HOME / culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

The Sexy PuritanSarah Palin embodies a powerful new Christian right archetype. What could that mean for America?

By Tom PerrottaPosted Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, at 12:16 PM ET

In the weeks since Sarah Palin made her entertaining and highly polarizing entrance onto the national stage, journalists have been scrambling to get a fix on her, attaching label after label onto the Alaska governor in the hope that one of them might stick. Is Palin a hockey mom, "a working-class heroine juggling career and family and living out her religious convictions," in the words of conservative writer Ross Douthat? Or is she, as Katha Pollitt would have it, "a rightwing-Christian anti-choice extremist"? Other observers have focused on Palin's appearance, calling her a "babe" (Rush Limbaugh), a "MILF" (Tina Fey), a "stewardess" (Bill Maher), and the ubiquitous "sexy librarian" (only Google knows). The sheer amount of head-scratching expended on Palin might lead you to believe that she's something new and puzzling on the American scene. But she isn't quite as novel as she seems. Caribou hunting aside, Sarah Palin represents the state-of-the-art version of a particular type of woman—let's call her the Sexy Puritan—that's become a familiar and potent figure in the culture war in recent years.

RSS

Sexy Puritans have been around for a while. Anita Bryant, the Miss America runner-up turned anti-gay crusader in the 1970s, was an early exemplar of the trend. The young Britney Spears, provocatively dressed and loudly proclaiming her virginity, is a more modern version, though that didn't turn out so well. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the most conservative member of The View, has a bit of the Sexy Puritan about her, as does Monica Goodling, the former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who admitted to engaging in improperly political hiring practices, including the dismissal of a career prosecutor Goodling believed to be a lesbian. (Puritanical footnote: Goodling is reputed to have been responsible for the draping of nude statues at the Department of Justice.)

Share this article on Digg

Share this article on Buzz

Related in Slate

Hanna Rosin explained why Christian conservatives love Sarah Palin. Derek Thompson offered a Palin FAQ. Abby Callard and David Plotz collected reader's dreams about Palin. Christopher Hitchens demanded that she not be patronized.

Sexy Puritans engage in the culture war on two levels—not simply by advocating conservative positions on hot-button social issues but by embodying nonthreatening mainstream standards of female beauty and behavior at the same time. The net result is a paradox, a bit of cognitive dissonance very useful to the cultural right: You get a little thrill along with your traditional values, a wink along with the wagging finger. Somehow, you don't feel quite as much like a prig as you expected to.

I didn't think too much about Sexy Puritans as a type until I began looking into the abstinence-only sex-education movement while researching my novel, The Abstinence Teacher. I expected to encounter a lot of stern James Dobson-style scolds warning teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex—and there were a few of those—but what I found over and over again were thoughtful, attractive, downright sexy young women talking about their personal decision to remain pure until marriage. Erika Harold, Miss America of 2003 (the right sure loves beauty queens), is probably the best-known to the wider public, but no abstinence rally is complete without the testimony of a very pretty virgin in her early- to mid-20s. At a Silver Ring Thing event I attended in New Jersey in 2007, a slender young blond woman in tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt—she wouldn't have looked out of place at a frat kegger—bragged about all the college boys who'd tried and failed to talk her into their beds. She reveled in her ability to resist them, to stand alone until she'd found the perfect guy, the fiancé with whom she would soon share a lifetime full of amazing sex. While her explicit message was forceful and empowering—virginity is a form of strength and self-sufficiency—the implicit one was clear as well: Abstinence isn't just sour grapes for losers, a consolation prize for girls who can't get a date anyway.

There's a sophisticated strategy of co-optation at work here—not so different from the one employed by Christian rock bands that look and sound almost exactly like their secular counterparts—an attempt to separate "sexiness," which is both cool and permissible, from actual sex, which is not. This is a challenging line to walk in practice, as Britney can attest, quite different from the simpler and more consistent "return to modesty" approach advocated by Wendy Shalit, in which girls are encouraged to downplay their sexuality across the board. What the Sexy Puritan movement represents, I think, is the realization on the part of some cultural warriors on the right that to be seen as anti-sex—and especially to be seen as unsexy—is a losing proposition in contemporary America, even among evangelical Christians most troubled by the fallout from the sexual revolution. Apparently nobody likes the Church Lady anymore, not even the churchgoers. If you don't believe me, you should take a look at the Web site Christian Nymphos, whose authors cheerfully proclaim, "We are women with excessive sexual desire for our husbands!" and offer candid how-to advice on anal sex, fisting, and "masturbating for your husband."

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Tom Perrotta is the author of Election and Little Children. His latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher, has just been published in paperback.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Comments from the Fray

On behalf of sexy librarians everywhere, I completely resent this comparison. Please stop.

--Inblackink

(To reply, click here)

I wonder why people throw around these issues like it really matters. What is illegal in this country isn't controversial. There's no public debate about legalizing drugs or prostitution. And both parties jump on an opponent who is caught in a bust just as fast. As for sex education, it is probably a good idea to cancel those classes. Kids could learn that, and probably do, on wikipedia in a fraction of the time spent in some bs class.

--craigvan

(To reply, click here)

(9/29)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES