Body Hero Jean Kilbourne on the Virgin/Whore Contradiction

“Females have long been categorized as either virgins or whores, of course. Whatʼs new is that girls are supposed to embody both within themselves, and that even very little girls are encouraged to look sexy long before they have any real understanding of what that really means. This creates an impossible double bind. In the same way that the girdles and the corsets of the past have been replaced by an internalized standard even more suffocating, so the sexual repression of the past has been replaced by something in some ways even more demanding and constricting.”

Jean Kilbourne