The Purity Myth - Campus Engagement

For my first Campus Engangement event I attended a discussion of “The Purity Myth” with Dr. Santana. At this vent we watched the documentary and then discussed its content. The documentary brings to light the idea of purity and its relationship with women, femininity and value. The basis for the argument was that women are objectified to such an extent that their value is decided by weather or not they are sexually active or appear to be sexually active.

The video and discussion made many valid points about how obsessed our society is with this idea of purity. The video started out talking about wedding dresses and how they symbolize the purity. To be honest, I don’t typically think about weddings or wedding dresses so it did not occur to me that this white dress is intended to symbolize the women’s purity and thus virginity while such a symbol for a man is not required because his sexual experiences are unimportant.

The video also discussed “Purity Balls.” These are events where young girls dress very formally, go as a date of their fathers, and pledge their purity until their wedding night. I had no idea that these sorts of things existed and I was disgusted by the video footage of them.  The girls are made to look old enough to be the wife’s of their fathers and then their fathers make a major decision (for many of the girls, they are to young to even understand) about their bodies. One clip of a particular ceremony depicted girls proceeding down an isle lined by fathers holding swords over them. I am not quite sure whether this represented the protection the fathers had over their daughters or a symbolic penis of power that men wield over women. Or perhaps these are the same thing.

One of the most interesting parts of the video was the discussion of abstinence only education in schools. In my high school we did not have abstinence only education but we did not have sex education either. And this is the problem that the video talks about. Almost everyone in the world will have sex at some point and it is important that we talk about it. Abstinence education is an idealist failure that has placed a heavy emphasis on girls and their choices. Some of the educators went as far to say that girls who had sex in high school would get pregnant and die as well as encouraged the entire audience to insult their peers who were sexually active.

The most important thing I took away from this is that our language may have the biggest effect. They way we refer to virginity as something that you lose. Something that makes you less of woman. Being pure is something that defines you and worth. We don’t talk about sex enough and they ways we do are extremely sexist. For boy’s having sex isn’t losing anything, its becoming more of a man. And women who have sex before marriage is, tarnished, ruined, or used goods. Even the fathers who vow to protect them from becoming a sex object, are turning them into a sex object by deciding their value on their sexual involvement. Overall, this video and the discussion we had was great. I learned a lot and it has made me more conscious about the things I say, and how I say them. I would recommend this movie for everyone I know.