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with me, as well as girls holding the title of Miss Teen America and other spokespeople for abstinence, often comment on how they believe they are stronger than those girls who “give in” to their sexual urges or need for attention. In other words, a girl’s strength comes from doing nothing, as opposed to from actually doing something in the world, such as being a powerful athlete or saying truths that are unpopular but necessary. This is especially troublesome because it also suggests that there is no possibility for healthy sexual exploration. In this scenario, all sexual activity equals giving away one’s power. There is no possibility that a girl can have sexual experiences and still be powerful. Having sexual experiences renders girls weak and helpless.
    Most important, though, the virgin myth emphasizes the idea that a girl is only worth as much as she’s able to keep her legs closed. Forget compassion, honesty, integrity, or kindness. As Jessica Valenti notes in The Purity Myth , “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.” 1 She notes that this view is just one more way that we value women most for their bodies and sexuality, and for what they do with those.
    We even throw virgins parties. In the past decade, we’ve seen the growth of “purity balls.” At such events, begun as a Christian response to rising teen pregnancy and STD rates, adolescent girls pledge their virginities to their fathers until they will wed, and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ chastity. There is white cake, exchanged vows, and a first dance, just like at a real wedding. Regardless of the creepiness of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls having commitment ceremonies with their fathers, the key point is that the balls don’t work. Out of a study of twelve thousand girls, those who had participated in purity balls had the same rate of STDs as those who didn’t pledge their virginity, and 88 percent break their pledges and have premarital sex. 2
    In so many ways, these sorts of ceremonies set girls up for failure. It might be easy for a twelve-year-old girl to say she won’t have sex before marriage, but three years later, she realizes how much she likes boys and sexual experiences. Or as her brain develops further, she begins to think, Wait a minute. How come I can’t have pleasurable physical interactions and boys can? (After all, where are the mother-son pledge balls? Good luck finding one.) Or, even more likely, she comes to know that her value as a girl is tied up with whether boys want to get with her, and to get boys’ attention, she will need to be sexy, and—well, combined with the fact that sex and attention feel good—you can see how easily those pledges become a distant, silly fantasy.
    This is not to say that a girl choosing to stay a virgin isn’t a perfectly acceptable decision for a teen girl. But so is choosing to have sex. The girls are not to blame here. It’s the abstinence train, the coopting, once again, of a girl’s control over her own sexual choices.
    That societal pressure to be abstinent has resulted in issues way more dangerous than a girl choosing to have sex: the pressure to exclude information about birth control in sex education and the refusal to supply condoms to sexually active teens. When girls don’t know enough about how to keep themselves safe, when they don’t have easy access to the very things that make them safe, then we’re complicit in the fact that they are unprotected from STDs and pregnancy. If we, the adults, are responsible for our teens’ physical safety, then we are failing them in this way.
    Equally important, the abstinence train has denied us this discussion around teenage girls and sex, and it has indirectly contributed to why many girls—the loose