Please welcome Ellice, the newest member of Team Trixie! After assisting with some of our interviews for the film, Ellice started wondering how she defined the V-Word for herself, and whether to even bother:
Therese (aka Trixie) has been asking a lot of people how they define virginity. She gets responses that run the gamut: it’s a loss of innocence, it’s a cultural construct, it’s heterosexual penetration, it’s sexual initiation, it’s miraculous, it’s bunk.
As much as these conversations pique my feminist interests, and as comfortable as I am examining them from a swiveling office chair, when I turned the camera on myself the other day, I found myself suddenly a lot less certain.
How do I define virginity? What does virginity and losing it mean to me? OK, I told myself, I can totally answer this. A whole gender studies curricula under my belt, no problem. Right?
Sure, the term is thrown around all the time: dresses are virginal, as are landscapes and olive oil. But the word virginity, at its most literal, tends to mean the state a person is in before she or he has had
heterosexual intercourse. Once you’re not a virgin anymore, the idea is that you have had this very specific kind of sex.
If you spend five minutes thinking about this definition of virginity, it’s hard to ignore how limited it is. And I think if you spend five minutes wikipedia-ing its history, how you use the concept of virginity to understand your own lived experiences, and the experiences of real people
you know, becomes relevant.
I know I use virginity in its most literal, conventional, narrow definition out of convenience; I define it more or less the way Miley Cyrus does. But, considering its history in controlling women’s bodies and lives, is this idea at all meaningful to me?
My immediate response is no. My sexual life doesn’t fit into the story that popular, scientific or mythical virginity definitions want to tell. This is partly because I'm queer. But I also know it's just because I'm a person whose sexuality is just as complicated as anyone else's.
What if I feel like I was sexual long before I "lost it?" What if there was in fact a marker of when I claimed my sexuality, and it had nothing at all to do with being penetrated? Virginity is not the framework that makes my experiences mean anything at all, and the centuries-old weight of meanings the word “virgin” carries does nothing but repulse me.
So, what is there to be done really but throw the word, the idea, the history out?
But I also wonder: what if this is not possible? And don’t important conversations require a language?
To me, "what is virginity" and "what does virginity mean to you" are very separate questions. To the former, I look to people working to imagine alternative definitions for what virginity (and "losing it") could mean. To the latter I personally say: it means nothing.
What does 'virginity' mean to you?
March 12, 2010
Do we need to define virginity in order to have a conversation about it?
5 comments:
You're right that it's hard to define. I would say it's just an absence of sexual experience. Of course, that begs the question: What kind of experience? Do the reproductive organs of both parties have to be involved? How long does the "sex" have to last in order to count, 1 second? 3 minutes? An hour? I think unless you use it with regard to a specific act (penetration, trib, oral, etc.) you can't really pin it down, as it were. But of course then we'd always be virgins in some way or another and the idea becomes meaningless (hm...) Personally, I think that big problem is that we try and reify it and treat it like it's something you can keep. How can you "lose" nothing? You can't lose what you never had.
I have read numerous articles like this that have trouble nailing down the concept of virginity. They often say something like the comment "So, what is there to be done really but throw the word, the idea, the history out?" I always find this frustrating. While there is no consensus on when virginity ends, there is no debate what to call someone without any experience. I have kissed a girl only twice in my life. With that being the extent of my sexual experience, no one would debate the fact of my being a virgin.
Anonymous, I can name at least a few people who would totally debate the "fact" of a person's--any person's--virginity. They're the people who believe, and I'll count myself among them, that not having had sex isn't the same as not being a sexual person. I do think virginity is hard to pin down because I do think it is an idea that's been shaped in complicated ways, to mean sometimes really different things.
I guess I should also clarify that if I really believed the concept should be tossed aside and forgotten about that simply, I wouldn't be writing about it. I think it's completely worth exploring because I think conversations about sexuality are important. Virginity is one way, among potentially many, to talk about sexual experiences. Why not imagine the alternatives?
I guess I can only share my understanding of virginity since everyone has a different experience: I think I define loss of virginity as shared sexual experience that initiates you into a new understanding of yourself as a sexual being. The first time I "had sex" I was intoxicated to the point of not remembering it. But the next time I "had sex" I was with someone I was in a loving relationship with. The transformative "A-Ha" moment that I associate with "losing my virginity" didn't come from the first time the physical act of penetration occurred. It came from the moment it meant something to me.
I am a sexual being, but I never had sexual intercourse. I consider myself a virgin. Others with this new way of considering virginty may not agree. I never thought of the idea of someone who is gay how that would effect them too. That would make it tougher to define. I have my personal definition, that is what matters most to me.
It is interesting how I am reading about viriginty and everyones opinion on what it means. I use to feel apart of the feminist movement until I seem to get this seperatist vibe from the current movement. I am a traditonal women and I am also liberal minded. I think that in order to make a discussion on what it means to be a virgin today we have to respect what the history of virginity means! It's not about division. That's how we got to the state we are in now.
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