It’s pretty interesting that at this year’s MTV Video Music awards the biggest controversy came from Brit comedian, host Russell Brand messing with the Disney-sponsored teen pop boy-band the Jonas Brothers for wearing Purity Rings.

Purity rings, or chastity rings/promise rings originated in the U.S. in the 1990s among Christian affiliated sexual abstinence groups. The rings are sold to adolescents, or to parents so that the rings may be given to their adolescent children as gifts.

It is intended that wearing a purity ring is accompanied by a religious vow to practice celibacy until marriage. The ring is usually worn on the left ring finger with the implication that the wearer will remain abstinent until it is replaced with a wedding ring. Although the ring is worn on the hand, where others can see, its main purpose is to serve as a constant reminder to the wearer of their commitment between themselves and God to remain pure until marriage. There is no particular style for purity rings; however, many worn by Christians have a cross in their design. Some rings contain a diamond chip or other gemstone and/or “True Love Waits”, “One Life, One Love”, or another similar saying embossed somewhere on the ring.

“It’s a little bit ungrateful,” joked Brand, “Because they could literally have sex with any woman that they want, and they’re just not gonna do it. They’re like Superman deciding not to fly, and just going everyhwere on a bus.” The joke became a running theme throughout the night, and at one point Brand even pretended he’d stolen a Jonas Brother’s virginity, holding up a ring in his hand. This, I should mention, got people more riled up than Brand calling George Bush a “retarded cowboy” after pleading, as a citizen of the world, for the US to elect Barack Obama. Eventually, however, he was compelled to apologize. “I’ve gotta say sorry because I said those things about promise rings; that was bad of me. I didn’t mean to take it lightly. I love Jonas Brothers, I think it’s (purity) really good. I don’t want to piss off teenage fans… Promise rings, I’m well up for it, well done everyone…It’s just, a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody.”

Coming from Europe, Brand clearly underestimated the dire seriousness with which Americans take their sex. Sure, comedians are supposed to poke fun at people, that’s what they do, but Brand’s delivery had seemed to imply, “Well, surely everyone else must agree this whole purity ring business is silly, right? After all, this is MTV. We’re all groovy Rock ‘n Rollers here, are we not?”

Before Brand issued his apology, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, herself flossing some finger jewelry, deviated from the telepromptered script at the live telecast declaring, “I just want to say, it’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody–guy or girl–wants to be a slut.” And for an 18 year-old, Sparks nevertheless managed to articulate the American perception of teenage sexuality with an astuteness that I would say is beyond her years: Either you’re a virgin or a slut. There is nothing in between.

Under the influence of the Bush administration’s Abstinence-Only approach to sex education, it’s not particularly surprising that there would be such a drastically reduced understanding of sexuality. Even the idea inherent in the whole Purity Ring concept implies that sex is a contamination, exposure to which makes you unpure. In this kind of oversimplified paradigm there’s obviously no room for complex ideas like being sexually responsible, or emotionally prepared, for instance. Of course, it’s not like rockstars have ever been society’s role models for moderation either, but in the past they’ve generally tended to err on the side of hedonism. So what’s happened that the newest generation of pop sensations is suddenly bringing non-sexy back?

Britney Spears was probably the turning point. Not that it’s exactly her fault that 16 years ago New Kid on the Block, Marky Mark was all about letting Kate Moss come between him and his Calvins while pimping underwear, and in 2008 teen stars are sporting accessories for vows of chastity, but she marked the crossroads. Back when she and Christina Aguilera were vying for individual identities to distinguish themselves (“Hit me baby, one ore time,” vs. “I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way,” anyone?) and Christina went all Dirrty, Britney’s positioning strategy became about branding the singer as virginal as nebulously possible. (And look which one ended up the nutcase!) Even now, as L.A. Times pop music critic Ann Powers writes, Britney’s “still dealing with questions about exactly when she lost her innocence, even after bearing two children.” Before Britney was singing ballads like, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman,” I think the last time anyone would have really cared this much about the status of a pop star’s virginity was back when you couldn’t show Elvis below the waist on TV. Even if there were still any expectations about the issue, you’d figure it would have gotten cleared up, once and for all, by Madonna. But a couple of things have changed in the two and a half decades since Like a Virgin (“That’s like a virgin. Not actually a virgin,” as Brand pointed out at the VMAs) came out.

Alan Ball–who’s no stranger to commentary on contemporary American sexuality, having written American Beauty, and the just-released Towelhead–explained in a recent NPR interview, “In our culture now everything is saturated with sex. Just watching mainstream TV, or going to the movies, or turning on your computer and looking at the images that are on your welcome page, it’s just sex, sex, sex….I think it’s much more in the faces of children now than it was when I was a kid.”  And it doesn’t stop at mainstream entertainment. A 2007 study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that more than 40% of kids have come across porn online. Two thirds of them weren’t even trying to look for it. By contrast, in a similar study conducted 8 years ago, just 25 percent of all kids interviewed said they’d had unwanted exposure to online pornography.

Meanwhile, in the era of Katy Perry ditties like “I kissed a girl and I liked it. (Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.)” and “Ur so gay and you don’t even like boys,” teenagers are now also faced with an unprecedented array of options for how to define their sexual identities. In a New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

This past September [2005], when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

So if all the options for defining your sexual identity are left open, but taking advantage of any of them makes you–as Sparks schooled us–a slut, and at the same time the pervasive sexualization of mainstream  entertainment, and contemporary culture in general, has made sluttiness a pretty much expected default–dude, how the hell are the latest crop of teen pop stars supposed to rebel?

From Details’ The Total Awesomeness of Being the Jonas Brothers:

On a quiet Friday morning in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden, the Jonas Brothers hold out their hands to show off their purity rings. Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas—the teen-pop trio who stand, at this very moment, on the brink of hugeness—wear the metal bands on their fingers to symbolize, as Joe puts it, “promises to ourselves and to God that we’ll stay pure till marriage.” Joe is 18. His ring is silver and adorned with a cross. “It actually ripped apart a little bit, just on the bottom, here, but I didn’t want to get a new one, because this one means so much to me,” he says. Nick, who is 15, says, “I got mine made at Disney World. It’s pretty awesome.” Kevin, at 20, is the oldest of the three, and while a punk-rock purity ring from Tiffany might represent the ultimate oxymoron, that’s exactly what he’s going for. His silver vow of abstinence is covered with studs. “It’s pretty rock and roll,” Kevin says. “It’s getting banged up a little bit because of the guitar.”

For any parent reading this, suddenly getting wildly excited about getting their teenager bling from god, this would probably be a good time to mention that virginity pledges are basically as much a sham as Brand assumed everyone would figure they are. A recent review of a number of independent American studies concluded that abstinence programs “show little evidence of sustained impact on attitudes and intentions,” and furthermore “show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse” Which is how Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter ended up 7 months pregnant, and how yours might too if the republicans have anything to say about it.

All this stuff we’re leaving kids to figure out on their own can be pretty damn charged and confusing and overwhelming. In an environment where the policy on sex ed exemplifies “don’t ask don’t tell,” where 40% of kids are being “educated” about sex through porn–whether they’re looking to be or not, and where the process of defining your sexuality is like a whole new kind of multiple choice exam, it’s actually not all that surprising that some kids might find the concept of a virginity pledge appealing. (At least in theory, if not 100% in practice). In the absence of information or substantive guideance to help them better understand what they’re dealing with, a purity ring offers teenagers a way to simply sublimate the insecurity and pressure that it’s completely normal–basically mandatory–to feel about sex at that age, with a token of self-righteousnessconfidence for simply avoiding it.

Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister, and founder of Silver Ring Thing, which runs more than 70 programs a year for teens, spreading a message of abstinence until marriage, and offering a ring to those who complete the course, appeared on the Today show following the VMAs, and according to MTV News:

Pattyn said he’s been getting quite a few requests from media organizations in the United States and England to discuss the issue. But more important, he ran into John McCain’s daughter Meghan backstage at the show, and the two had a talk that he hopes will soon connect him to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “We had a long talk about Sarah Palin and her daughter’s pregnancy and them maybe getting more involved when they come to Pennsylvania where I live,” Pattyn said.

“This is a big, big to-do,” Pattyn said of the flap in his community over the Jonas Brothers/ Brand issue. “It’s fantastic for an organization like ours, and we think this will open up some major things.” Pattyn said he gave Meghan McCain one of his group’s rings to give to Governor Palin for her daughter “to let her know we’re supporting her and praying for her.”

I don’t know which is more suspect, that just two years after the ACLU settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a case challenging federal funding of more than $1 million for Silver Ring Thing (which seeing as it is a subsidiary of an Evangelical Church, giving it govt. funding did kinda constitute a major violation of that whole separation of church and state thing) Pattyn’s back innit again as if that never happened, or what exactly this guy was doing hangin’ backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in the first place?

(Hey, Trojan, have you considered maybe getting involved with the VMA’s for 2009? Might be a good time to think about that.)

Kinsey is probably rolling over in his grave, and so are a bunch of musicians. As Powers writes, “Nobody seems to remember when rockers were supposed to rattle the jewelry of the folks who attend glittery galas. But then, MTV has long trafficked in turning rebelliousness into a commodity. Brand, saying uncontainable things, upset the apple cart. That made him the most old-fashioned presence in a program full of young, aggressively commercial self-packagers, for whom any statement — political or otherwise — is best judged by the number of units sold.”