The Purity Myth (13 page)

* The idea that someone would want to consume “authentically” humiliating films is dis- couraging, to say the least, but it parallels current cultural notions of American women as stupid and vapid.

w o m e n o f P o r n , w o m e n o f P u r i t y

There are many (many, many) genres of pornography, but what I find most interesting is the kind of pornography that reveals an image of women that is strikingly similar to what purity culture would like women to be.

Take Real Dolls, for example. These dolls—which their distributor pub- licizes as “the most realistic love doll in the world”—are life-size sex man- nequins that look disconcertingly like, well, real women. The dolls have articulated skeletons (for “anatomically correct positioning,” says the web- site
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) and three orifices. Buyers can choose from ten body types, sixteen in- terchangeable faces, and different wigs, makeup, and even pubic hairstyles. For all of this customization and use of high-end materials, consumers pay about $6,500 per doll.* There is even a community of men online who call themselves iDollators—they discuss their real dolls, post pictures of them, and run a monthly web magazine,
Cover Doll.
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In an article for Salon.com, reporter Meghan Laslocky spent months on iDollator forums and websites, talking to men (online and off) about their Real Dolls. One website, which she called “Hello Dolly” to protect the users of the forum, is nearly twelve thousand members strong—Laslocky called it “a place where all my worst fears about men churned in an awful froth.”

Here were thousands of men who love the idea of peeling a woman’s face

of f and replacing it with another, who revel in taking pornographic photo- graphs of their “girlfriends” and sharing them with their friends, men who glory in sex unfettered by the daily push-pull of a relationship, men who might have lit tle respect for the word “no.”
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* For the thrifty Real Doll purchaser, headless, limbless torsos run just $1,299.

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And, in what seems like a natural next step for men who see plastic dolls as perfect women, Real Doll users often find ways to abuse their dolls. When Laslocky interviewed a Real Doll repairman, he spoke about badly mutilated dolls with their breasts hanging off, their hands and fingers severed. Another entrepreneurial type started a website to “rent out” Real Dolls. “Imagine love making for as long as you want and only in the ways that you want,” reads the site. “A doll that looks a bit like Britney Spears poses and ‘says,’ ‘I am Tracy and I will make your wishes come true. With me everything is at your pace. I never say ‘no’ and it is super easy to rent some time with me.’”
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In this way, these dolls are the pornographic expression of the ethics of passivity that real-life women are expected to adhere to. In fact, they’re exactly what the purity myth would like women to be: passive, silent, and un- able to articulate their desires.

As one Real Doll owner said to Laslocky, “For the most part, it’s just like sex with an organic woman . . . who doesn’t say anything and is brimful of Quaaludes.” It’s not surprising, then, that these iDollators don’t refer to their dolls as sex toys* or masturbatory aides, but as “girlfriends.” It’s a sad state of affairs when some men would rather form intimate “relationships” with plastic dolls that can’t reciprocate affection, engage in conversation, or do anything, really, than take the time to get to know actual women. (With pesky things like opinions and personalities, who wants to bother?)

While Real Doll buyers and iDollators may be on the fringe of sex toy aficionados—even twelve thousand members of a doll-fan website is not a tremendous number compared with the membership of other kinds of In- ternet pornography forums—there’s no doubt that they have become part

* I’m not anti sex toy. I am anti treating plastic dolls as if they were real women and wish- ing real women were like plastic dolls.

of current American culture. The 2007 movie
Lars and the Real Girl
focused on the relationship between a disturbed man and his Real Doll; the dolls have been featured in articles and TV segments, and are a regular part of Howard Stern’s radio-show shtick. There was even a
New York Daily News
gossip item about Charlie Sheen destroying and disposing of his Real Doll: “He and his bodyguard tried to dispose of it, like it was a real body. They wrapped it in a blanket and drove around in the middle of the night till they found a [D]umpster.”
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There are other kinds of sex toys—thousands, in fact—so why the fasci- nation with this particular doll? Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that we’re captivated by the Real Doll because it represents a trend in the United States: valuing women for their silence and inability to say no (or to say anything!) and seeing them as sex objects above all else.

Another part of the new world of porn that reveals volumes about the purity/porn connection is the cult of personal celebrity. A 2007 Pew Research Center poll reported that 51 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five- year-olds surveyed said that being famous is their generation’s most im- portant or second most important life goal; 81 percent said the same thing about being rich. In a culture where reality television reigns supreme and the promise of online celebrity has everyone lining up for even fifteen seconds of fame, it’s not surprising that young people would hold being famous in such high regard, and think of it as an attainable goal. And with blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking tools being so pervasive, most young Americans have some sort of public iden- tity online. In this new tech world, we’re
all
in the spotlight—it’s just a matter of how many people are looking at us.

Unfortunately, for younger women, being famous often means

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being a sex symbol—or a sex symbol in training—and the “famous for be- ing famous” trend has made it easier than ever to attain that status. Take Tila Tequila, who gained renown through the Internet by posting barely dressed pinup-girl pictures of herself and earning the “most popular person on MySpace” position. Appearances in men’s and porn magazines followed, and now Tequila has a popular reality show on MTV,
A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,
on which both male and female would-be suitors court her.

The truth is, it’s hard to think of
any
female celebrity who isn’t sexual- ized in some way.* Even female celebrities whose acclaim has nothing to do with sex find that they have to be seen as sex objects in order to remain famous. In her book
Female Chauvinist Pigs,
Ariel Levy points out that in the weeks before the 2004 summer Olympic Games, female athletes, such as high-jumper Amy Acuff and swimmers Amanda Beard and Haley Cope, were featured near to totally nude in publications like
For Him Magazine
and
Playboy.

The collective ef fect of these pictures of hot (and, in most cases, wet) girls with thighs parted, tiny, porny patches of pubic hair, and coy, naughty-

girl pouts made it almost impossible to keep sight of the women’s awesome physical gif ts. But that may have been the whole point: Bimbos enjoy a

higher standing in our culture than Olympians right now.
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If Levy is correct (and I’d like to hold out
some
hope that she’s not), then she explains why so many young women aim to be “hot—if not as a life’s calling, at least as a goal for day-to-day living.” Author and my Feministing

* Even celebrities deemed too “old” or “ugly” are sexualized by public chatter about their general unhotness.

coblogger Courtney Martin wrote in her book
Perfect Girls, Starving Daugh- ters
how this obsession is literally taking over many young women’s lives:

The perfect girl focuses her energy on controlling her appearance. She spends her paycheck before the ink dries, buying trendy outfits that make her feel re- made. (Never mind that they will bore her before the month is out.) She com- pulsively buys makeup, gets a membership at the tanning salon, purchases the same pair of shoes in a variety of dif ferent colors—all so she can feel worthy of attention
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But the obsession with celebrity bimbos, as Levy calls them, and the struggle to be considered hot perpetuate the same fetishization of women that the virginity movement is built on. What’s the difference between ven- erating women for being fuckable and putting them on a purity pedestal? In both cases, women’s worth is contingent upon their ability to please men and to shape their sexual identities around what men want.

Celeb culture is akin to the spotlight shining on the virginity move- ment’s purity princesses. Let’s face it—the beauty queens and young girls touting virginity pledges are simply purity porn stars. Whether it’s actual porn or mythologized purity, the end goal is to be desirable to men, and what women may actually want for themselves, sexually or otherwise, is lost.

P u r i t y ’ s P o r n a g e n d a

Concerned Women for America (CWA), a conservative Christian organi- zation, wants to put an end to pornography—which CWA blames for ev- erything from breaking up marriages to child-on-child rape.* But instead of