21st
on virginity.
A couple of days ago, I was out with a friend who is a couple of years older than me. He was talking about how he’d like to find a nice girl and settle down into a serious relationship, and mentioned this one girl we both have in common and how he’d always liked her. After I asked what the hell he saw in her, because she is not very pretty and not very nice, he said he liked how she was so pure and innocent.
“Are you talking about her being a virgin?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the plus of being with a virgin?”
“You know they haven’t been sleeping around, they tend to respect themselves more.”
I pursed my lips, thinking of everything I wanted to respond to that, but decided to refrain from saying anything. Why virginity has been and continues to be held to such high esteem in society is completely beyond me. And the fact that someone prizes it enough to be so attracted to it is sick to me.
I was raised in a very open and liberal household. My mom didn’t care enough about me to give a fuck about what I was doing, and my dad let me do as I pleased as long as I was making informed decisions and was being mature and responsible. Of course, no dad wants to hear about her precious daughter going around having sex— even after she is old enough to take care of herself— but he’d rather have me do it safely and responsibly, so he’d be open enough to discuss things with me before I even knew what a lot of things were.
Since he never explicitly forbade me from having sex, or going out with guys my age, sex never had the same mystery for me that it did for other people my age, and virginity was not seen as a treasure to be saved for “someone I loved”. I saw sex more as something two people who like (or maybe love) each other do, but nothing else. And so when the time came to lose my virginity, it happened fairly naturally, without the awkwardness that usually comes with first times. After it happened, all I could think was, Really, is this what people make such a big deal about, having sex for the first time? People talk about this moment so much, like it’s a turning point in a woman’s life, and here I was, lying naked in someone’s bed, and all I could think about was how I was really craving cake. I didn’t really care about having lost my virginity, because to me, it was a concept so abstract that I never got to wrap my mind around it.
And, in principle, the controversy regarding virginity has just never made any sense to me. Why is purity held in such high esteem? For an act as beautiful and as fulfilling as sex can be, people sure make it sound horrible. Society makes us girls feel like our virginity is all we have to offer to out future husband, and if we don’t take good care of it, there is nothing else we have going for us. Screw the $200,000 college education and the good looks we work so hard for, because if someone has already stained the sheets with you, there’s nothing that can help you now. Those girls who lost it to their high school sweethearts in the back seat of his car? Damaged goods, baby.
While I was lucky enough to be raised with a very liberal view of life, I know there are girls who were raised to believe that their virginity is their most prized possession. And, of course, being normal human beings with normal sexual needs raises the question: What do you do when you’re too horny to keep it in your pants, but too scared to lose it? This is where all the technicalities come in, which just add to the ridiculousness of it all. You’re still a virgin if you take it up the ass, but God forbid he tries to stick it in your vagina, because then it will all be over. And the sad part is that a lot of these girls running around showing off their virgin status are quite promiscuous young ladies who wouldn’t think twice before sucking someone’s dick, because everyone knows that oral sex is just not real sex. Bam, virginity still intact.
While I won’t pass judgment to those kinds of girls because that’s their deal and not mine, it angers me that those girls get away with doing that while normal girls like me who just happen to have slept with someone get branded as “less pure”. See, the virgins are the ones they’d rather date (or marry), but the non-virgins are the ones they’d rather fuck. And that right there is my beef with virginity.
