The XX Factor: What women really think.

Busting the Purity Myth--What Replaces It?

Over on Talking Points Memo Cafe, I posted this week as part of a discussion of Jessica Valenti's new book, The Purity Myth. Jessica makes a strong and convincing argument against fetishizing virginity and judging how ethical girls and women are based on when they first had sex, or how many partners they've had. Amen to that. She also says that some of the time, there's nothing wrong with teen sex. This opens up a host of questions: If we quit cautioning kids against having sex, what do we say instead? From my TPM post:

Jessica cites a survey showing that "47 percent of teens who had experienced some form of sexual intimacy said they'd felt pressure to do something they didn't want to do--and young women were more likely to have had this experience than young men." I would bet that a disproportionate number of those girls are low-income and not white, exactly the girls who Jessica and many of us are particularly concerned for.

Will taking away the taboo take away the pressure, or even reduce it? Again, I'm not sure. I'd argue that we want teenagers to have sex lovingly and safely--or not at all, because sex can, sometimes, explode with meaning. Probably, we want teenagers to have sex sparingly, because a lot of their relationships aren't especially loving and safe. That's not necessarily what the testing of adolescence produces. And so I think there's a lot of work to be done to figure out what should replace the purity myth--the details and multi-faceted layers of what kind of sex ed makes sense for what kind of kids, and how parents should weigh in.

Thoughts?