Pursuit Of Purity

As children we all dread the discomfort and awkwardness of the sex talk. Whether it takes place with our parents or in a health classroom, the conversation that takes place is not one many people enjoy. Possibly the worst part of it all is that most people don’t learn much about sex. They are taught about the act briefly about the anatomy with diagrams and maybe taught about protection, like how to apply a condom, but the majority of sexual education classes in high schools can be summed up by something the health teacher in the movie Mean Girls said, “don’t have sex, or you will get pregnant and die.” Pregnancy is often a big topic when it comes to talking about sex. Teens are told stories of faulty condoms and abortion horror stories, but …show more content…
Purity balls, purity pledges, and promise rings are forced upon young girls before they even know what sex is. The purpose of these is to make them promise to their parents and to God that they will be abstinent before they know what they’re doing. What charades as a fun father/daughter dance is the beginning of the sexualization of young girls and forcing beliefs into their heads. In the article Pursuit of Purity, the authors address the controversy about these saying it “gives kids too little power, too little control over their decisions, as though they 're incapable of making good ones.” The article includes an example of a father/daughter relationship where she is given a heart shaped locket and her father has the key. The daughter explains “It 's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector,”. Patriarchy is a core cause of women’s virginity having more meaning than men’s. The father “owns” his daughter’s pureness until a man marries her, then he gives the bride dressed in pure virgin white away as if she were property. Therese Shechter mentioned in her interview “How to Lose Your Virginity” that “[a]lthough that world of pledges and purity balls might seem sort of foreign and confined to a small minority, we’re symbolically enacting the same process at any …show more content…
The idea of a pure, innocent girl to have sex with is more enticing than sex with a “dirty” or “used” one, right? Young women are often taught that having sex with more than one man is like giving the others the first man’s leftovers. Therefore, women who at least put on the “virgin act” are more desirable because men prefer to be with a clean woman. This causes a strange backlash of hypersexualization. Virgins are desirable, and they play it up even more with porn like “Barely Legal” or “Girls Gone Wild”, so young women think it’s necessary to play into this sexy virgin