"Virginity is such a personal thing. You can't judge anyone on it. A lot of young women feel they want to save themselves for the man who they think they'll love forever"
About this Quote
A media psychologist threading the needle between empathy and enforcement, Joyce Brothers frames virginity as “personal” while quietly fencing in what that “personal” is allowed to look like. The opening move - “You can’t judge anyone on it” - sounds like permission. It’s also a preemptive scold aimed at the culture’s favorite sport: sorting young women into respectable and ruined. Brothers is doing harm reduction in the language that a mid-to-late 20th-century American audience could tolerate on daytime television: nonjudgmental on the surface, conventional underneath.
The subtext arrives with “A lot of young women feel they want to save themselves…” That phrasing shifts agency onto “feel,” not “choose,” and it treats abstinence less as a moral command than as a psychologically understandable desire for security. But then comes the tell: “for the man who they think they’ll love forever.” The imagined endpoint of female sexuality is a man; the imagined best-case scenario is permanence. Even the caveat “think” gestures at realism, yet it still installs lifelong romance as the default frame.
Context matters: Brothers built her brand translating therapy-speak for mass America, during decades when sexual liberation and conservative backlash were in constant trench warfare. This quote is a compromise product. It tries to soften shame without challenging the institution that produces it. The result is a culturally legible kindness that still smuggles in an old script: female virtue as a thing to be “saved,” and desire as something that only becomes fully acceptable once it can be stapled to forever.
The subtext arrives with “A lot of young women feel they want to save themselves…” That phrasing shifts agency onto “feel,” not “choose,” and it treats abstinence less as a moral command than as a psychologically understandable desire for security. But then comes the tell: “for the man who they think they’ll love forever.” The imagined endpoint of female sexuality is a man; the imagined best-case scenario is permanence. Even the caveat “think” gestures at realism, yet it still installs lifelong romance as the default frame.
Context matters: Brothers built her brand translating therapy-speak for mass America, during decades when sexual liberation and conservative backlash were in constant trench warfare. This quote is a compromise product. It tries to soften shame without challenging the institution that produces it. The result is a culturally legible kindness that still smuggles in an old script: female virtue as a thing to be “saved,” and desire as something that only becomes fully acceptable once it can be stapled to forever.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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