{"id":1576,"date":"2009-12-07T16:02:49","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T23:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sexuality\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2010-11-03T13:22:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T20:22:41","slug":"pure-fashion-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sexuality\/2009\/12\/07\/pure-fashion-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"Pure Fashion Policing"},"content":{"rendered":"

ABC news recently featured a story about “Pure Fashion,”<\/a> a U.S. faith-based program that leads 14-18 year-old girls “through an eight-month course in which they are encouraged to ‘dress in accordance with their dignity as children of God.'” The eight month course ends with a “‘purity preserving’ fashion show.”<\/p>\n

The obsession with, monitoring of, and handwringing over girls’ (sexualized) appearance is of course not new, but this particular iteration comes from an ironic source: a fashion model and former Miss Georgia, Brenda Sharman. Sharman may be preaching “purity” but she also understands that her message will be considered more hip if she can dissociate from conservative and\/or mainstream culture. Hence, Sharman is on a mission to reframe “pure” girls as “radical” girls:<\/p>\n

\"Brenda
Brenda Sharman: model, former Miss Georgia, and founder of Pure Fashion.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The idea with Pure Fashion is very countercultural,” said Brenda Sharman … “It takes a girl who is brave and gutsy…This is not for the weak and wimpy girl … to say, ‘I’m different, and I’m going to preserve my\u00a0innocence and virginity<\/a>,’ that’s a girl who’s radical!”<\/p>\n

\"Scene
Scene from the Pure Fashion catwalk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The problem is, radical, counter-cultural movements are supposed to challenge and pave new ground. In contrast, the leaders and proponents of Pure Fashion look to conservative established models for their inspiration. They are mothers, fathers, and church leaders who are deeply disturbed by the sexual displays (assumed to be impure) of their unmarried daughters. This may be a radical backlash to signifiers of sexuality or the de-coupling of sexuality and reproduction, but it’s not radical.<\/p>\n

Concerns about sexually expressive girls and women is common amongst groups whose cultural and religious norms privilege men and\/or believe that men and women have naturally different physical capabilites and personalities. As Shari Dworkin and I argued in a recent article,<\/p>\n

“(c)ultural and religious traditions that privilege men always require intense regulation and surveillance of girls’ and women’s sexuality. In these contexts, the moral and social ‘worth’ of girls and women is based on their sexual availability, creating a good virgin-bad whore dichotomy. This tradition is thriving in many aspects of U.S. \u00a0culture, including the movement for abstinence-only education, virginity pledges, purity ball, and so on” (Lerum and Dworkin, 2009b).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is clear that “Pure Fashion” can be added to the list of cultural institutions that support a hierarchical segregation between “virgins” and “whores.” For example, one mom who sent her daughter to “Pure Fashion” expressed her desire for men to look at her daughter in the same way that she looks at her daughter, as “pure and beautiful and innocent”:<\/p>\n

“I don’t want her to be distracted by men. So I kind of don’t want men to look at her at all, not notice her,” Tina said. “But I recognize that they will, so I just want to make sure they look at her in the way that I see her, which is pure and beautiful and innocent.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But conservative religious parents aren’t the only one sounding the alarm horns; many feminist and feminist-leaning academics and professionals are also concerned about sexy and sexual girls. This is because mainstream media appears to create the opposite problem of conservative religion: that is, rather than telling girls and women that their worth is based on their lack of sexual availabilit<\/strong>y<\/strong>, the media appears to “tell” girls and women that their worth is based on their widespread sexual appeal and availability<\/strong>. They may leave God and purity talk out of it and they may not send their daughters to Sharman’s fashion reeducation program, but secular, feminist, and academic critics\u00a0are still dismayed by girls who dress “sexy.” Indeed, it has become common for people across lines of politics, religion, and profession — at least in the US — to shake their heads in dismay over the increasing “sexualization” of girls, women, and of culture. This perceived shift in mainstream US culture is almost uniformly seen as harmful, something to critique and work against. It is in this cultural context that the American Psychological Association formed a task force on the Sexualization of Girls and wrote a highly publicized report (APA Task Force report on the Sexualization of Girls 2007)<\/a>. \u00a0(See below for the APA’s definition of “sexualization”).<\/p>\n

In contrast to the APA task force and conservative religious groups, we think it is a mistake for scholars and activists to automatically assume<\/strong> that sexualized images and appearances are harmful to girls and women. We critique the methodological, empirical, and epistemological foundations of this argument in great depth in a recent article (Lerum & Dworkin, 2009a), but here I focus on just one point: how the concern about “sexualization” misses the boat on sexual health. While the APA task force briefly discusses what they consider to constitute “healthy sexuality,”<\/strong> we argue that the term “sexual health”<\/strong> is much more useful for social justice, feminist, and public health scholars\/activists:<\/p>\n

… we suspect that an ideological gulf\u00a0may exist between the APA\u2019s (2007) concept of healthy\u00a0sexualit<\/strong>y and the more widely recognized concept of sexual health<\/strong>. For one, the APA\u2019s version of healthy\u00a0sexuality seems to rely on the existence of a sexual\u00a0partner: (\u2018\u2018intimacy, bonding . . . shared pleasure . . .\u00a0mutual respect between consenting partners,\u2019\u2019 p. 2).\u00a0In contrast, the concept of sexual health is often\u00a0explicitly tied to a rubric of individual sexual rights\u00a0(some of which may apply to both children and\u00a0adults). Originally developed by the World Association for Sexual Health and now widely recognized\u00a0(and modi\ufb01ed) by other organizations including the\u00a0World Health Organization, the concept of sexual\u00a0rights may include the right to sexual pleasure (not\u00a0necessarily with another person), the right to emotional\u00a0sexual expression (including self-sexualization), and the\u00a0right to sexually associate freely (Lerum & Dworkin, 2009, p. 259).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We further argue that “(s)ounding the alarms on sexualization without providing space for sexual rights results in a setback for girls and women and for feminist theory, and is also at odds with the growing consensus of global health scholars (Lerum & Dworkin, 2009, p. 260).<\/p>\n

While the APA task force report virtually ignores sexual health, statistics about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are widely embraced and utilized by conservative religious groups. The following quote comes from Brenda Sharman, director of “Pure Fashion”:<\/p>\n

“If you are too steamy in your bikini, you will become a part of a statistic,” Sharman told a roomful of 40 girls at the Atlanta conference. “By the age of fifteen, 76 percent of teens are involved in a sexual relationship. What do we expect, really, when so many girls have displayed their bodies to the world? … For the first time teen girls have the highest gonorrhea rate in the nation, teen boys have the second. Approximately 400,000 teens have abortions every year. And according to UNICEF, half of all new HIV infections occur in young people 15-24.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Sharman’s use of these statistics is alarmist and conflated (e.g., the UNICEF statistics are GLOBAL, reflecting more about conditions of access to contraception, early marriage, and\/or extreme poverty than whether or not a girl has access to a bikini!), but it is also clear that conservatives are using them to shore up a particular theory of sexuality (i.e. bad things happen when girls get sexy). For critical scholars of sexuality, justice, health, and inequality, these statistics illustrate points and questions around a very different set of assumptions. We leave these interpretations to the conservatives at our own peril.<\/p>\n

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The APA task force defines sexualization as a condition that occurs when a person is subjected to at least one<\/em> of the following four conditions:<\/p>\n