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Your question is a good one, Emily. The flip side of the purity pressures are well-drawn in Ariel Levy's excellent Female Chauvinist Pigs. I remember one girl Levy spoke to in particular—a pretty, leggy California high schooler who had sex utterly without pleasure. She did it to keep up with her fellow popular Janeses; she did it because she felt it gave her a measure of power over the men in her life. Sex didn't make her feel good, not one bit.
For me, one of the biggest problems with Valenti's book is that she makes the personal political to an outrageous degree with vignettes about her adolescent sexcapades. Her attitude is essentially, I had sex in high school by choice and it worked out, so having sex in high school is a positive thing. For many, many women this is not the case. From what I observed when I was a teen, most of my cohorts were happier when they waited until 17 or 18 to become sexually active; it is a rare 14 or 15-year-old who is secure enough in herself to have sex without regret. I think we should encourage teens to wait until college, but supply them with the proper contraception if they choose not to. As we all know, encouraging people to wait until marriage is completely unrealistic.
However, teens are so woefully undereducated about sex in this country that the first step should be to get them proper information from the get-go. The next step after that is more difficult because we cannot remove teenagers from their own social ecosystems. While a teenager in rural Alabama may be pressured by the so-called purity myth, a teenager in San Francisco may be pressured by her sexually active friends. The best bet is to encourage internal traits—like self-confidence—that help teens make the right choice for themselves. Again, I will return to Margaret Talbot's point in the New Yorker article Red Sex, Blue Sex: teens who feel they have a lot at stake will delay sexual intercourse and when they do have sex, have it responsibly. If I knew how to make all teen girls feel like they have a future worth waiting for, I would be a trillionairess.