Virginity has, throughout history, been hailed as the ‘be-all and end-all.’ Something sacred, it is the ultimate decider of a woman’s worth, with marriage itself, what should be a celebration of love, having its origins in the continued oppression of women via the patriarchy.

From fathers giving their daughters away to waiting husbands, as though all a woman can ever be is a man’s property, to mothers and older sisters giving warnings because they know what is coming, ‘make sure you save yourself for ‘the one’, when a woman’s virginity is taken, so too is her respect.

To seek to have autonomy over your own sexuality as a woman is to have no respect in the eyes of a society that loves to demonise a woman who knows what she wants…

‘You’re so promiscuous.’

To the moralist, prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
– Emma Goldman

When women are told that to be a virgin is to be pure and innocent (everything a man wants), yet women are also told that to be unwed is to be unwanted, what greater proof is there of the prevalence of the patriarchy than this?

Being told that they should remain virgins in one breath, and then being asked when they’re going to settle down and have children in the next, the contradictions are stark.

When to take means to have means to own a part of her forever, men relish the idea of ‘taking’ a woman’s virginity.

Primal, medieval, making our lives political, a woman who has ‘lost’* her virginity is a slag, a slut, a whore, she is told, unless she has lost it to you. Unless you are the one who gets to control and subjugate her, she is worthless.

*(Note: I write lost in inverted commas because virginity is not something that can be lost since it is not a physical thing. What it is, in fact, is merely a social construct designed to uphold the patriarchy).

(Notice how you never hear men being asked if they’re virgins, it’s always women)…

Dear Men: Pleaser stop slut shaming women for doing the same things that you smack each other on the back and shake hands with each other about.

Conflating sexuality with morality, why are promiscuous men seen as ‘lads’, something to be celebrated, while promiscuous women are seen as ‘sluts’, something to be shamed?

Why does the shame always lie with women?

When a baby is crying on public transport, the mum is given looks- headshakes and tuts of dismay, while the dad is given looks of sympathy. Why are women expected to carry the load of the family’s emotional wellbeing?

Who gives the therapist therapy?

Who is going to mother the mother?

When girls are sent home from school because their skirts are too short and it’s too much of a ‘temptation’ for the boys. Girls shouldn’t be taught not to wear certain items of clothing to school, boys should be taught not to rape.

Alas, turning women into property for men to invade, bailiffs coming to evict them from their own homes, the concept (construct) of virginity is all about control. It’s all about policing and gatekeeping women’s bodies.

It’s all a lie.

‘If Eve ate that apple, then why do men have Adam’s apple still stuck in their lyin ass throats?’

The fact is that it is impossible for a woman to remain a virgin when she has ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ sewn into her seams as a marker of her identity from the day she is born… When she is nameless, faceless, shameless if she doesn’t have a ring on her finger and a baby in her arms…

Wanting everything all ways, always, like throwing a baby’s dummy in the bin and then screaming at them when they start crying because of your actions, men want to take what they deem to be a woman’s ‘innocence’, and then berate, degrade, and humiliate them when they are no longer, in their eyes, ‘pure.’

This is why lesbians are, in one instance demonised by men, and in the next, sexualised, because men only accept a woman’s sexuality when it is on their terms…

‘A woman is only sexually active if a cis man and his penis are involved.’

This, of course, discredits anyone who isn’t in a heterosexual relationship, because God forbid a relationship that has, not only no man in it, but also no man observing it. 

What a (beautiful) concept.

And where penis in vagina sex is involved, sex finishes when the man finishes, because only his orgasm matters…

Despite less than 20% of women reaching orgasm from penetration alone, penetrative sex has long been considered to be the only sex that is ‘real’, with everything else denoting ‘foreplay.’ This emphasis on male pleasure is very telling in how women are viewed in society: unequal.

It doesn’t help the matter either when in schools, sex education is almost entirely focused on male pleasure.

What will it take to get men and women to be viewed as equal? To have sex education spend less time demonstrating how to put a condom on a banana and more time focusing on female pleasure.

In order to make progress going forward then, first, we must go backward. We must look at the systems that contribute to the patriarchy and hold the institutions that feed into the rhetoric that male pleasure always comes before female pleasure accountable.

We must destroy the harmful narrative that women exist to appease and satiate men’s desires once and for all. Only then will women be free.