Language is important. The words we choose to describe the world and our experiences in it matter, especially when it comes to those things—emotions, ideas, sensations—which are intangible, which have no fixed physical presence. Sex is partly physical, of course, but it is also a deeply psychological experience, and can be highly emotional. Clear and precise communication is crucial to ensuring enthusiastic and fully informed consent, and enthusiastic and fully informed consent is crucial to sex which is safe, fun, and enriching. With all of that in mind, there’s one particular word I’ve been thinking about lately: virginity.
What actually is “virginity”? Of course, it means different things to different people, but for the most part the prevailing consensus (and the definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary) is still that “virginity” refers to a state of sexual inexperience—specifically, inexperience of heteronormative sexual intercourse, a.k.a. penile-vaginal penetration. This immediately throws up some problems. For one thing, that just isn’t how everyone has sex. It places wildly uneven emphasis on one extremely specific act, and ignores a whole host of others. Understood in these terms, the notion of virginity automatically excludes the experience of many queer and trans people, its logic dictating that a 17-year-old heterosexual with a single, brief, and anticlimactic notch on her bedpost is somehow more sexually experienced than a 55-year-old lesbian who’s enjoyed the company of many women throughout her life—which is, plainly, absurd. It also delegitimizes much of heterosexual sex, leaving those women who only orgasm via oral or manual stimulation feeling inadequate, as if their body is defective, somehow, when in actual fact theirs is an entirely normal experience.
While we’re on the topic of bodies, now seems as good a time as any to remind you that there is no biological basis for the notion of virginity: it is not a scientific term used to describe the transition from one state of being to another, and, despite what some shady doctors may try and sell you, it is literally impossible to gauge a person’s level of sexual experience by inspecting their genitalia. There is no test for virginity (just ask the World Health Organization); how could there be, when engaging in the act of penetrative sex does nothing to alter the physical body in any permanent, discernible way. The hymen—that thin layer of tissue which surrounds and partly covers most (but not all) vaginal openings, and which can be (but isn’t always) torn the first time the vagina is penetrated, which sometimes (but not every time) results in bleeding—can be ruptured in a number of ways which involve no sexual contact whatsoever, such as inserting a tampon, doing gymnastics, or riding a bicycle. The notion of “virginity” is not scientific; it is a wholly and entirely social construct, existing only within our collective imaginations.
If you’re thinking my discussion has all been very female-focused so far, well, that’s because the idea of male virginity is a relatively new one, though it can be just as stigmatizing and damaging; just look at incel culture, and the terrible acts of violence which have been committed in its name. For most of human history, though, “virgin” has been gendered female. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the Latin “virgo,” meaning “maiden,” and was originally used to refer to young women. As a descriptor of sexual experience, the concept of virginity has its genesis within the patriarchal cattle-market of the marriage economy, in which a woman’s value was determined by the perceived level of her sexual “purity”; ensuring she remained a virgin until marriage was a way of guaranteeing any children she bore had been fathered by her husband. Women who failed to meet these standards—by their own choice or otherwise—were considered to be tainted and thus unmarryable. I’d love to say those days are long gone, but they aren’t: In the UK, invasive and inaccurate “virginity confirmation” tests are still practiced, according to an independent report commissioned by the UK Government, on girls as young as 13, and there are some women who find it necessary (or are forced) to undergo hymenoplasty before marriage, a painful and potentially damaging surgery intended to “restore” virginity by stitching the hymen. (Like virginity testing, hymenoplasty became illegal in the UK in 2022.)
Virginity has always been bound up with the oppression of women, a tool for controlling our bodies, sexuality, and fertility. It has also, therefore, always been a label imposed on women’s bodies from without, part of a language of commodification and objectification, rather than a term developed to describe a subjective, internal experience. True, there is precedent for reclaiming such words, but even if we update our definition of “virginity” to encompass a wider range of sexual experience, there remains a fundamental problem: the notion of virginity relies on the assumption that sexual experience is achieved—or rather that sexual innocence is lost—in a single moment. The truth is far more complex than this: Experience is not some cut-and-dry binary, whereby you transfer from a state of ignorance to one of knowledge in a single step.
Instead of this tired concept, we need a new language of sexual experience, one which is fully inclusive, and which is able to express the full macrocosm of sex, never prioritizing or privileging one individual act over another. We need a language which leaves room for gradations of experience, always recognizing that our knowledge and understanding of sexuality is never—and will never be—fully complete. Our language of sexual experience must contain multitudes because sex contains multitudes: there is always another frontier, whether it’s new preferences, positions, or partners, or perhaps changes to your own body; sex feels different after childbirth, for example, as I’m sure it does after menopause. Becoming “sexually experienced” doesn’t begin and end with penetration, and it doesn’t happen overnight: It’s a long and gradual process, with infinite potential for new discoveries. If you’re lucky, it can last a lifetime.