Review by Choice Review
Feminist cultural critic and media activist Jessica Valenti turns her attention to the current obsession with virginity in mainstream media and right-wing religious talk and practice. In fiery, accessible prose, she sets out the myriad ways that reducing women's moral and social personhood to the notion of sexual purity mars women's lives. Young, white, straight, fundamentalist women tend be most directly subjected to control of their sexuality through the purity movement. But women of color, queers and lesbians, and older women are also rendered invisible, immoral, outcast, undesirable, or worse by abstinence-only education, pornography, "purity balls" (at which girls pledge their virginity to their fathers until marriage), sexual fetishization of girls, and media furor over "girls gone wild." Valenti couples her snappy style and biting wit with deep concern for the plight of girls and women. For all the scorn she heaps on the hypocrisy and misogyny of the purity myth and its often-creepy adherents, Valenti voices a political commitment to encouraging more constructive dialogue and less-destructive vitriol about gender and sexuality. The result is a book that is in places a bit contradictory but consistently smart, funny, informative, and inspiring. The resource listing is useful. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. L. D. Brush University of Pittsburgh
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Making a cult of virginity via media stereotyping and abstinence-only sex education damages young women, Valenti says, and rolls back women's rights by emphasizing sexuality and deprecating personal character. Furthermore, the book's most thought-provoking chapter points up an insidious connection between chastity and pornography: the porning of America is vital to those in the virginity movement, which needs increasingly available hard-core porn to justify its extreme regressivism. The dangerous belief that a woman's primary value is sexual underlies the objectification and sexualization at the heart of the virginity movement's agenda of controlling and defining women, Valenti maintains. When young women see their bodies and sexuality as commodities, that isn't caused by porn culture but by a larger societal message that . . . their sexuality is not their own. So, is a post-virgin world possible? Full of piercing insight and wit (recalling her own sexual initiation, Valenti quips, I fail to see how anything that lasts less than five minutes can have such an indelible ethical impact ), this is an important addition to women's studies.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
