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technically still a virgin by conventional standards, is far from alone. The purity that the virginity movement is working so hard for is more of an illu- sion than it would like to own up to. Teens who make these pledges often do so in front of church members, peers, parents, and community leaders, and oftentimes they have no real choice in the matter. It’s not as if many twelve- to fourteen-year-olds are going to be self-assured enough to refuse to take a chastity vow. (“No thanks, Mom, I’d like to keep my sexual options open!”) These pledges are little more than cultural farces created to make parents feel better about their children’s coming of age. And, frankly, parents who buy into the purity myth need some hope; after all, mainstream media would have them believe that their daughters are going wild and are perhaps irredeem- ably tainted (more on this in Chapter 2).
    Whether they’re pledges, bare stems, or Virginity Vouchers, the messages are clearly regressive. But virginity proponents are doing one heck of a job marketing them as “revolutionary” and “empowering.” Appropriating feminist rhetoric to reinforce traditional gender roles is nothing if not brilliant.
    Wendy Shalit, a writer and virginity guru whose first book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering Lost Virtue, was the topic of much debate when it was released in 2000, is a prime player in the “making abstinence cool” movement (or, as she calls it, the “modesty movement”). Shalit, who in 2007 penned

    * Contraception is for “bad” girls who planned out sex, not girls who got caught in the heat of the moment. And, of course, many of these teens are taught that birth control doesn’t work anyway, so why bother?

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    another ode to chastity, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, founded a website, the Modesty Zone, 27 and a blog, Modestly Yours, 28 which has twenty-one in-house bloggers. The site describes itself as “an informal community of young women who don’t have a voice in the mainstream media.”
    “Whether you’re a virgin waiting until marriage, or just against casual sex more generally, you can find a safe harbour here to share your ideals, inter- ests, and goals for the future,” it reads. The Modesty Zone features “Rebels of the Month” and slogans like “Be Daring, keep your shirt on!” Of course, the core message of the modesty movement is still in plain view, as evidenced by the blog’s tagline: “Modesty Zone: A site for good girls.”
    Some virginity-movement members are even resorting to using sex to sell their antisex message. A shirt being sold on the website of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Christian organization, says, Virgins are hot, and groups on Facebook dedicated to the same message call their own work “passion for purity.”
    What’s most telling about all of these efforts, whether they’re being executed via education, religion, or social imperatives, is that they’re not working—at least, not in the ways the movement would like them to. Vir- ginity pledges have proved ineffective time and time again; the same is true of abstinence-only education. 29 Blogs like Shalit’s Modesty Zone have little web traffic, 30 and the purity groups on social-networking sites are dwarfed by groups like “This is what a feminist looks like” or even those as trivial as “If You Can’t Differentiate Between ‘Your’ and ‘You’re’ You Deserve To Die.”
    Despite its inability to keep women “pure,” or to convince most Ameri- cans that abstinence is best, the virginity movement is strong, well funded, and everywhere. While there isn’t a critical mass of young people who iden-

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    tify with this movement, that doesn’t mean they aren’t affected by it; these are the people who are teaching our kids about sex and teaching our daughters about morality. And what they’re teaching them is