In high school, I sometimes looked around at the people sitting next to me in boring classes and wondered if I could pick out the virgins.
Not too long after, I asked for a purity ring for my eighth grade graduation and then wore it proudly for five years. I saw purity as one avenue of perfectionism that could be explored. It felt clean, and I’d proudly tell those who asked that purity meant abstinence.
Since then, I’ve come to understand the term virginity to be total bullshit.
Historically, and still today in some cultures, virginity mattered in order to define how much a woman is worth in marriage, and it’s still an undertone in our culture that pops up when we shame women for having multiple sexual partners, or wearing revealing clothes. This stigma, like many others in sexuality, has stuck despite its increasing irrelevance.
Why does having a lot of sex indicate that a woman respects herself less, or should be respected by others less, if she makes choices based on what she wants?
Virginity is a social construct that fixates on one very specific point of sex. While virginity might be associated with purity, there’s no chemical change that occurs as soon as you’ve done the deed that makes the difference between pure and not.
It puts undue emphasis on intercourse as the moment that sex begins. Some people can prefer other kinds of sex, and many don’t enjoy intercourse at all. The term completely rejects every sexual identity except for heterosexual.
The language surrounding virginity, too, circulates around a negative view of sexuality. It suggests you’ve lost something, or it’s been taken, when you decide to become sexually active. It’s akin to hitting home the idea that you’ll contract an STI and end up pregnant if you start having sex. It’s scary to think about giving something up that you can never get back, and it’s silly because sex shouldn’t be so ominous.
It’s okay to decide you’re not ready, or you don’t want to, but it’s also okay to decide that you are. Unless you’re trying to conceive, whether you actually did something that could be worthy of forfeiting your virginity is entirely irrelevant if you’re having a good time and doing what feels good for you and your partner.
In reality, if the decision to start having sex is one made confidently based on your own standards for yourself, you lose nothing when you have your first time. Once I put the term virginity to bed (literally), I found myself feeling much more free to make my own choices about sex.
