Virginity and shame

Sexually active women? Sluts. Virgin men? Losers.

There are a million different ways for someone to ask you. Have you swiped your V-card? Have you popped your cherry? Hell, even your doctor asks you if you’re sexually active as soon as you enter puberty. What you feel pressured to answer, however, heavily depends on your gender. Girls are constantly pressured to wait and think about whether or not they should let someone take their virginity and who they should choose to give it to. Despite virginity being a social construct, it’s still viewed as a deep, meaningful, and visceral possession. Men, however, are generally far less encouraged to think out their decisions when it comes to when they’ll lose their virginity and to whom. In fact, rarely will you hear anyone refer to having “taken the virginity” of a man. Instead, men are more pressured from their compatriots to find a conquest as soon as possible to shed their virginity in order to seem more manly.

The stigma behind women’s sexuality can be found everywhere, from the pure white dresses in bridal magazines, to dress code requirements, to how embarrassing it can be for a woman to even step foot into the family planning aisle of a drugstore. Girls are rarely considered to be the ones seeking sexual pleasure, and rather they are often only thought of as tools for a man’s pleasure, nothing more than casualties of a wily penis. Thus, a woman is thought of as able to choose—out of many begging men—who will have the honor of breaking her hymen (which was probably already broken riding a bike at age 12). In my sexual education class in high school, they specifically stressed that women should abstain as much as possible from having multiple sexual partners because her self-worth would diminish. This sends the message to young girls that when they have sex, especially for the very first time, they are giving a piece of themselves away rather than gaining any sort of pleasure or satisfaction. This turns sex into a transaction in which women “lose” something to their partner. The pressure to remain “pure” makes women believe that if they choose to have sex, they are somehow dirtied, used, or sullen. Women who choose to be sexually active are demonized by other girls for their choice of sexual partner or number of sexual partners. It’s constantly stressed to women that who they choose to have sex with for the first time will define them. For women, who they have sex with, how soon, and how often are all determinants of their self-worth. As much as the first time you do anything accomplishes a milestone, having sex for the first time as a woman is more representative of an end than a beginning. The condemnation of women having sex is a point of great shame and turmoil for young women. In reality, having sex with someone has whatever meaning that you choose to give to it. A woman should not feel broken or less than whole just because they chose to have sex.

For men, the pressure is quite the opposite. Once puberty hits, men are expected to become machines of sexual activity and to seek out conquests almost immediately. I have a 19-year-old male friend who is a virgin, but when his male friends make comments about how sexually active he must be, he doesn’t correct them because he fears the torment and judgement he would face for choosing to not have sex. Why do men see the choice to abstain as so

unnatural? Why do they feel the need to compare their “body counts,” as if it’s a measure of their manhood? Possibly, because men are taught that they are responsible for convincing women to sleep with them; that they’re the hunters and women are their prey. This message is hammered in by other males, as well as by pop culture. In teen movies, there is frequently a portrayal of a small young nerd who wants to charm a girl into sleeping with him before college because the stress of being a virgin is just too much for him to bear. There was even a movie made called The 40 Year Old Virgin because haha, how funny is the idea that a man has never had sex? In the TV show Friends, the playboy character, Joey Tribbiani, is depicted as a suave, hypermasculine man for having sex with tons of women and never becoming attached. Meanwhile, Chandler Bing is constantly ridiculed for not being able to get women to sleep with him. His friends even joke he may be gay simply because he doesn’t sleep with copious numbers of women. This attitude implies that a man’s skill in convincing women to have sex is what determines whether or not he will have sex, rather than the consent of the women involved. This can also be related back to the view that women don’t enjoy sex or actively seek it out. There’s a certain shame that comes with being a male virgin that has even spawned darker communities like “Incels” (involuntary celibates) who condemn womankind for not having sex with them. For men, sex is viewed as an unquestionable need that must be met. It’s not men’s fault that they feel such shame for sexual inactivity, it’s what they’ve been taught by their peers and mentors, but they should consider how that shame makes them view sex and women.

Although having sex for the first time is a milestone, virginity should hold the meaning each person chooses to give it. Think about how you treat people upon learning their sexual history. Do you judge them based on your own views of virginity and sex? Have you slut-shamed a girl? Have you mocked a “sexually-inexperienced” boy? The reflex to judge others for not acting as society dictates is ingrained in us from childhood, but when you question those norms, you begin to see how utterly ridiculous it is to force those views on individuals.