The Purity Chronicles

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

In an election year full of unprecedented events and weirdness, there’s been another notable oddity: Whenever a new hot girl enters the zeitgeist — say, actor Sydney Sweeney hosting SNL this spring in a low-cut dress, or Hawk Tuah Girl taking over the internet earlier this summer — conservatives fall all over themselves trying to claim the phenomenon as their own.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

There was a moment in the 2000s when you could tell the world exactly what kind of woman you were trying to be by who you were rooting for in the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston love triangle.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

In 1999, as the black-hearted comedy Election slunk its way onto movie screens across America, the film critic MaryAnn Johanson made a prescient prediction. This was going to be one of those movies, Johanson wrote, that would see a huge generation gap in the way audiences responded to it.

In 2007, High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, the new darling of the Disney Channel, had her personal nude photographs leaked to the internet. One of the oddest things about what ensued was how loud the outrage was when the leak occurred in 2007, and how little anyone seems to think about it now.

Hackers first leaked Hudgens’s private photos after the release of High School Musicals 1 and 2 but before 3. The world was shocked. Disney moms pronounced Hudgens “ruined.” OK! confidently reported that she would be dropped from High School Musical 3 and replaced by one of the Cheetah Girls. Hudgens released a chagrined statement taking responsibility for the photos (“I want to apologize to my fans, whose support and trust means the world to me”), and Disney made its own statement regretting Hudgens’s “lapse in judgment.” Days after the pictures leaked, Hudgens was photographed by paparazzi at a church, as though to cleanse her reputation. “Baby V she is no longer :(” lamented Just Jared.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

Like low-rise jeans, Bennifer, and other artifacts of the 2000s, Sex and the City is back. The HBO classic, which ran from 1998 to 2004 and saw two feature film sequels in 2008 and 2010, has returned to TV in the form of a revival, now titled And Just Like That …. Which means now is the perfect time to look back at the original series, and at the bizarre, glamorous vision of the sexual marketplace it championed.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

There was something in the air in the 2000s. It was as though American culture was obsessed with ripping away women’s clothes and then blaming them for it. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian. Upskirt photos, leaked sex tapes, leaked nudes; teary-eyed apologies, snide jokes on late-night television, righteous op-eds in the newspapers. Every day we were acting out literally what was happening in the cultural marketplace, where women faced commercial and structural pressures to market themselves with highly sexualized images and then were called whores and sluts for doing so.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

All famous women are symbols of something in American pop culture. But Monica Lewinsky is singular for being, among other things, a symbol of a symbol.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Aaliyah. The R&B singer, born Aaliyah Dana Haughton and nicknamed Baby Girl but best known by her first name, died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, at 22 years old. Alongside that anniversary comes a notable milestone: On August 20, Aaliyah’s music catalog began making its way to streaming for the first time.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

Every time I think about Gossip Girl — the glossy, aspirational, slightly wicked teen soap that ruled The CW in 2007 — I ask myself: You mean the show where the romantic lead sold his girlfriend in exchange for a hotel?

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

When people talked about Whitney Houston at the start of her career, there was a very specific image they returned to over and over again: Whitney Houston, people used to say, was America.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

As our current fascination with the wronged women of decades past swells, we seem to be resistant to extending it toward Paris Hilton. Britney Spears? Yes. Princess Diana? Of course. Mia Farrow? Sure. But Paris Hilton? Her? Oh, absolutely not.

In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.

When today’s 30-somethings were teenagers, the culture was awash in confusion about sex, purity, and femininity. We were postfeminist: Women had already achieved equality and had become butt-kickers with girl power, and there was nothing left to complain about. We were in the midst of raunch culture, and it was important to be tanned and sexy and taut and down for anything. We were entering the Bush-era purity ring years, when virginity would be held up as a prize to be fetishized and evaluated.