How The Cult of Purity Is Killing Girls

I was a sophomore at a Catholic high school the year that Brittany Spears released "Hit Me Baby One More Time" and danced her sexed-up school girl uniform all over MTV.  In the following weeks, my friends and I were barraged with cat calls and comments whenever we wore our plaid kilts in public.  We had no idea why this outfit we found so frumpy and unattractive (and ignored by the boys at school) would suddenly catch the notice of men twice our ages.  So I asked a teacher, who simply replied, "It's because you're pure."    

Why are we so obsessed with purity and virginity for women?  Natalie Dylan, the woman who auctioned off her hymen on EBay, the Jonas Brothers' purity rings (and subsequent South Park spoof), and our old friend Brittany are all selling the same idea: purity.  And people are buying it in salivating, pulsating droves.  On the surface, a cultural focus on purity may seem a non-issue; if the Jonas Bothers don't want to have sex before marriage, who cares except a handful of precocious and disappointed teen girls?

But for many girls, purity and cultural obsession with it is a death sentence.  In rural parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, some still believe that sex with a virgin child can cure HIV/AIDS.  This practice leads to at least 3600 young girls a year in Zimbabwe alone contracting the disease via rape.  Men without HIV/AIDS will also pay handsomely to deflower a girl, making girls with perceived or actual purity a main target for traffickers.  Some girls have been trafficked and sold as virgins again and again, as long as they look young enough.  Even here in the U.S., we often blame rape victims and try to find a reason their behavior or appearance "enticed" a rape.    

Is our obsession with purity and virginity ultimately killing our girls?  Were virginity not such a choice commodity, would the thousands of young women trafficked into prostitution and commercial sex each year be spared?  Or if sexual experience were valued in women the way it is in men, would the world's brothels be filled with Bea Arthur type grandmothers?  And perhaps the most important question at all- How have we gotten to the point where it is acceptable for men to seek out sex with a virgin child?

I survived Brittany Spears turning an ugly polyester outfit I was forced to wear everyday into a sex symbol.  But so many girls do not survive what the cult of purity forces on them: rape, disease, pain, slavery, and despair.  When will this obsession end and set them free?