When purity was called virginity, and Juliana Hatfield was its poster girl

The mini-uproar that host Russell Brand generated at the MTV Video Music Awards by ribbing the Jonas Brothers about their "purity rings" has passed. The Jo Bros and their defender Jordin Sparks can go back to "Burnin' Up" while taking love"One Step at a Time" (as their respective singles describe), and Brand can sit back and enjoy the new season of "Californication." I tried to clear my mind the other morning by cracking open a good new book -- only to be reminded that sexual conservatism and pop have been strange bedfellows before, and not so long ago.

Juliana Hatfield, the author of the new memoir "When I Grow Up," was an indie rock star back when that music defined a slacker generation. She palled around with scene hottie Evan Dando (remember the Lemonheads?), wrote great songs about loving Nirvana and going to see the Violent Femmes and, with the band the Blake Babies and her ongoing solo career, helped misfit, thinking girls carve out their own corner of guitar heaven.

Hatfield is gifted with Top Model looks as well as a stunning sense of melody and the chops to play a mean guitar solo when required. Coming up alongside fiercely confrontational artists including Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, she got a reputation as something of a prom queen. She was just too pretty, too aloof; and she had a habit of getting miffed with interviewers and saying things that sounded downright conservative....

She let loose one of her most controversial statements while promoting her first solo album, "Hey Babe," in 1991. Frustrated by a prying journalist's insinuations about whom she might be dating, she announced that, at 23, she was still a virgin.

The statement hit Hatfield's career like shrapnel. "Almost every subsequent article written about me referenced the quote," Hatfield writes in "When I Grow Up." "I couldn't shake it; my recorded words were like an incurable disease."

Hatfield's disease metaphor is right on. I remember when that story came out (it was in Interview magazine), and how many of my friends -- feminists, critics and indie-culture fans -- reacted. Hatfield did suddenly seem somehow dangerous, contagious. The Riot Grrrl movement and the music of such artists as L7, Hole and PJ Harvey were blowing open the conventions of female sexuality in rock. And here was Hatfield, trying to take us back to the days of pristine Sandra Dee.

Except that wasn't her goal. In truth, the young, painfully shy Hatfield was trying to embody a feminine stance few public figures have successfully filled. She describes it in her book:

I thought that by admitting my virginity I was being subversive, declaring my right to chose how to live. I thought feminists and anarchists and freethinkers and outsiders and late bloomers everywhere would cheer when they read the interview. Maybe people misunderstood me and were unable to decipher my motives simply because there is no archetype of a female loner-by-choice, especially in the pop-rock music world. The strong, silent, individualistic, solitary outsider -- the lone wolf -- is historically always male. But that is how I saw myself: standing alone, off to the side, with a tight grip on my own original, quixotic ideas, and not as a pathetic waif, desperate for some record executive to make me a star; not as a delicate shrinking violet waiting eagerly to be swept up in the arms of my future husband who would ravish me in a dramatic, yearned-for defloration.

When I read that, I didn't think of Sparks or Sandra Dee; I thought of Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane in "Deadwood," tough, alone and unabsorbable. Also sad. Our culture remains even more hostile to the idea of the female loner than it is toward the free sexual woman, because that kind of woman can't be packaged to sell.

I don't think Hatfield would have ever worn a purity ring. She isn't into groupthink, and as a good indie rocker, she would have found the prospect of prettied-up, undeniably sexy teen idols wearing them hypocritical. What she believed virginity stands for is far more provocative and challenging, both for the 23-year-old she was, trying to live against all the tendencies of the pop world, and for a culture addicted to voyeurism and the teasing lecherousness of the "anything but" lifestyle.

So, Juliana Hatfield, I'm offering you a 17-years-overdue apology. Purity has come a long way since 1991, but your honest book and music still stand up for it, in the best sense.

-- Ann Powers

Photo: Chris Pizzello / Associated Press