The words used to describe women who didn’t have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me. I absorbed the language of archetypes and aesthetic tropes—the repressed woman, the liberated woman—instead of thinking more critically about whether these stories were true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power.
