01c. 1978 ADWhat’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
02c. 1978 AD..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
03c. 1978 ADTrusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically “empowered” or “feminist.” I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting womenis a radical act.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
04c. 1978 ADPerhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
05c. 1978 ADValue yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
06c. 1978 ADAs Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
07c. 1978 ADSex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
08c. 1978 ADIf being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults. Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
09c. 1978 ADI think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
10c. 1978 ADBy erasing any nuance and complexity about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn't seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there's no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
11c. 1978 ADThe desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
12c. 1978 ADWhile falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
13c. 1978 ADFor women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
14c. 1978 ADIf you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
15c. 1978 ADWomen are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We're being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the word "feminist" pisses you off. How dare we.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
16c. 1978 ADBecause even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
17c. 1978 ADI spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don't "speak from our power," but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
18c. 1978 ADYes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too- but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
19c. 1978 ADIf we have no place to go where we can escape that reaction to our bodies, where is it that we're not forced? The idea that these crimes are escapable is the blind optimism of men who don't understand what it means to live in a body that attracts a particular kind of attention with magnetic force.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
20c. 1978 ADBecause while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
21c. 1978 ADStill, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
22c. 1978 ADWe say "misogynist"; I've written that "misogyny kills," but the world falls flat on your tongue - it's too academic sounding, not raw or horrifying enough to relay the truth of what it means.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
23c. 1978 ADNo matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
24c. 1978 ADAs bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote. Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.Jessica Valenti / quote ↗
