The idea of virginity is one that is heavily loaded and ever-so tricky to define. One cannot discuss virginity — as a status, as a concept, or even as a word — without rendering the conversation specifically to women, and is therefore problematic.
While men can obviously be described as “virgins” or “virginal,” the phenomenon of virginity was first oriented around women and their ?“virtue” — or lack thereof.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Catholic Church first described a virgin as “an unmarried or chaste maiden or woman” around 1200.
Ever since its establishment, society has obsessed over the idea of a woman’s status as a sexual being by using this word as a noun, an identity.
“I’m a virgin” was a phrase that seemed ever-present in high school, framed either as a proud declaration or sheepish admission. We grow up understanding virginity as a status: you either are one, or you aren’t.
Until, that is, the conversation becomes about a woman who does have a sex life, at which point the rhetoric of identity makes a drastic shift to the rhetoric of materialism. Suddenly, virginity is a commodity to be “lost.” A virgin is someone to be “ruined” and rebranded as a “fallen woman.”
Let it be said that virginity is not a one-sided concept. It involves both men and women, and what it means to them as individual beings. There should be no universal definition of what it means to be a virgin.
The Editorial Board believes that how we define virginity is our own individual and personal choice. It is not for society to decide what it means to be a virgin or what it means to lose one’s virginity.
Kinsey Confidential is an online resource provided by the Kinsey Institute to provide accurate, research-based information on sexual health. According to its mission statement, it provides “accessible, topical information based on current scientific knowledge, and it shares news and trends related to sex, gender and sexual health.”
Kinsey Confidential provides resources for questions concerning sexual health and wellness education, counseling, contraception and pregnancy, LGBT, sexual assault crisis ?services and STI/HIV information. Sexuality education programs and classes are available on its website, as well as a sex Q&A column.
The resources are available and they are closer to us than we think. The stigmas attached to sexual health can often deter young people from reaching out for help or even talking about it in the first place.
Starting the conversation is the first step. Somehow, we’ve forgotten that virgins and non-virgins are people with immense inherent value regardless of the socially-constructed, purely fictional “status” that is virginity. Attaching someone’s human worth to sexual activity is blatantly ?discriminatory and subtly violent.
Sex is, of course, a hugely general term that acts more as an umbrella under which scores of activities fall rather than a specific, singular experience.
In 2015, sex is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore virginity, if the idea insists on surviving, should be too.
The concepts of sex and virginity exist on a sort of gradient scale that is defined entirely on an individual basis using utterly subjective terms. It is a choice.
