Jessica Valenti QUOTES

1 " What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up. "

― Jessica Valenti , Full Frontal Feminism

2 " ..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

3 " Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically “empowered” or “feminist.” I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women
is a radical act. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

4 " Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically 'empowered' or 'feminist.' I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women
is a radical act. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

5 " Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

6 " Value yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement. "

― Jessica Valenti , Full Frontal Feminism

7 " As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

8 " Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

9 " I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

10 " By erasing any nuance and complexity about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn't seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there's no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

11 " While falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you. "

― Jessica Valenti , Full Frontal Feminism

12 " If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

13 " Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit. "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

14 " Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too- but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one. "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

15 " If we have no place to go where we can escape that reaction to our bodies, where is it that we're not forced? The idea that these crimes are escapable is the blind optimism of men who don't understand what it means to live in a body that attracts a particular kind of attention with magnetic force. "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

16 " Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable. "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

17 " Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”? "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

18 " No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on. "

― Jessica Valenti , Sex Object: A Memoir

19 " Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

20 " By fetishizing youth and virginity, we're supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren't women at all- they're girls. "

― Jessica Valenti , The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women