Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3: “Like a Virgin, Whatever That Is”

Chapter 3, Section 1 Summary and Analysis: “Cashing in the ‘V’ Card”

The chapter opens with one of Orenstein’s interviewees watching a video of Pam Stenzel, an abstinence-only educator, talking to teenagers about preserving their virginity before marriage. Christina found Stenzel cheesy, but she didn’t disagree about the value of remaining a virgin before marriage.

The average age of virginity loss in the United States is 17, and two-thirds of teenagers have had intercourse at least once before college. In studies about virginity, over half of those interviewed report being drunk the first time they had sex. Many of the girls Orenstein spoke with were sexually active for years before having intercourse. Feminists have argued for decades that virginity is an archaic and meaningless concept. There is no medical basis for it, as many are born without hymens or break them through everyday activities like exercise, tampons, or masturbation. Jessica Valenti, the author of The Purity Myth, writes that it’s even socially meaningless since one can reinstate one’s virginity through a new commitment to abstinence before marriage.

As Orenstein notes, first intercourse is rarely the romantic, significant event it’s set up to be. It’s awkward and often unenjoyable for the girl, even when in a good situation. Many young women lose their virginities out of fear of being judged as prudish, and many of those women get drunk to do so.

Laura Carpenter, the author of Virginity Lost, suggests there are four ways young people relate to virginity. One is as a gift: an expression of love. The danger here is that this notion depends on the sexual partner’s reaction, and plenty of times he doesn’t experience his partner’s virginity as a gift he’s earned by being special in some way. Another group experiences virginity as a stigma. These are the girls who want to do away with their virginity quickly so they aren’t judged as prudes, and they tend to be disappointed by how little anything changes after they have intercourse. The third group sees losing virginity as a rite of passage—part of becoming an adult—and they tend to have the best outcomes. The final group vows to stay virgins until marriage. They think of their virginity as a gift and as a way to honor God.

Chapter 3, Section 2 Summary and Analysis: “Waiting for the Prince”

Purity Balls are ceremonies for teenage girls and their fathers where girls pledge to stay “pure” before marriage, and fathers pledge to protect their daughters. The Purity Ball grew out of the “True Love Waits” movement, started by the Southern Baptist Convention in the mid-1990s, and since then, millions of American girls have pledged their purity. Research shows that three-quarters of white, evangelical teens disapprove of premarital sex, but evangelical teens are also the most sexually active compared to other groups. They lose their virginities younger and are less likely to protect themselves from STDs or pregnancy.

Abstinence pledgers do tend to delay intercourse about 18 months later than those who don’t pledge, and they tend to have fewer sex partners. That said, male pledgers are four times more likely than non-pledgers to have anal sex, and both sexes are six times more likely to have oral sex. Most pledgers over the age of 18 don’t remember pledging at all, and all pledgers ultimately wind up with the same rate of STDs and pregnancies. Studies that interviewed those who left their churches found they were more sexually satisfied and felt less shame regarding their sex lives.

Feminists—and many secular people in general—argue that pledging or even deciding not to have sex until marriage places too much emphasis on sex. Orenstein writes about the pledgers, “[T]hey all believed that one sexual act would magically transform them—for better or for worse—and they all risked harm to their sexual and emotional development as a result” (92-93). The young women who attended Purity Balls wrapped up their sense of self in their virginity and in doing so denied themselves developmentally appropriate curiosity and exploration. They also missed the chance to learn about the spectrum of intimacy beyond sex; a professor of pediatrics calls these, “[A] pool of experiences of closeness, warmth, desire, attraction, arousal, touch, orgasm—all those are part of the possibilities of sexual learning” (93). By focusing so much on vaginal intercourse as an enchanted threshold to sexual maturity, pledgers lose out on the developmentally appropriate exploration of sensuality and touch.

While Purity Balls exercise blatant sexism—fathers own and control their daughters’ sex lives—Orenstein isn’t thrilled with the alternative. She sees the hypersexualization of girls and pledging virginity as “flip sides of the same coin” (94). Girls’ worth is determined by their bodies either way, as opposed to all the additional aspects of who a person is.

Chapter 3, Section 3 Summary and Analysis: “The Good-Person Checklist”

One of the girls interviewed shared her experience regarding sex. She struggled with shame and guilt regarding her actions, which she knew was a vestige of her conservative upbringing. She had intercourse for the first time in college in a partnered relationship, and at the time of her interview, she still wondered about what was normal and what was not when it came to sex. She didn’t know how to ask other girls about their experiences. She is just one example of how girls tend to worry about what behavior is acceptable regarding sex.

Orenstein finds that many girls worry about their “number”: the number of people they’ve had intercourse with (not including oral sex). They wonder how many is too many, and how many make them “sluts.” In a conversation between some of the interviewees, they discussed whether sex had to be “meaningful” to be acceptable. One said the idea of sex being meaningful didn’t make sense because sex can be meaningful for reasons besides love.

Orenstein is clear that the cultural focus on intercourse as more meaningful than other sexual behaviors isn’t useful:

It is worth asking how putting this one act into a separate category is keeping girls (and boys) safer from disease, coercion, betrayal, assault; whether it gives them more control over their sexual experience; whether it encourages mutuality and caring; how it affects their perception of other kinds of sexual interactions; what it means for gay teens, who can have multiple sex partners without heterosexual intercourse (100-01).

By giving vaginal intercourse all this power, young adults wind up misguided about the results and meaning of those actions. Orenstein makes the case that oral sex shouldn’t be considered less meaningful than vaginal intercourse, especially since the two acts are equal in terms of STDs and emotional repercussions. Orenstein argues that the construct of virginity impedes sexual maturation and is more harmful than not; virginity does not prevent coercion, disease, or pregnancy, and those who wait until marriage to have sex are just as likely to have no agency in their sex lives other than as gatekeepers. The construct is also entirely heteronormative, erasing the experiences of LGBTQ teens.