imagine a scourge of blonde teen girls being arrested and thrown in juvenile detention after being raped, abused, and forced to sell their bodies—people would be marching in the street; the media would be outraged. But for the girls of GEMS, there’s only silence.

Unfortunately, exploitation doesn’t stop on the streets. With the advent of the Internet, more insidious forms of sexualization are broadcast for the world to see—yet remain on the margins of the public’s radar. As authorities crack

jessica valenti
77

down on child pornography online, pedophiles are finding new and improved ways to circumvent the law; the latest is child “supermodel” websites.

Featuring pictures of prepubescent girls posing provocatively in bikinis, underwear (often thongs), or clothing that is, at best, disturbingly inappro- priate, these websites promote themselves as child “modeling” sites, though they’re clearly marketed toward a predatory audience.

Julie Posey of Pedowatch, an online watchdog group aimed at protect- ing children, recently said in
Wired
magazine, “Why else would someone pay to see kids in their underwear?”
34

When
Wired
investigated these websites—which are owned primarily by one company based in Florida—the virtual fan club members’ comments made the sites’ intentions crystal clear:

[There are] men with nicknames such as “Cum ta Poppa.” At one of Amber’s fan clubs, “ humberthaze” writes: “We only get glimpses of her potential when she does a bit of ‘ bump and g ,’ but then she quickly relapses into something

awkward and childish. Sometimes you can hear the photographer get excited when she gives us what we/he want(s). She’ ll do a little killer wiggle and we hear him say quickly, ‘What was that?’ or ‘Do that again!!!’”

One user even complained, “She’s gotten too developed for my taste, I doubt I’ll be an Amber fan anymore.”

It doesn’t get much more obvious than that, but because these websites don’t show children engaging in real or simulated sex, they’re legal.

Obviously, websites like these, unlike purity balls or padded bras, are
overtly
sexual. But the line is surprisingly thin. Think about it: How different is deliberately turning young girls into sex objects by having them pose in

underwear from getting them dolled up for a child beauty pageant or a date with Daddy? Yes, the former is meant to elicit sexual arousal, but just because the latter is couched in the language of purity doesn’t make it any less sex- ual. Either way, the focus is still on girls’ sexuality, and it’s still making them “women” before their time.

o u r h y m e ns , o u r s e l v e s ?

Whether it’s surgery or purity balls, a woman dressing up like a Catholic schoolgirl for Halloween or a child dressing in a ball gown for a beauty pageant, the common theme is that women’s—nay,
girls’
—sexuality has become our only truly valued personal characteristic. And for America’s invisible girls, that fetishization often means a life of violence and punish- ment (more on the way women are punished for violating purity guide- lines in Chapter 7).

Any way you slice it, women’s identities are so tied up with whether or not we’ve had sex, or how sexual or abstinent we are, that it’s become almost impossible to think of ourselves as women outside of that framework. And really, while it’s pop culture that gets the most attention in this regard, it’s the virginity movement that’s reinforcing the notion.

After all, what’s the difference,
really,
between the shirt sold at purity balls—a tight babydoll tee that says, I’m Waiting—and the one recently pulled from Delia’s (a clothing store for preteen and teenage girls) that shouts in rainbow colors, I’m Tight Like Spandex? Sure, the Delia’s tee is the more vulgar of the two, but the intent is the same. They both announce virginity and they both make clear that virginity—or at least its assumed physical attri- butes—is a part of the wearer’s identity.

In my interview with Durham, she noted that “girls need informa-

jessica valenti
79

tion, support and nurture as they move into a sexually empowered adult- hood where they can make intelligent and intentional sexual choices for themselves.” That’s what we need to be fighting for—a nuanced, respect- ful, informed vision of sexuality for young girls. Because what we have now—sexualization and fetishization—is hurting girls every day.