I’m not ashamed to say that this article was inspired by an episode of Dr Phil. The theme of this particular show was “is this normal?” and featured a man who claims to have exorcised demons out of thousands of people as well as a couple who have twins and septuplets. The final guest is the man who concerns me and this article. His name is Randy and he came up with ‘purity balls’ to keep his daughters in line. A ‘purity ball’ is basically a dance attended by fathers and daughters in which the daughters promise to ‘stay pure’ until marriage.
I cannot describe how infuriated I was and continue to be. First, why do we, as a society, continue to associate sex and sexuality with purity? Why do we continue to deem sex ‘dirty’? Why is any expression of sexuality considered offensive and repressed? The people who promote such ideas consider themselves ‘traditional’ and they’re right. Traditionally, society has made a concerted effort to repress the sexuality of its members, especially those that are female. One only has to look at the history of marriage to see this. Women were merely property to be passed on from father to husband and a woman’s value was dependent upon her sexual experience - a ‘good’ woman and bride was a virgin.
It is 2007 and though the terminology has changed somewhat, the idea persists. A woman is expected to remain sexually inexperienced until her wedding night. The same expectation is not extended to the man. In fact, modern society celebrates men who are sexually experienced. One look at the advertisements for any one of the men’s deodorants proves this. I find it funny how the women that the men in these adverts sleep with are seen merely as sexual receptors only for the duration of the commercial. According to the logic of modern society, after women have served their sexual purpose they become dirty, they are ‘sluts’, ‘whores’ or on a good day, ‘promiscuous’. These same labels are not usually applied to men and if they are, we say ‘man-slut’ or ‘man-whore’, as though disapproving of men’s sexuality is so unusual that we need a special name for it.
The double standard applied to women is blatantly obvious; all you have to do is sit down and think about it. Another example I’ve found is the way in which some women in the ‘celebrity’ world use their sexuality to try and further their careers. Whenever a woman ‘fucks for tracks’ or has sex with a director on the casting couch for a role or when a model sleeps with her employer so that she can attend award shows on his arm we lay all the blame, ridicule and humiliation at the woman’s door. We don’t denigrate the man for being willing to exchange sexual gratification for film roles, music or invitations to award shows. If we as a society were up in arms about sex becoming a form of commerce then we’d confront both parties. But this is not about the hyper-sexualised nature of society, this is about women expressing their sexuality and in any and every case, society need to represses female sexuality.
The colloquial term for being STI-free is ‘clean’. I don’t think that this is a coincidence. The common stereotype is that only those who ‘sleep around’ contract STIs. By the same logic, those people are ‘dirty’ and those that don’t ‘sleep around’ are ‘clean’.
Society feeds women two conflicting messages. On the one hand, we are enamored with the Paris Hiltons of this world because they are so unabashedly sexual and yet on the other,
There is nothing inherently wrong with abstaining from sex. But I believe that if you’re abstaining from sex because you’re afraid of being called a whore and being ostracized from your family, there is a problem. If you’re engaging in anal sex with your boyfriend to try and avoid breaking your hymen – that most praised membrane, there is a problem. If you are having any sort of unprotected sex because your sex education didn’t go beyond absolute abstinence, there is a problem.
