It seems like a ridiculous question, right? We all know virginity exists because we have all been told to hang on to it until marriage (at least, all us women have). But how can you define virginity?
Jessica Valenti points put in her book, The Purity Myth, that there is not a single, standard, medical definition for virginity. Not one. So how can we go about hanging on to and protecting something that we can't define?
Think about it for a second. How do you define sex? Do you only count heterosexual intercourse? Do you count oral? Do you count an experience in which you didn't have an orgasm? If we can't even settle on what counts as "sex," how can we say when we have had sex for the first time and, therefore, lost our virginity?
Valenti's book is great because it provides a whole new way for thinking about sex and sexuality. She mentions a friend of hers who only labels an experience as "sex" if she has had an orgasm. This blew my mind. It doesn't focus on mechanics; it focuses on pleasure. And one experience could count as sex for one partner and not the other. So what? We all know that not everyone gets off at the same time or even in the same night, but why does it matter? By thinking of sex as something that culminates in pleasure, we can change our entire attitudes about sex entirely.
And even better, we could begin to eliminate the gray area that some people seem to find between sex and rape. We could live in a world in which sex for everyone is a comfortable, fun activity to be enjoyed when desired (for all people). And we could live in a society in which virginity didn't have to be hoarded and saved, but instead, one in which sex was a series of activities and experiences to be explored at one's own pace.
I would very much enjoy this world.
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