Ms. Reviews & Bookmarks

[close] MORAL HAZARD
Laura M. Carpenter

Review of The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
By Jessica Valenti
Seal Press

For decades, Right-Wing think tanks and conservative Christian organizations have promoted what Jessica Valenti calls the “purity myth”: the belief that virginity separates moral/good women from their immoral/bad sisters. In its blatant attempt to re-establish traditional gender roles, the purity movement backs restrictions on birth control and abortion and vilifies rape victims who are insufficiently chaste.

“There’s no room…for the idea that young women could want to be sexy, to have sex, or to express themselves in ways that fall beyond wearing ankle-length skirts and finding husbands,” Valenti writes of virginity advocates. “The idea that young women could have a sexuality that’s all their own is just too scary.”

The purity movement teaches girls that their moral status derives from their sexual (in)activity, while boys learn that being moral means making responsible, adult choices. Although its rhetoric sounds all encompassing and ostensibly includes boys, its vision of purity is embodied by white, conventionally attractive, middle-class girls. Women and girls of color, consistently hypersexualized in U.S. culture, are never positioned as “pure,” nor are women with disabilities or impoverished women. Our nation’s obsession with virginity overshadows real issues that afflict women, such as lack of affordable reproductive health care and sexual trafficking. While father-daughter purity balls, virginity vouchers and abstinence rallies are busy celebrating and commodifying virginity, our tax dollars are funding abstinence-only sex-education curricula that use fear and shame to promote chastity outside marriage and provide no (or incorrect) information about contraception or safer sex. Not only are these classes steeped in traditional gender politics that identify women as sexual gatekeepers and men as sexually out of control, they ostracize LGBTQ youth by ignoring their needs for relevant information on sex.

Ironically, the purity movement has much in common with pornography; both idealize passive, doll-like women who desire only to please men. Like pornography, it finds myriad ways to denigrate women. Those who remain virgins effectively remain girls and, as such, can’t—or shouldn’t—be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies. The fetishizing of virginity inspires grown women to embrace girlishness via vaginal rejuvenation surgeries and Brazilian bikini waxes. It’s hard to miss the connection between this glorification of “innocence” and the backlash against women’s advancement in education, work and the public sphere. My own research suggests that the women (and men) who most prize their virginity are those most likely to be disappointed, even devastated, by first sexual experiences that don’t live up to the hype (note: Valenti interviewed me for her book). But given the hullabaloo about its importance, virginity itself eludes definitions. If the first time you have sex is when you lose your virginity, Valenti asks, then what constitutes sex?

“If it’s just heterosexual intercourse, then we’d have to come to the fairly ridiculous conclusion that all lesbians and gay men are virgins and that different kinds of intimacy, like oral sex, mean nothing,” Valenti writes. She argues that the very concept of virginity is a sham perpetrated on women. With The Purity Myth, she urges feminists and other progressives to stop ceding the definition of morality to social conservatives and asks that we trust young women to make their own intimate sexual choices.

---
LAURA M. CARPENTER is an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University and the author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (NYU Press, 2005).

[close] IRON LADY
Erin Aubry Kaplan

Review of This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President
By Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (with Kim McLarin)
Harper

The 2006 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia’s first woman president—the first in all of Africa!—is one of the new uncontested bright spots in the turbulent recent history of that country. But personal triumph is not the point of this memoir, despite its title. Sirleaf instead narrates the fascinating but frequently disheartening story of Liberia itself. From its improbable origins as a new settlement for freed American slaves in the 1800s to its descent into the hopelessly “balkanized chaos” of civil war more than 100 years later, Sirleaf tells it all in a steady and unsentimental voice, fueled throughout by a certain optimism, even in Liberia’s darkest hours.

Not that she neglects her own part in the story: The trajectory of her life is described with the same passion and attention to detail with which she describes everything else. And what a life it is, one that ultimately measures up to the greatness predicted for Sirleaf by a somewhat anonymous old man who visited her parents when she was
born. Highlights—or lowlights—include becoming a self-made power broker in international finance and surviving imprisonment by a Liberian dictator while colleagues are slaughtered around her. But it is concern,
almost obsession, for Liberia’s future that drives Sirleaf in all her endeavors. Clearly, the “child” that marches toward destiny is not just Sirleaf, but her still-emerging native land: As it goes, so goes she. She does try her luck
elsewhere in the world. On the way to the presidency, she has a brilliant career with institutions such as the World Bank, Citibank, the Equator Bank and the United Nations. Yet time and again she quits those posts
to follow a path back to Liberia, determined to fulfill a long-standing dream of helping her country achieve peace, prosperity and stability. Often she returns home against the advice of family and friends, who think she’s “cuckoo” to leave the material comfort and international prestige (to say nothing of the personal safety) of private-sector jobs. But Sirleaf is determined; it’s not for nothing she’s called “Iron Lady.”

Sometimes information overshadows the storytelling. At points This Child reads less like a memoir and more like a history primer, stump speech or opaque analysis from a politician who, after all, is still working to sell her vision. And what happens to Sirleaf’s four children, who all but disappear after the first 50 pages? Perhaps she was too wedded to her cause to devote much to the parental scene, but I’d like to hear her talk about that, to hear her version of the impossible sacrifices many women make to be effective in their chosen fields.

Sirleaf’s great talent as a narrator is that she doesn’t waffle. She admits to initially liking Liberian revolutionaries who later morph into despots; she admires Kofi Annan but doesn’t excuse his neglect of the Rwandan genocide. She praises the U.S. for the educational and work opportunities it provides her, but takes American governments (and Jimmy Carter) to task for supporting the vicious Liberian regimes of William Tolbert and Charles Taylor.

But Sirleaf never underestimates the enormity of the task of leading her country into the freedom implied in its name. Becoming president in postwar Liberia was pure euphoria, she says, the most she could hope for. At the same time, “Despair and resignation stared many of our citizens in the face,” she writes. “All of this was as true on inauguration day as it had been the day before and as it would be the day after.” Wise words, reminding us that hope is far too complicated a thing for politics, or even historic elections, to fully express.

---
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is a freelance writer and a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times opinion section.

[close] UNBOUND
Julie Phillips

Review of Shanghai Girls
By Lisa See
Random House

Novelist Lisa See has found rich material in Chinese women’s lives. Her bestseller Snow Flower and
the Secret Fan was set in 19th-century Hunan and dealt with foot-binding, the secret “women’s script” nu shu and the rivalrous bond between two women. The plot of Peony in Love turned on a 16th-century Chinese play. And in her latest, Shanghai Girls, she brings her characters from China to America.

The Chin sisters, practical Pearl and beautiful May, grow up rich, educated and modern in 1930s Shanghai. For fun, they work as “beautiful girls”: models for advertising artwork, like the painting on the book’s cover. But these arefree times are cut short when their father pays off his gambling debts by selling them into marriage to two Chinese American brothers. Pearl and May have no intention of following their husbands to Los Angeles—until the Japanese invasion changes everyone’s plans.

Upon arrival in California, May and Pearl submit to months of interrogation at Angel Island, the immigration processing station in San Francisco Bay. (They deliberately delay the process in order to work a trick that will get them out of a jam and determine the course of their future.) Released at last to the custody of their husbands, they do not regain their freedom. In Los Angeles, they discover, Chinese Americans cannot live outside Chinatown, watch a movie except from the theater balcony or get hired for “white” jobs. May observes that in Shanghai, people of different backgrounds “walked on the streets together… Here everyone is separated from everyone else— Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, blacks and Chinese. White people are everywhere, but the rest of us are at the bottom.”

Worse, their husbands turn out to be “paper sons” who have entered the U.S. with false papers and live in constant fear of being deported. In this isolated, apprehensive community, even Pearl finds herself latching on to “outdated traditions… as a means of soul survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.” The 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese Americans from full citizenship, brings only partial solace.

See’s tale of the two sisters’ love and rivalry, their romantic adventures and long struggles to regain their balance in a new land is entertaining, if melodramatic. (A wartime rape, an unplanned pregnancy and a child born dead are some of its more soap-operatic elements.) But the plot mainly serves to keep the book moving past a series of fascinating backdrops. We see cosmopolitan prewar Shanghai, with its mix of Asians and whites, wealth and poverty; Angel Island, where women sleep three deep on wire mesh bunks and suicide by sharpened chopstick is the alternative to deportation; Los Angeles’ China City, a faux Chinese neighborhood designed by whites and built from leftover film sets; the real film sets where May finds work providing costumes, arranging for extras and occasionally getting a tiny speaking (or screaming) part. Well-researched and highly readable, Shanghai Girls is a moving and revealing story of the Chinese American experience.

---
JULIE PHILLIPS is a book critic for the Dutch daily Trouw and the author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), which won the NationalBook Critic’s Circle Award.