Moriah Conant’s Reviews > The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women > Status Update

Proponents of chastity and abstinence, though, would have us believe that abstaining indeed requires strength and action.

It’s this inextricable relationship between sexual purity and women- how we’re either virgins or not virgins- that makes the very concept of virginity so dangerous and so necessary to do away with.

Because today, in a world where porn culture and re-energized abstinence movements collide, the moral panic myth about young women’s supposed promiscuity is diverting attention from the real problem that women are still being judged (sometimes to death) on something that doesn’t really exist: virginity.

The idea that virginity (or lost thereof) can profoundly affect women’s lives is certainly nothing new. But what virginity is, what it was, and how it’s being used now to punish women and roll back their rights is at the core of the purity myth.

The lie of virginity-the idea that such a thing even exists-is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality.