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Amanda and Hugo both have posts up on the fetishization of virginity, and since I have given the issue a few passing thoughts since I first espied this headline on CNN, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon too. Several months ago I wrote a post about abstinence, which touched quite a bit on how the process of losing it affects teenage girls; in it I describe (G-rated, of course!) what my own experience of that situation was. One thing I didn’t really discuss, though, was what that long-ago boyfriend’s feelings were about my virginity, or what the men I was involved with during my younger years thought about the virginity of their prospective sex partners.

My long-ago boyfriend–who was my second “real” boyfriend; I didn’t have sex with the first one–was a virgin himself. However, aside from him telling me so, and some basic back-and-forth during our initial attempts at sex (“Still okay..?” “Dammit, ouch!”), the topic of my virginity never came up as a discussion point. His didn’t either, actually. We were both aware that the other person was one, and we both fully intended to have sex with the other person, and that was all there was to the entire situation. This, coupled with the reason why our initial attempts at sex did not result in the actual loss of my virginity until three or four months later, gave me the utter wrong impression of female virginity in the mind of one’s male significant other–I came away with the impression that one’s male significant other only cared about one’s virginity insofar as he was awfully sorry that attempting the act was so uncomfortable for you. I absolutely failed to realize that having an intact hymen gave you a special, elevated place in his mind and heart and that rupturing your hymen with his erect penis was one of the most profound acts he felt he could ever perform. Damn that boy, what was wrong with him? Talk about a failure to fulfil his patriarchal duty! Ah, well–he was but a young thing then, perhaps he got better-programmed as he got older.

My next partner-in-sex-crime ended up becoming my first husband; only once that I can recall did we ever, in the nine years that we were together, discuss my virginity or lack thereof as it pertained to our relationship. During one romantic moment fairly early in our marriage, I do recall him gazing at me with large, soulful eyes (he had very pretty eyes, with curly dark brown lashes) and saying that he wished we had both been virgins when we first met…but, see?! Yet another failure of patriarchal programming–he wished that we were both virgins, not that just I was–he was having an emotional moment of wanting us to have begun the marvellous exploration of self and other that is sex together. He completely failed to look at it from the perspective of just being the first to bust my cherry–where do I find these losers, anyway..?

My major point is, though I could hardly escape the general societal push for female purity, I managed to entirely miss it in my own personal relationships during my most vulnerable years–therefore I’m always a little floored when I encounter the obsession as an older adult. My first thought tends to be–do these people really care..? (Yes; yes, they do! But it’s hard for me to understand, in the exact same way it is hard for me to understand the compelling draw of “reality TV.”) Now I do understand much better why a man of little to no experience himself would like a woman of the same–there is much more pressure on a man to be proficient at sex, as a mechanical skill, than there is a woman, at least in part (I think) because it is generally harder for women to have orgasms during genital intercourse with a man than it is for men to have them during genital intercourse with women. It is often somewhat dependent upon how and what the man does with his body, his hands, and his penis. The emotional piece I understand too, as I understood it when my first husband expressed it all those years ago. However, what I failed (and still struggle with today) to understand is why an experienced man (or woman, though anecdotally I must say that appears to be an infinitely rarer phenomenon) wants an inexperienced, preferably virgin, woman. Not simply wanting a particular woman and then finding out she’s inexperienced or a virgin–but wanting a virgin and then searching out a woman who is one–that that is the or even a primary trait to be considered. Or that one might even spend thousands or millions of dollars to be the f-i-r-s-t to stick it in there.

I think Hugo hit at least part of the nail on the head when he said:

when one of our chief longings is “to be remembered fondly”, to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body

The same primitive instinct that compells dogs to pee on fire hydrants–hawwt! Also, I can’t imagine where these guys are getting the idea that woman’s first time is one that she usually remembers fondly–from an anecdotal perspective again I would have to say that the first experience for a woman is, if she’s lucky, mediocre, and much more frequently than non tends to make an appearance on her bottom twenty list of sexual encounters. I realize that Harlequin romances and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series make it sound like that cherry-popping first event is an ecstasy unlike any the female in question has ever known before, but I thought men weren’t the target demographic for those books. This leads me to believe that being remembered fondly is not the goal–it is simply to be remembered, and to get to have, at least once in your life, a feeling of having owned that pussy–generally, as a man, you can’t have that feeling; there is no way to tell how many other penises have entered that particular vagina. But if you grunted and shoved til bloody flesh tearing occurs, you have marked it; it is really and truly yours, at least for that one shining moment in time.

So the dynamic becomes quite comprehensible; it’s just yet another manifestation of the burning resentment that it seems like an unavoidably high number of men have towards women, the gatekeepers of the uber-desirable pussy. As Amanda says in another post:

I think that the experience, however tedious, has given me some insight into why so many straight men are just plain old misogynists, even though they presumably like women enough to want to be with us. Women are socially constructed as men’s inferiors and often in a servile role. But at the same time, sexual attraction makes men feel especially vulnerable to women, which hurts the ego. After all, if women are supposed to be in a servile role, but still have a right to reject you, that’s got to be maddening. Much of our society is organized around putting women in their place to rectify this situation for insecure men.

I might try to be sympathetic, as I have to admit that being unable to procure as much sex as I’ve wanted at any given time has not really been a limiting factor in my life. However, I really can’t quite manage it–there are several things that have been consistently negative experiences for me and are heavily gender-imbalanced in their causes–yet I have managed not to translate this into some kind of bizarre sexual or emotional fetish in regards to men. Rationality, gentlemen–it’s the new black! Repeat after me–!

A pussy is not something a man can ever own.

No matter how many hymens you rupture. Sorry!

And I think I’ve reached my rather low threshold of boredom with the topic…it really is about at the same bar as my threshold of boredom regarding “Reality TV.”

*Phrase from an old V.C. Andrews book I read as a teenager. The main character uses it to describe what the man who ends up being her first husband passionately believes about her before they marry–it paints a vivid word picture of that mindset, I think. As it turns out, her husband is chronically unfaithful to her with underage girls years into their marriage–perhaps a rather unsurprising development.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 9:18 am and is filed under Punkass!, Feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.