The Purity Myth (22 page)

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who are making decisions about women and their health are very much invested in the purity myth, which tells them unmarried, sexually active women are bad, wrong, and in need of help, and allows them to create legislation that limits women’s rights and opportunities with a clear conscience.

P u re P u n i sh m en t

In 2007, while in Atlanta at the National Summit to Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women, I heard a story that forever changed the way I think about women, law, and punishment.

Laura Pemberton told a roomful of pro-choice activists, midwives, doulas, and feminist organizers how she was taken from her Florida home—while in active labor—shackled, and forced to undergo a cesarean section she did not want. Pemberton had wanted to have a vaginal home birth, but when she became dehydrated during labor, she decided to go to the hospital to receive f luids. When a doctor noticed a scar from a previ- ous C-section, the hospital staff panicked—many doctors won’t perform a vaginal delivery (VBAC) after a cesarean section. They told Pemberton that she wouldn’t be able to give birth vaginally, and that she would have to stay at the hospital. She refused, and went home to continue her labor. (She actually had to sneak out of the hospital, as the staff had called the district attorney to come and compel her to get surgery.)

Once she was back at home, a sheriff came to her house, at which point her legs were shackled together and she was forced to go to the hospital, where a hearing was being held about the rights of the fetus—her child. A lawyer had been appointed to her unborn child, but not to Pemberton. After being
forced
to have surgery, Pemberton sued. She lost. The state told

Pemberton that her rights hadn’t been violated; doctors could operate on her without her permission because the rights of her fetus—as defined by the state—trumped her own.*

I was particularly struck by this woman, who was devoutly religious and pro-life but had come to talk about her experience to a mostly pro-choice audience. “I was raped by the state,” she said. She recognized that despite our political differences, all women are at risk under laws that dehumanize us and view us as little more than baby receptacles.

As horrible as Pemberton’s experience was, she was luckier than others. In the early ’90s in Washington, D.C., Angela Carder became critically sick with cancer. She was also twenty-five weeks pregnant. The hospital sought a court order forcing the twenty-seven-year-old Carder to undergo a C-section, in the hope that the fetus could be saved; despite medical testimony that the surgery could kill her, the court privileged the fetus’s rights over Carder’s own life. Carder’s fetus, too undeveloped to be viable, died within two hours. Carder died within two days—the C-section was cited as a contributing fac- tor in her death.
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These laws—the ones that express a fear of female sexuality and seek to control it—have one distressing commonality: punishment. This kind of legislation is punitive in and of itself, of course—whether it’s criminalizing pregnant women who don’t have healthy babies or shaming women who want abortions—but purity policies’ consequences extend far beyond the language of a bill. Real women, like Pemberton and Carder, are suffering and dying because of laws that deem them less than full citizens.

The most recent law that epitomizes this principle is the federal ban on abortion. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the first-ever federal

* Pemberton went on to safely give birth vaginally to four more children.

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law banning an abortion procedure.* The Supreme Court actually struck down the law as unconstitutional in the 2000 case
Stenberg v. Carhart,
in part because it made no allowance for women’s health. But in 2007, when the court’s makeup had changed, thanks to two Bush-appointed justices, women were not so lucky—the court upheld the ban. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (currently the only woman on the Supreme Court) wrote in her dissent, “For the first time since
Roe,
the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

Of course, other purity punishments exist that aren’t as dire as the ones outlined here, but they’re disturbing all the same. Take the teacher who was fired for being unmarried and pregnant (a sin against the purity myth if

there ever was one), or students at Liberty University in Virginia, who can be fined—yes, fined—$500 and expelled for having an abortion.
†
One legisla- tor in Virginia even introduced a bill in 2005 that would make it a crime— punishable by a year in jail—for a woman to fail to report her miscarriage to the police within twelve hours.
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#

So, you might ask, what does all this have to do with virginity: C-sec- tions, abortion bans, miscarriage laws, and the FDA? Everything, really. The point of the purity myth is not only to valorize women who are “virgins,” but also to prop up the idea of the perfect woman as a blank slate, as powerless,

* The law bans “partial-birth abortion,” which is not a recognized medical term or proce- dure but refers to common abortion procedures used in a woman’s second trimester. The legislation is written so vaguely that it could apply to any abortion (which is, of course, its intent). In fact, in 1998, doctors in Wisconsin stopped performing abortions pretty much overnight when the ban was enacted in their state, for fear of going to jail.
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†
Incidentally, racial and sexual harassment costs them only $250.

#
Just in case you’re unsure about how this one is related to purity, consider that the same lawmaker—who seems to have a penchant for legislation that involves women’s bodies— is the man behind a bill that requires strippers to wear pasties.
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and in need of direction. Women who want to control their lives, especially their sexuality, don’t adhere to the purity model. “Pure” women aren’t just vir- gins—they’re women who accept what extremist pharmacists tell them, who trust legislators over their own instincts, who don’t question the notion that men should be in charge. In the past (as in the case of American female suf- fragists), women were told they shouldn’t foul themselves by getting involved in the dirty business of politics. Likewise, women today are told to trust that their government knows what’s best for them, their bodies, and their families. Power is not pure, so women shouldn’t have it—and they should be punished for trying to obtain it.

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c h a P ter 7

public punishments

“Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

s e n a t o r d o u g h e n r y ( d - t n ),

2008

the gang raPe of
a California teenager was caught on video: While the sixteen-year-old was unconscious, she was raped vaginally and anally with pool sticks, a Snapple bottle, and lit cigarettes while her three assailants danced around her in between their assaults. At one point during the attack, the girl urinated on herself. In her rapists’ 2004 trial, the defense argued that the girl was eager to make a porn video and was just “acting” for the camera. The trial resulted in a hung jury.*
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A nineteen-year-old university student in Washington, D.C., after be- ing drugged and sodomized in 2007, was denied treatment at local hospitals

* Thankfully, the second trial delivered guilty verdicts, but not before one of the boys was arrested for raping another sixteen-year-old at a party held the night of his mistrial.

because she “appeared intoxicated”—not so surprising, given the nature of her attack. Even when the teen went to the police for help, she was turned away. Sergeant Ronald Reid, of the Metropolitan Police Department Sexual Assault Unit, was quoted as saying, “[I]f we don’t have reason to believe a crime happened, we wouldn’t administer a rape kit.”*
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A year earlier, in Maryland, a state court ruled that once a woman con- sents to sex, she can’t change her mind. Not if it hurts, not if her partner has become violent, not if she simply wants to stop. If she says yes once, nothing that happens afterward is rape.

Across the United States, a scourge of rape and violence against wom- en is going unpunished and unnoticed. One in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime; young women are
four times
more likely to be at- tacked.
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But instead of these statistics’ and these horrifying stories’ being a national scandal, and instead of the media and government being up in arms over the epidemic of violence that women are facing, the reaction is largely silence—or, even worse, blame.

One would hope that the days of blaming the victim and qualifying what constitutes rape were long gone. But today, misdirected blame and rape apologism are even worse—because we should know better. More than thirty years ago, feminists fought to shine the national spotlight on violence against women. We’ve had access to books like Susan Brownmiller’s
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape;
we’ve seen legislation passed, like the groundbreaking Violence Against Women Act, which allocated millions of dollars in funding to shelters and sexual assault services; we’ve watched
The Accused
and dozens of other movies and television shows about how rape isn’t women’s fault.

* The assumption in this case is that intoxicated women can’t be assaulted.

But the myth of sexual purity still reigns supreme, and it grossly affects the way American society thinks about violence toward women. So long as women are supposed to be “pure,” and so long as our morality is defined by our sexuality, sexualized violence against us will continue to be both accept- ed and expected.