September 1

Bethany (6 years old) and Mary Grace (5 years)
picking blueberries behind Grandma Ober's house.
Missing from the picture is Claire (3 years at the
time), the youngest member of our very
girl-oriented family.




I began this week's post by searching online for organizations that demonstrate girls' agency in practice and written pieces that point to an awareness of girls' agency. I immediately turned up this article from March 30, 2008 which I vaguely remembered reading:



"Students of Virginity"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/magazine/30Chastity-t.html

The article focuses on (mainly religious) student groups that advocates complete abstinence from sexual relationships before marriage, loosely associated with nationwide organizations such as True Love Waits. I latched onto this article and this topic because it ties in very closely with my own experience as a girl growing up in a religious context, and because it highlights some of the complications of girls' agency as I am beginning to understand it. Janie Fredell (the Harvard student interviewed by the Times and pictured here) describes one reason for waiting:

She said she read in Mill that women are subordinated in relationships as a result of “socially constructed norms.” If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.

But this reason seems to have been preempted by the perception that she grew up with, that it was wrong to have sex before marriage, and that practically no one was. The article opens:

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.” They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

Looking at my own experience, this article, and an article describing a "Purity Ball" organized for girls and their dads, I really am convinced that this "choice", which is promoted as being brave, mature, and a mark of independence, is orchestrated by parents and communities before most girls are old enough to think about wanting to have sex.

12-year-olds? Really?

http://www.mywesttexas.com/articles/2009/04/04/news/top_stories/purity_ball-_4_4.txt

And Time mentions a 4-year-old

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1823930-1,00.html


There's much more to look at here - the first article includes an interesting aside regarding sons:

The topic, many agreed, is also one important for their sons. However, the ball's organizers said, an elegant evening with pink balloons, dancing and wedding-gown like dresses is likely not the best way to reach boys. What method is, they're still trying to figure out.

And of course, there's a consumerist aspect to this culture. The search terms "sexual purity" at the Christian Book Distributors website brings up 92 products, including jewelry, cds and books. I don't mean to rely on cynicism and a critical attitude in writing about this subject, because I come from this culture and still find a lot to love in the evangelical church. But as far as attitudes towards girls go, there is quite a lot that I would like to change.