VIRGIN NATION
Sexual Purity and American Adolescence
By Sara Moslener
OUP USA. 232 pages. £19.99
ISBN 978 0 199 987 764
Dr Moslener’s fascinating, but in my view one-eyed, work focuses on issues surrounding adolescent sexuality (especially that of females!), purity, religion, US nationalism and the apocalypse from the early 20th century to the present. As such it is far more likely to interest (and infuriate) American readers, who may well get the feeling that Moslener neither properly understands nor appreciates the wider and more alarming implications of these issues.
For Moslener, ‘in the moral economy of sexual purity, the rapture of sexual ecstasy is only offered to those who wait for divine beneficence… Consequently, the moral economy of sexual purity is doubly charged with individual and collective implications [i.e. saving American civilisation] (see p.168).’
