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are willing to “give it up” easily aren’t really the datable kind anyway.
    The men I’ve had these conversations with, misguided as they were, had to have absorbed this line of thinking somewhere. And I can’t say I completely fault them, since popular culture is saturated with ever more sexual images while sexuality is still being touted simultaneously as dirty, wrong, and even deadly. The messages that sex for anything other than procreation makes women used goods are disproportionately targeted toward girls and young women, but the impact they have on boys and young men is equally harmful. While girls internalize this message, boys are propagating and enforcing it.
    So where does it come from, this dirty double standard? Pathologizing women’s bodies and sexuality is certainly nothing new; from “hysteria”* to fears about menstruation, women have been considered the “dirtier” sex for a long time.
    In The Female Thing, author Laura Kipnis argues that fear of women’s bodies, specifically our genitals, is at the heart of the dirt double standard.

    Recall the unhappy fact that throughout history there’s been the universal con- viction that women are somehow dirtier than men. The male body is regarded, or is symbolically, as cleaner than the female body. . . . Possibly it ’s that outjut- ting parts of the body, like a penis, are regarded as somehow cleaner than holes and cavities. . . . The vagina is frequently associated with rot and decay 2
    * The word “hysteria” actually comes from the antiquated idea that women’s emotional problems were derived from the uterus.

42 the Purity myth
    Not exactly the kind of message we’d like to see spread around, yet that’s what we’re stuck with. Educators, religious leaders, media, and parents alike help to promote these notions of dirty girls. Headlines about girls “gone wild” dominate newspapers and wire services, STI rates are discussed alongside stories of supposedly promiscuous teens on cable news shows, and books about the “hookup culture” ruining young women are a dime a dozen. The scare tactics are everywhere and the message is the same: Sex is hurting women.
    Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won’t have sex, but rather that they’ll have it without pleasure.*

    P e r f e c t v i r g i n s , d i r t y g i r l s
    The Abstinence Clearinghouse’s website is a virtual cornucopia of virginity worship. 3 It features educational tools, videos, a blog, pictures of purity balls, and links to conservative and religious organizations, all touting purity and chastity. The website also features a page where women (and only women) are pictured and quoted about why they’re chaste. One such quote, from six- teen-year-old Ashley Dial of Tampa, Florida, reads, “I don’t want to show up empty-handed on my wedding night. I want to have the whole package to give to my husband and my husband only.”
    Jolene Churchill of Evansville, Wisconsin, says, “Whenever I get the opportunity to speak to young people, I beg them not to become another broken victim of the lie of safe sex. The loss of one’s self-esteem, health, and

    * Pleasure is widely dismissed, if not denounced, in the virginity movement. When the purpose of sex is simply procreation, pleasure is simply gratuitous.

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    potentially their life is just too high of a price tag to pay for merely being used by another individual.”* 4
    When did sex become such a downer?! “The whole package”? “Broken victim”? These are fighting words for those of us who see sex as a healthy expression. Would it be so terrible to talk about sex in a way that acknowl- edges how wonderful it can be?
    After all, it’s not as if the virginity movement is completely without joy. On the contrary, it finds happiness in discussing