"The Purity Myth" picks apart purity as a virtue and how this is problematic. As much as I like Tough Guise, and I really do like it, I've seen that video at least three times now (once in tenth grade, twice in a class that I TA'd for my senior year of high school). It was nice to watch something fresh and new.
During the video, I found myself laughing at many of the things that were said. It was hard to take any of the people speaking about how purity was a good thing seriously. The white conservatives blamed "out of control lesbian feminists" for the fact that their long standing problematic views were being called into question. The fact is, they're very antiquated and based on pseudo Christian-centric views (not based on actual Christianity but rather a fake Christianity used to mask their own prejudice). It is just a way to keep women subservient and powerless in a world where they are gaining more and more power. Why do you think there was such backlash against Hillary Clinton running for office? Because they want women to remain sexy, not sexual, young, thin, unmarked, and just as pretty objects.
They also present a very hegemonic, hetero normative view of sex. Are lesbians virgins? Are gay men virgins? If virginity is not being penetrated by a penis then are gay men not virgins? If virginity is not achieving orgasms, in which case lesbians aren't virgins? It's all very confusing and seemingly fragile. Since virginity is so hard to pinpoint, why is it held up as a virtue in the first place?
Because virginity is associated with innocence and passivity, it is valued because it keeps women in the binds that they were held in for millenia. At its most basic level, the reason white conservatives value virginity in women is because it keeps them stuck in the sexist gender role that they created for women.
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