Like a Virgin: How Society Invented Virginity and Vilifies Sex

If you’re a girl, you probably spent your formative years being told to wait for sex.  You were probably told that your first time was supposed to be special.  You were probably told to wait for a boy who loved you.  Maybe you were told to wait for marriage.  You were told that losing your virginity is a big deal.  And in some ways it is: our society treats losing your virginity as a right of passage into adulthood.  But a girl losing her virginity is treated very differently than a boy losing his virginity, and virginity itself is an interesting concept: why is it such a big deal?

The truth is, virginity and its importance is completely socially constructed.  Losing your virginity feels like a big deal because you internalize the idea that it is a big deal, since that’s what society has been telling you for years.  In fact, it’s a marker of how valued virginity is that we have a word for it, but not a real word for being a non-virgin. And because historically (and biologically) the risk is greater for women, society treats it as a bigger deal when women become sexually active than when their male counterparts do so.  But the actual act of having sex for the first time isn’t inherently meaningful-~-it only matters because we think it does.

Because masculinity and male sexuality are so closely intertwined in many US cultures, society places less emphasis on a man losing his virginity.  It is still painted as a right of passage, and event which makes a boy a man, but the reality is, it is almost expected that young men will lose their virginity before their female counterparts.  It is treated as almost surprising for a young men exiting their teen years to not have lost their virginity, but this conflation of sexuality with masculinity can be problematic.  The result is a culture which places pressure on men to perform sexually and to be sexual, when in fact this may not be the norm for all men.

At the same time, women’s sexuality is still treated as something that should be hidden.  Although many college men would still be surprised to discover a girl they were involved with was a virgin, especially after a certain point in college, the reality is that it would be less of a big deal than if the genders were reversed.  Female sexuality remains in some ways taboo in the United States, and the result is a perpetuated purity myth that places the emphasis on women having to remain chaste, which conflates abstinence with responsibility, and which constructs a good girl paradigm  that frames female sexuality in terms of danger or victimization, making it something to be overcome rather than embraced.

Pre-birth control, it made sense to frame female sexuality in this light.  In another time, female sexual purity was a selling point for marriage, something families sought to protect.  Because there is no way for a woman to deny a child is hers (as opposed to men, who could get away with ignoring their illegitimate children), there was a greater risk if a woman should become sexually active.  As a result, women were encouraged or forced to put off their sexual debuts until marriage-~-though admittedly, marriage often followed closely after reaching relative maturity (read: the beginning of menstruation), so it was a much shorter delay to demand.  In a society operating under these constraints, protecting female sexuality was a way of protecting the economic interests of the woman and her family, because it made her a better catch in the marriage market.

But the reality is that these circumstances have changed significantly.  The rise of reproductive health technologies such as contraception (including emergency contraception), condoms and other barrier methods, and abortion mean that the risk that a woman will become pregnant or bear an unwanted child are significantly lessened.  Women today enjoy greater sexual freedom than they did in previous generations, and the utilization of these kinds of technologies has become normalized.  As female sexuality has become increasingly divorced from motherhood, the need for female sexual purity has diminished.

That said, the decline in need for abstinence hasn’t decreased the demand for it.  Virginity remains a magical concept, and the idea that virginity is something lost remains an interesting one.  When we say that someone “lost” their virginity, what exactly do we think they are now missing?  Society conflates virginity with innocence and purity.  And the fact is, when we paint the “loss” of virginity as a loss of those things, we continue to paint sex as something dirty, something nasty, something dangerous, something that makes a person tainted or impure.  You can still see holdovers from these beliefs in traditions such as white wedding dresses and references to “good girls” in popular culture.

But those negative connotations, because of that historical emphasis on female sexual purity, have resulted in a double standard that harms women.  It’s what gives rise to the phenomenon we now call slut shaming.  It’s what allows our politicians to point at women and say that they’re “irresponsible” for having sex.  It’s what allows the Christian right to condemn those who don’t practice abstinence, to say that they are damned, to say that they have been corrupted.  That’s what gets us an ongoing purity myth that forces a perpetuation of sexual education that doesn’t actually teach our youth anything, and a culture that doesn’t promote a meaningful dialogue about sex, sexual health, or consent.

For some people, their first time really is meaningful.  But for others, it’s just another moment in the course of their development.  Virginity has exactly as much meaning as we give it-~-so maybe it’s time we start talking about it differently.  Maybe it’s time to stop acting like a girl “lost” something during her first time.  Maybe it’s time to accept that sex is often a normal event in the course of a relationship, that sex is a natural urge that people experience, and that there is nothing wrong or dirty or tainted about having sex.  Maybe it’s time that virginity meant something else to us-~-or maybe for us to let people decide for themselves what it means, because our current concepts of purity aren’t getting us anywhere good.

~ by Randi Saunders on July 27, 2013.