Chapter 3

1.  Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2009), Lynn M. Phillips, referred to later in this chapter, calls this virgin icon “the pleasing woman discourse.” The pleasing woman is “pleasant, feminine, and subordinate to men,” and she lacks sexual desire herself. Her entire being is based on pleasing and being in service to others, especially men.

2.  Hannah Brückner and Peter S. Bearman, “After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36 (2005): 271–278.

3.  Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and The Myth of the Slut (New York: Scribner, 2002).

4.  Ibid.

5.  Kate Snow and Kelly Hagan, “Teen Girls Hazed on N.J. High School ‘Slut List,’” Good Morning America, September 23, 2009, abcnews.go.com/GMA/teen-girls-hazed-slut-list/story?id=8649050&tqkw=&tqshow=GMA.

6.  “2009 AP-MTV Digital Abuse Study,” MTV’s A Thin Line Project, www.athinline.org/MTV-AP_Digital_Abuse_Study_Executive_Summary.pdf.

7.  Lynn M. Phillips, Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

8.  Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005).

9.  Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007).

10. To read the full Marie Claire interview, see Sarah Z. Wexler, “Confessions of a Sex Addict,” Marie Claire, April 2008, www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/sex-addict-confessions.

11. Find the Jezebel.com blog post I refer to at Moe Tkacik, “Is ‘Sex Addict’ Memoirist Kerry Cohen Even a Slut?” April 22, 2008, jezebel.com/382609/is-sex-addict-memoirist-kerry-cohen-even-actually-a-slut. The blog post is intact, but almost all the original comments were deleted. Why? Less than a month after the posting, Jezebel ran into problems because their readers and bloggers were often deeply cruel and nasty. You can read about that at Lauren Lipton, “Not on Our Blog You Won’t,” New York Times, May 4, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04jezebel-1.html. It seemed to me that most of the blog posts and comments that were truly mean were ones about women who had achieved success—and this at a blog created for “smart” women.

12. Erica Jong, quoted in Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, 76.

13. Phillips, Flirting with Danger, 52.

14. Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (New York: Hyperion, 2008). For those who are interested, I wrote about the work it took to find the meaning inside this scene in the essay Kerry Cohen, “Excavating a Moment’s Truth,” Brevity.com, January 2010, www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/craft/craft_cohen1_10.htm.

15. Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 3–19.