Being a sex-positive feminist might seem, to some, to be a contradiction- aren’t feminists supposed to hate men, not love cock? Well, that’s just another misconception about feminism that we need to break down, right up there with the idea equality is satanism.

The reality is that feminists have better sex; what’s not to love? That’s the question that Kidder Kaper, Cootchie, Laura Rad, and Gay Rick ask on their podcast, Sex Is Fun. Their information comes in a free, open-source medium that is easily downloadable to iTunes and tons of other programs, and their topics range from “How to Throw A Sex Party” to “Sex Education in Europe” and “How Lose Your Virginity.” They can tell you how to find the female g-spot and they have done their research about lots of what they call “non-vanilla” topics, such as butt sex, sex toys, bdsm, open relationships, multiple partner sex, and voyeurism. They’ve had guests like Betty Dodson, the Jill-Off Queen (who also writes for our favorite magazine, Bust) and Tristan Taormino, as well as product reviews… it’s a party in your headphones.

It’d be easy to endorse them unequivocally: they are providing free sex education to a country that badly needs it- – by Laura Rad’s report in Sex is Fun Episode #118, from last April, the current statistics are that 3 or 4 out of every 10 American girls get pregnant before they are twenty years old. That doesn’t mean that they have the baby, of course, but that is a staggering number compared to other industrialized nations– Western Europe, for example, averages 6 out of 100 girls.

Why? They have compulsory sex education. Condom advertisements are part of life. It has often been noted that the introduction of higher education for women in developing countries decreases birthrates; our culture’s discomfort with sex is doing us no favors.

We do use sex to sell everything, anyway: why do we have such a double standard about talking about how to protect ourselves and be healthy? It’s a question that remains to be answered, but as Kidder put it, the U.S. is also “the industrialized nation with the largest churchgoing population. Just sayin’.” The lack of federal funding for sex education also means that well-meaning sex educators, like the crew at Sex Is Fun, are forced to look elsewhere for funding.

Sex Is Fun was originally funded by the Smitten Kitten, a sex-toy store based in the Twin Cities, where Sex Is Fun is also based, and by a company that made a product called Boom Energy. Boom Energy was a non-prescription sexual stimulant that, in January of last year, was exposed as containing the prescription drug Viagra. Although the distributor plead ignorance, claiming that the product was not supposed to contain the drug, Kidder reported that the manufacturers “faced sentences of up to 20 years.”

It’s ironic that our cultural ignorance has left the best and most comprehensive sexual educational material — material that should made these four part of the academe of sex practice — dependent on deceptive products for funding. Maybe we could just admit that Sex is Fun?

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.” One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely. We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are. We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero. We meet today to heal the divisions that have torn this country. For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We http://www.hungry-girl.com/sectionimg/1176strawberry_creme.jpgmust bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay.

Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed.

As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits. And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”

And in Denver, we Democrats showed America that we have cute daughters who will someday provide us with prestigious car-window stickers. We heard Hillary Clinton’s ringing endorsement of “the weak-looking thin guy who’s bound to lose.” We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.

We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don’t perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life. We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, “Vote Obama: He’s better than you’ll ever be.” We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country. No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope! For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America! (From David Brooks, NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist).

Like Gil Scott-Heron (you may be familiar with his hit “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“), I’m going to spend this post, the first in a long time, asking the admittedly pretentious-sounding question, “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?”. I’m asking because it sure won’t be Whole Foods, or hybrid cars, or organic cigarettes, or bottled water  (which is not better for you than tap water) or any of that other shit that’s supposed to purify the American lifestyle, and elevate the upper-middle class consumer above the Kraft E-Z Mac of the middle class and the Mickey D’s of the working people, to hover like indecisive chopsticks over a sushi platter.

That sounds like an angry rant, and I guess it is — and it’s probably the result of moving back to Eastern Massachusetts, where the classism bubbles just beneath the surface. I can’t protest the judgment of people that begins with accent and appearance and moves over every element of lifestyle choice, because I do believe that evaluating oneself and one’s neighbors is a natural extension of critical thought. But I do object to the commodification of morality that often accompanies divisions of social class in this country – the wealthy are those who can afford to purchase Terrapasses to offeset their carbon emissions, and buy fair-trade, organic, locally-grown groceries and clothing, while the rest of the country shops at Wal-Mart.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t make an ecological difference to buy organic, but it is to say that it makes a larger sociological statement. Social class, like all social constructs, is communicated through the actions, attitude and appearance of each agent. But wearing social class overtly can function as a form of perpetuated, passive-aggressive oppression: a person wearing large diamonds is saying “I hope that this makes you think I have lots of money, and that that makes me special because most people don’t,” which of course also reveals a certain degree of insecurity, and a reliance on cultural signifiers of prosperity to bolster their self-image.

With the rising popularity of sites like Stuff White People Like (tagline of upcoming book: A Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions), we have to ask what motives drive the “idiosyncrasies” of white culture here among the residents of the United States. This is not talked about very often because while “white” is recognized as a racial categorization, it is rarely recognized as an ethnic or cultural group, which is mostly because it has been the unquestioned dominant American cultural force for centuries. Because that will soon be changing, as Hispanic-Americans comprise an ever-larger percentage of the country, an examination of white culture is long overdue.

White is so much the norm that non-white people are called “minorities.” The everyman, the mannequin, and the medical textbook illustration are white. Asian- and Hispanic-Americans are underrepresented; black people are often represented as token stereotypes, meaning that any black politician running for president has to make the the uncomfortable choice of pandering only to the Starbucks-sipping upper classes or running with the regular joes and risking playing into those stereotypes.

In fact, United States culture is so insular that, as citizens of other countries on the American continent are quick to point out, they are under the impression that they are the only Americans. In Spanish, there is a word, “estadounidense” (es-TAH-doh-oo-nee-DEN-say), which means we’re from the fifty states plus or minus Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and all of the army bases our country has all over the world. Our word, “American,” could as easily mean Canadian or Argentinean.

This is not just because we lack an adjective for “from the U.S.”, but also because we believe that “America” means just our country. And when we envision Americans, we imagine a nation of European-descended, mostly Protestant people who care about lawn care, regardless of the injury to global water economy and “freedom,” regardless of the injury to the inmates of the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

White culture is the culture of capitalism — not just the culture of privilege but the culture of taking advantage of the disempowered and unprivileged by blinding oneself to their existence. The reason that we don’t have a word to define ourselves in contrast to the rest of the world is the same reason that in 2006, the majority of “Americans” can’t find Iraq, a nation we’ve been at war with since 2003, on a map.
If we actually understood that our clothes were made by children working for fifteen cents an hour, if we actually understood that corporate “America” has it out for their own wallets and not our best interest, if we actually understood the effect that driving our SUVs has on the ecology of our planet, maybe things would be a little different. But we’re too busy thinking about ourselves to give a shit. I’m so glad we won’t be the majority forever. Thank (white, upper middle class) god for small favors. And let’s remember that exclusive policies have not been working well for us so far, and they might not work well for us white residents of the United States if we become the (gasp) minority.

“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.“

Satan didn’t want to be greater than God, he simply wanted EQUAL in authority.” Uh, right. The parallel here between Satan and feminism is real, because both of them wanted equality within a preexisting power structure. However, Satan was neither a woman nor a feminist, and few feminists would align themselves with Satan, so the analogy stops there. Just as feminism, like many egalitarian platforms, supports a subversion of hierarchies in general, it might legitimately be argued that the egalitarianism which lead to the use of both male and female interpretations of God in the original language of the Bible (and The Old Testament) undermines any conception of male and female as less than equal, or indeed as separate beings. Indeed, the focus on the differences between ourselves should not outweigh our attention to our similiarities, for we are overwhelmingly similar beings — seeing as we are, on the DNA level, 99% identical to chimpanzees (before insertions and deletions are taken into account, and 96% the same when they are) and any two of us are 10 times more similar than that. So exactly where does the basis for male authority lie, if not in God or in biology?

I would argue that it’s a part of our culture — a culture that would be shocked if anyone were to publicly propose a racial or ethnic or religious supremacy, but which barely bats an eye when we affirm gender supremacy.

Call me Satan, call me evil, or call me a threat to the godly man, but don’t call me a cog in the machine of gender supremacy. And as my grandpa always says, please don’t call me late to lunch. (And if it’s soul food, God, someone save me some ribs.)

It does seem like, as they say here, God is Brazilian: I have yet to meet a Brazilian who said anything negative or threatening to me, and many people have helped me kindly and warmly, as if I were a neice instead of a stranger who was consistently butchering their language, which is how some people think of God. I asked, today, for the “bath” in a coffeeshop, and the baker turned from her work and looked at me with real affection and said, slowly and clearly, “bathroom.”

Then, there’s also the tremendous social inequality, which makes me realize that I’m terribly naive about the state of the world. I tried to fend off my first child beggar by just walking away, but he pursued, frowning and making eating motions, “please, some money, just a little, i’m so hungry”. I said no, and tried to walk away, again, but he asked, “will you buy me some milk?” and I said, “ok, yeah,” – I mean, you can’t really misuse milk. when i came out of the store (whose employees had immediately ushered out the favela kid unceremoniously when we came in), the first kid was ecstatic, and laughing and dancing, and another kid was waiting with him, and it started again: “please, some money” and followed me down the street begging until i gave him 1 real, about fifty cents.

People here say that God is Brazilian. As the child of a pagan and a committed Jewish atheist, I have no idea what to make of the idea of God, who towers over this Catholic city and talks to my hostel’s night janitor on long and lonely shifts. But it seems to me that if I were an omnipotent (and omnivorous) deity, I would settle down here, where there are tons of fresh juice and delicious multicultural foods, a huge beach and a beautiful mountainous landscape, and some social problems that need the attention of an all-powerful being.

I mean, not just people from another place, but people in our country. Flabbergasting, isn’t it? We train people to kill non-US citizens, and then they kill US citizens. You’d think all people were created equal or something.

So anyway, 121 veterans of a war that began March 20, 2003, have been killing people.

Naturally, in such an unfortunate situation, we don’t turn to the Church — according to the WildWildLeft and USA Today, 72% of Americans who never attend church, even on holidays, believe that “God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists.” We certainly can’t turn to Pat Robertson, who proposed that we continue the American imperialist regime by killing Hugo Chavez: (hat tip, WildWildLeft), and we are uncomfortably reminded that Chavez is the kind of Venezuelan President who donates oil to poor Americans. Why do we want to cap him, again? Oh, yeah, “it’s cheaper than a war”.

We might consider turning, in our times of strangely government-subsidized violence, to liberation theology (curtsy: Annie).

Before I scare any of you valuable atheistveganarchists off with the word theology, let me emphasize that liberation theology, a movement that began in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in1955, has become a powerful economic and political movement in South and Central America, leading to other movements such as the Solidarity Economy movement.

And it doesn’t always have much to do with the Church – which, since that USA Today survey, informs me that 72% of non-Church-attending U.S. citizens also believe that the Church is “full of hypocrites”, should be a relief.But the Church isn’t the only thing that’s stubborn: Hugo Chavez has found another one. You might admire his choice of setting up his desk outside to harangue Bush; you might admire his choice of words.

But don’t forget that he’s done more for the Bronx – and lots of other working-class places in the US- than any other President in a long time, and that after Hurricane Katrina, when Condi Rice was shoe-shopping and Bush and Cheney were on vacation, and neither of them lifted a finger to address the issues at hand.

“The Chávez administration was the first foreign government to offer aid to its “North American brothers”. Chávez offered tons of food, water, and a million barrels of extra petroleum to the U.S. He has also proposed to sell, at a significant discount, as many as 66,000 barrels of heating fuel to poor communities that were hit by the hurricane, and offered mobile hospital units, medical specialists, and power generators. The Bush administration declined the offer, ” reports Wikipedia, footnoting Jorge Martin.

You’re a donkey, Mr. Danger.

¿Qué onda, buey? which translates literally as “what wave, ox?”, and more figuratively as “what’s the vibe, dude?” is the friendliest of the bunch, and a common choice among the hip younger set.

But there are also the various formal time-based greetings which we hardly use in English, (good morning, good afternoon, good evening), as well as specific greetings for someone who is eating (provecho!), which connote más respeto and are used frequently by the hip younger set when they need to prove themselves not dragones (literally, dragons, figuratively, hoodlums).

Then there about twenty ways to greet someone informally, including a few idiomatic gems like ¿Qué tal? - which literally means something like “What’s so?” and the anachronistic sounding ¿Qué pasa? - “What’s happening?” which is still used here as if ‘happenings’ didn’t go out with shag carpet and the Nixon administration.

Here, as in any Latin American country, conversations must begin with a form of hello if the speaker wants to show any kind of respect for the other person or persons involved.

So needless to say, it creeped me out endlessly when I was walking down calle Juncal at 1:30 in the morning looking for a bar that it turned out I had been given bad directions to (my hosting friend was happily ensconced in her boyfriend and was looking to entertain me by passing me off to some others) and someone approached me without saying hello.

Since Argentines eat dinner at about 10pm, everything retail stays open until 9, and restaurants usually don’t manage to kick their customers out until 12 or 1, so 1:30 is not such a late hour as it would be in the States.

However, the wealth disparity gapes like a hungry mouth, and many people don’t have an alternative to crime. The poverty of the villas surrounding the city means that there are people who come to the city proper to collect cardboard, which they can  take back to the villas to sell as housing material.

Women are not supposed to walk alone at night, but it was only four blocks that I felt completely comfortable on in daylight, so what did it matter? But then I couldn’t find the place I was looking for, and began to get nervous and walk faster.

Behind me, I heard a voice mumble something. I walked on, past some streetlights, over the cracked concrete of the sidewalk, and heard it again: “Tengo una pregunta”- I have a question.  I had some questions, too, but I didn’t want this guy to get any closer to me, so I wasn’t going to ask them: I was alone on the street, and he hadn’t said hello.

“Tengo una pregunta.” He was following me now. I glimpsed a bulky figure. My sneakers pattered busily on the sidewalk. “Tengo una pregunta.” 

A taxi pulled up, and the driver leaned out of the window, and yelled very loudly and indignantly at Bulky Dude, and he went away. I was lucky, I guess, that the taxi showed up.

The thing is, I realized later, that if it was a woman who said that to me – especially a small, young woman, but pretty much any woman who didn’t look thugged or drugged out – I probably would have stopped to hear her question.

Men are bigger, and in one-on-one combat I can take them, sometimes, if they don’t have any weapons or martial arts training, but I’d really rather avoid the whole thing.

So in this case, in the late-night half-lit street confrontation, my instinct tells me that Kathleen Barry is right – that sex is physical power, because a man is more of a physical threat than a woman.

I spent several hours per week last semester interviewing women at my coed college and a nearby women’s college about their ideas about feminism and safety on campus. Most said that they felt completely safe, and that there was little or no crime on their campus, but when I asked about their perceptions of the frequency of sexual assault and rape, the women at my coed college said, “oh, i’m sure that happens pretty much every party night” – meaning Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with selected Wednesdays thrown in for good measure.

That means that the threat of rape is pretty present on my campus.  Hello. Thanks for not raping anybody. Chau, buey.

It was a long story, but it can be told simply – she and a spacy, naive friend were invited to a club and given VIP treatment until it became clear that something was pretty sketchy about the way that the woman who’d invited them wanted them to come back, for free, and hook up with the customers.

Later that night, I was with most of the same friends in a cab. It was pretty late – definitely past 1 in the morning, and our driver was this small dude in a white hat. Most of the kids I was with are Americans who’ve been living in Buenos Aires for five months and can get around the city pretty well, but we were all speaking English at the start of the ride, so we were just some random tourists to him, probably.

As the driver made a turn, one of us protested that he was going the long way – a common trick cabs use to scam a bit more money out of wealthy-looking passengers.

But he just laughed, and told us, “You’ll see, you’ll like this route better.” He took us down a long street lined with prostitutes in crazy Argentine retro-punk lingerie – garter belts, dominatrix boots, false eyelashes, zebra print, naked breasts, and fur coats whizzed by the windows. A girl I’d just met was sharing the front seat with my friend, and wondered aloud, “?Fue hombre o mujer, este?”

“Oh, that one’s a woman,” the driver replied, “her name is Maria.”

“Are you married?” we asked.

“I have four small kids, but I’m separated,” he said, and laughed: “With a twenty-two year old girlfriend.”

According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’s Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, Argentina is “one of the favored destinations of paedophile sex tourists from Europe and the United States.”

The New Internationalist reports that officially, prostitution in Argentina is “Not a crime, according to Article 19 of the Constitution: ‘private actions that in no way offend order and public morals or do damage to a third party are reserved to be judged by God and fall outside the competence of judges’. But it is illegal to solicit, to aid or abet a prostitute, live off their earnings, or run a brothel.”

In practice, though, “Prostitutes are arrested and fined or jailed for 21 days under edicts issued at the discretion of the police. There is no State protection. Libertad Latina’s 2005 report, “The Crisis in Argentina,” summarizes, “Latin American women and children of all races survive in a hostile social climate of severe sexual harassment and sexual violence. These conditions expose women and especially girl children to danger in the home, in their communities, in their schools and in their workplaces.”

Prostitution is constantly denigrated in Latin American Spanish: the most common and most denigrating insult/curse is hijueputa “son of a whore,” and the more affectionate cabron, literally means cuckold – which is to say, you’re too soft on your woman, or she’s smarter than you, or something.

I can’t believe, though, that the law actually says that the people who employ prostitutes are reserved to be judged by God. I mean, if that flies, why should there be any law at all?

A BBC article from last week chronicles the “Prostitutes in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires,” who “have launched a campaign to raise awareness about the difficult circumstances in which they work.

“They have renamed one of the major parks in the city Prostitutes’ Plaza and a book has been launched about abuse and exploitation.

“The women have been marching and handing out condoms.

“It is part of a national campaign to admit prostitution exists and provide better security for women involved.

“On the city street maps, the park is called Mercy Plaza but the locals all call it Once Plaza, since it sits at the heart of the working-class Once neighbourhood.

“Only now the women who, come nightfall, work around here have renamed it Prostitutes’ Plaza.

‘Taking control’

“On the ground by the main statue they have daubed the words “No woman is born a prostitute”.

“It is the title of a book published by two women, Sonia Sanchez and Maria Galindo, which looks at Argentine society and the role prostitution plays within it.

“”We’re taking control of the streets,” said Maria.

“It’s a small but important step.”

Sonia said: “We’re saying enough is enough. Prostitution isn’t a job. It’s sexual exploitation and it’s big business.”

Other slogans daubed, then painted over, around the square read: “The pimps rule here” and “Here they exploit the bodies of girls, and the police do nothing”. The Bolivian creative activist collective Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) and the Buenos Aires group AMMAR take credit for the vandalism. For more info in Spanish, check out these articles.

While Graciela was not the first to sell her virginity, or even the first to auction it off, her choice to pimp her sexuality (which she later retracted; perhaps this was her intention all along and this was merely a publicity stunt?) leads us to question what virginity is, and why it has become so valuable.

Wikipedia writes that “The act of losing one’s virginity, that is, of a first sexual experience, is commonly considered within Western culture to be an important life event and a rite of passage. It is highlighted by many mainstream Western movies (particularly films aimed at a teenaged audience). The loss of virginity can be viewed as a milestone to be proud of or as a failure to be ashamed of, depending on cultural perceptions. Historically, these perceptions were heavily influenced by perceived gender roles, such that for a male the association was more often with pride and for a female the association was more often with shame. (See Double standard.)”

Ah, right: that Judeo-Christian construct, knowledge is shameful, and women who seek wisdom are punished with a subordinate role. Here’s the book of Genesis, 3:6-16:

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. “

Riiight. Not everyone has that same kind of eviction-from-paradise introduction to sexual knowledge and awareness of their own nakedness, but lots of people consider the loss of their virginity to be a significant milestone in their lives. At the Virginity Project, you can check out some stories of how people “lost it” and how they felt about it.

In a country as Catholic as Peru, perhaps it’s not a surprise that Yataco backed out of the deal -what’s 1.5 million compared to losing the respect of your community? But even in a place like the Northeastern U.S., without a consistent, state-funded shame regulating religious mentor, female virginity is fetishized, sacred, almost taboo. This reflects the objectification of women, as men gain cultural value as lovers by practicing a sexuality that is allowed to include making love, watching pornography, and masturbating, while women are expected to twiddle their thumbs or risk losing cultural value due to the dangerous contamination of their pretty little heads.