Day 22
Day 22, and I have been reading about purity. The pursuit of purity that so often is treated as if it is the only value a woman has. Her body, untouched, virginal. The damage this ideal does to our girls and women is myriad but not fully quantified. Too many people take the pursuit of virginity for granted, as if it were the main ideal of morality that a girl should seek. But why? Why can’t girls be valued for their brains, their personality, their character? Why is purity so desired? It goes back a long time, doesn’t it, this search for the untainted, unsullied woman. The same expectations are not part of the male upbringing. Even in those circles where virginity is taught to boys, slipping from that ideal of purity is shrugged off as “boys will be boys” or a normal part of growing up. For girls, it is rarely so simple. So tonight, I offer you a story of a girl who has reached for purity…and failed.
First, five women.
Ramla Ali, Somali boxer
Amelia Bloomer, women’s rights and temperance activist
Agatha Christie, author
Katherine Hepburn, actress
Nancy Pelosi, first woman speaker of the US House of Representatives
PURE
Kylie pulled back, wanting him, but not wanting to compromise herself. She thought about the little card in her wallet, the purity card, the promise that she would save herself for marriage. This was wrong…but it felt so right. Devin. Her boyfriend. Her first boyfriend. She was in love.
Devin pulled her close and claimed her lips again. She felt his hands on her back, inside her shirt, against her skin. She tried to pull away, but her passion drove her forward, further into his arms. She gave herself to him, completely and totally. She forgot about the purity card.
It surprised her how quickly it happened, how soon it was over. There was no grand burst of stars, no music, nothing. It was…well, sort of…what? Just…they got naked, he got on top of her, and then…almost before she knew he had done anything, he went soft and pulled out. He dropped beside her on the bed, holding her hand and stroking her arm. She turned into his embrace, and they cuddled.
She was dressed and out of the house before his parents came home. She raced to the library, and slipped in the back door just in time to meet her parents at the front. They assumed she had been at the library all afternoon. She had never lied to them before. She climbed in the back seat and pretended to read all the way home.
Even though the experience had been somewhat less than she expected, she treasured the moment. She had become a woman. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She and Devin were a couple, almost like man and wife, really. After all, they had known each other. In the Biblical sense, as her parents always said. They said it with a frown, but it didn’t feel like she had done anything wrong.
School was strange. People scooted away from her as she walked down the hall, whispered to their friends as they looked at her. It was almost like…well, almost like they knew. Almost like they saw. She glared at Emily. Emily was giggling and whispering about her, but Emily had lost her virginity a year ago. What was so funny now? Kylie held her head up and didn’t look to either side as she slipped into homeroom.
Devin was hanging out with his friends at lunch. She scooted near him, hoping for a quick hug and kiss, as they usually did during brief encounters at school. She stood beside him for a full minute, but he pretended not to notice her. What was wrong? Didn’t he love her anymore? What about all those sweet whispers yesterday, all the passion? How could he just turn his back?
Maybe he was embarrassed because people were talking about them. He wanted to protect her, to show others that she was still a good girl, not the slut they were calling her. She knew they were saying that, because some of them were saying it loud enough for her to hear. She heard Emily talking to the girl next to her; all she heard was Kylie, Devin, and sex. She kept her head down and moved to a remote table where she could eat alone, away from prying eyes of other girls who had already lost their virginity, but seemed to need to point and whisper about her.
Someone sat at her table. She looked up, and found Blake sitting across from her. He ran his tongue over his lips and leered at her. She got up to move, and he grabbed her arm. “Where you going? Sit with me.” A teacher headed their way, and he let her go. She threw away her uneaten lunch and fled to the bathroom. At least there she could close the stall door and no one could see anything but her feet.
She moved beside Devin as they walked home, and tried to slip her hand in his. He turned and glared at her. “What do you want?”
“I want to walk home with you, like we always do”, she said.
“Go away. Tramp.” He moved away from her and caught up with a large group of boys on the other side of the street.
Kylie stared after him. Tramp? She was a tramp? He wanted to have sex. He told her he loved her. She was a tramp? What was he? She started to follow him, but changed her mind when he looked at her with a look of disgust. She sat on the curb and cried.
Emily sat beside her. “What’s wrong?”
Kylie glared at her. “Go away.”
Emily refused to leave. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know…I just…everyone was…I…” She stopped, unable to put her thoughts into words. “Hey, don’t let it bother you. Everyone will forget soon. Trust me.” She put her arms around Kylie, but Kylie shook them off. “I know.”
Kylie stumbled home, afraid to face her parents. Surely they knew. If everyone else had heard, they had almost certainly heard. One of the kids would have said something, their parents would hear it, and tell her parents. Now she would probably be thrown out of the house, cast out to try to survive on her own. She was only sixteen. She didn’t know how to survive on her own. She was just a girl.
Her parents were not home. Mom left a note saying she was at the grocery store, and would be home soon, don’t cause any trouble. Kylie left the note for her little brother; it was mostly meant for him. She locked herself in her room, determined not to come out no matter what they said. She was no longer pure. She had violated their trust. She was chewed chewing gum, candy that had been licked. Even the one who had chewed the gum no longer wanted her.
She had no future. No man would want her now. She had nothing left to offer anyone. Her value had dropped to zero. She might as well not be a person. How could she let this happen? She pulled the purity card out of her wallet and stared at it, and the ring around her finger where she had promised her virginity to her father when she was only six. She had failed. She had failed all of them. She might as well be dead.
Kylie’s mother heard Aaron screaming when she got home. She dropped the bags she was carrying and ran to find him. He was in Kylie’s room, staring up at his sister, suspended by a rope from a hook on the ceiling. Her tongue was out, her face was purple. Mom eased her down and called the ambulance, but they came too late. Kylie just had time to say good-bye and forgive me to her mother before she breathed her last breath. Forgive her? For what?
Mom never noticed the purity card clutched in her daughter’s left hand until the attendant at the mortuary handed it to her after preparing the body. Mom and Dad stared at the card, realization dawning. Their daughter had died in the pursuit of purity.