This Sunday I was treated to 1950s sexual politics masquerading itself as an article in The New York Times written by someone who has the liberal credentials of actually having written for Mother Jones. The article, "Students of Virginity" by Randall Patterson, decided that, fifteen years or more after this movement really took off, it was time to talk about celibacy on college campuses because Harvard University finally happens to have a chapter, dubbed "True Love Revolution." Problem one, then, this didn't matter when other, less famous and less wealthy schools had chapters?
Myriad are the questions and concerns this article brought up for me. Instead of reading a journalistic examination of this complex issue, I felt like I was reading a propaganda piece for the virtues of Victorian era femininity but recast as a feminist stance. First you have your main figure, a girl from a town in Colorado where supposedly no one had sex, who finds herself in the midst of "godless Harvard," where apparently hook-up style sex is rampant. She is then contrasted with her colleague, the male co-chair of Harvard's True Love Revolution. While, and I ask you to consider the images above as I write this, she is rendered as sexy, strong, and smart, her male colleague is rendered as creepy. That's right, chastity is sexy in women, but in men, it's just creepy. Why can't a normal, sexy man make a respectable choice for abstinence?
But of course the 1950s propaganda doesn't stop there, our white-middle-class heroine is then pitted against a "harlot"/"vixen" in complete uniform, a mini skirt, a lack of self restraint in her love of food, and a seeming idiocy about her own opinions in the one paragraph she gets to express them. Oh, and one other thing, our vixen happens to be Asian American. That's right, now I feel like it's a classical virgin vs. harlot with the added colonial overtones that all non-white-middle-class women are completely sexually available and so lustful they cannot control all their hormonal habits. Coincidence?
Putting aside these questions about the overt ways race and gender interplay in an article that seems to support the position of the virgin, I am left with several other questions. Why are chaste women always pitted against a rival whose sexual preferences resemble those of pornography? Why wasn't her opponent in debate a woman who takes a more moderated position towards sexuality? We may feel overloaded in this society by images of Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, and I might be with the Colorado virgin in seeing the danger to feminist strength in those women as well (always being sexually available porn style is being just as much controlled by men and being just as much an object with no subjectivity as the virgin, if not more so; I must agree with that). The choice is not virgin vs. harlot. In fact, both the virgin and the harlot, as archetypes in this dichotomy, are women who package themselves for patriarchal society's desires, not their own. A woman's sexual choices are much more complicated than that, and the one thing this article can remind is how much these choices, for both men and women, should be about self-respect and meaning, not just hormones, lust, and the images peddled to us by the media and other communities. And every man or woman should be self-conscious about why she chooses what she chooses about sexuality.
And how snide a name is "True Love Revolution," assuming that gays for one (whom the group only accepts if they are celibate), and other people who do not marry somehow do not experience "true love," but people who married experience true love, people who often did so throughout history as part of economic contracts not love? Also, haven't we learned the dangers of valorizing marriage as a kind of perfect utopian home life? Isn't that a lesson we can take from the 1960s even if we didn't live through them? And what was with the publishing of letters to Harvard's Crimson that implied the "vixen" was just not the wifely material that the "virgin" was? Not only does that yet again replicate 1950s mentality but it assumes our "vixen" wants a traditional monogamous marital relationship, which she may very well not.
I can still imagine that some (I know not all, and that the virgin and harlot imagery exists because some people have made choices that look just like that) women and men can and have over the centuries chosen to be neither virgins nor harlots; celibate freaks nor virile dogs. That there is a much more complicated path in between that does justice to the full personhood of all the women and men involved in a sexual exchange. What is significant about now, and better about now than the 1950s, is the the freedom to choose for oneself without society setting up the old stereotypes. But this article felt like a step backwards instead of the step forwards it was presenting itself as.
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Images of True Love Revolution leaders Leo Keliher and Jamie Fredell, taken by Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times
