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“Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
tags: feminism , non-fiction
“Whether it appears in a story about a man killing his girlfriend while calling her a whore or in trying to battle conservative claims that emergency contraception or the HPV vaccine will make girls promiscuous, the purity myth in America underlies more misogyny than most people would like to admit”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
“As Feministing.com commenter electron-
Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students
of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a
WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that
that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.”
― Jessica Valenti, "The Purity Myth", The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students
of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a
WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that
that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.”
― Jessica Valenti, "The Purity Myth", The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
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