The Virginity Card is a sacred (metaphorical) card that all
people have. The metaphorical card that we carry identifies our purity.
Although in US society we have our own speculations on what it means to carry
our V-cards. For men we are brought believing that it is a good thing to lose
our virginity at an early age, and that having a lot of sex makes us real men
and we are praised by our peers by doing so. On the other hand women are supposed
to hold on to their virginity until the day they get married and our put to
shame for breaking that sacred bond of purity. This sense of purity in women is
at times used to determine their worth. For example when a man meets a women
who is a virgin it is seen as a good thing, and is held to a higher standard
than a women who is sexually active. In Jessica Valenti’s film, "The
Purity Myth," she examines and explains the myth of purity associated with
the women’s virginity.
Paternity has a huge impact on purity and virginity in today’s
culture. It is up to the father to protect his daughter and not let her lose
her innocence. I believe this comes from the fact that before women had any
rights they were considered property and their fathers decided who they could
and could not marry. Even in today’s culture it is considered tradition, or old
school, for a man to get the father’s blessing before marring his daughter. The
control of a women’s sexuality by their father is insane. No human being should
be allowed to decide how one treats their body or how one chooses to live their
life. After a certain age we are all in control of our own lives and our own
decisions a parent’s role is to protect us until that point, and put us on a
path to living an extraordinary life.
According to Valenti, the contemporary virginity movement holds
women back and prevents them from doing things outside of their gender roles. The
idea of abstinence is to prevent childhood pregnancies, but it also contributes
to assigning gender roles amongst men and women. They teach abstinence in
schools to tell children to wait until marriage to have sex thus assigning the
gender roles of the common house wife. In the film abstinence speakers would
preach about how sinful sex is and it is dangerous and bad. They also give false
perceptions about sex and take their views to extremes. Abstinence programs
have proven not to work. This is not surprising based on the fact that one of
the biggest and most successful topics for advertisement is sex. Sex is
everywhere and pornography is easy to obtain in today’s culture so how can they
expect abstinence to be affective?