How “virginity” pollutes our view of sex.
In my most recent video about sex education as a moral panic, I delve into how sexual education, in academic spaces and in socially overall, is often presented through an anti-sex lens. This fearful perspective of sex affects everyone negatively. For this month, I’m doing a three part series on the politics of sex.To start the series, let’s dive into virginity as a concept.
As someone who was assigned woman at birth and who still identities as one, I’ve heard basically every “cautionary tale” surrounding sex under the sun. “Don’t have sex before marriage or you might get pregnant . oOr people might think you’re a slut. Or both. are all messages sent by the media, by school, and byin society at large. Women who are sexually active are labeled as “ran-through,” “loose,” “passed-around,” and many many other descriptors that mean to identify the receiving woman as an object that has been “used” too much. If a woman enjoys sex, and enjoys it outside of the binary, it changes her entire image. Although I realized from pretty early on that these “rules of thumb” were ridiculous and solely meant to shame, this does not mean they didn’t harm me. Many women realize the stupidity of these beliefs surrounding their sexualities, and yet they still have to deal with the implications.
But “virginity” doesn’t only harm women. Historically, virginity narratives only legitimize sex when it is PVI (penile-vaginal intercourse). They also don’t take people on the asexual spectrum into account, who may identify outside of labeling pertaining to their sexual history or interest in sex at all. This is yet another tactic of marginalization. We need to completely reconstruct narratives around sex, and I think the best place to start is the construct of virginity.
