Is virginity obsolete?
Sensationalistic news headlines such as ‘Edward Smith has sex with more than 700 cars, lost virginity to a VW Beetle’ and ‘Alien abductee David Huggins lost his virginity to extraterrestrial woman named Crescent’ prove that the definition of ‘virginity’ is a vague one.
So perhaps this is true: ‘Icelandic teens think virginity is dated’.
“They just think it’s a dated concept that isn’t valid anymore,” said a representative of a recent youth festival that discussed the concept. “Do you only lose your virginity if a boy and a girl sleep together? The concept doesn’t really take into account when two boys sleep together or two girls.”
‘God’s thunder’
Methods to disguise one’s lost virginity remain a growth industry.
“Women in many societies go to great lengths and spend lots of money to preserve their image before men. In countries like Tunisia, doctors have had to perform hymenoplasties at the request of their patients who wanted to give their men the impressions that they were virgins. The popularity of ‘virginity soaps’ in markets like Dubai are another example,” according to ‘Cameroon’s dangerous “virginity” stone’.
In Cameroon markets, alum stone is sold as a way to tighten vaginas.
“Alum stone has different names in different regions. In the West, it’s called ‘wothi’, but on the coast, it’s called ‘loba’, which means ‘God’s thunder’. Women crush it into powder and mix it with water; sometimes, they add a bit of lemon juice or honey. They then use the concoction to clean their private parts, as the stone’s powder kills bacteria. But this mixture also provokes a momentary contraction of the vagina, which can give the appearance of virginity to a woman who has already had sexual relations.”
However alum can cause vaginitis, increase the chance of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases and make the vaginal walls so rigid that they tear during childbirth.
“In general, women should not put any products in their vaginas,” says one local gynaecologist.
The toughest nut to crack
“While virginity is linked to the idea of purity, societal pressures to remain pure before marriage fall mainly on women. No one seems to believe that men should also stay virgins before marriage. Rather, virginity in our culture is only related to bleeding from the breaking of the hymen rather than the preservation of purity in both sexes,” according to ‘Men versus women virginity: the hypocrisy of Moroccan society’.
“However, a woman’s hymen can be ruptured in numerous ways, such as riding a donkey or a bicycle or strenuous physical activity. The hymen could have broken before marriage through a variety of means other than sexual intercourse and is in no way an indication of sexual promiscuousness. Additionally, it is scientifically proven that sometimes there is no blood present during a woman’s first experience of sexual intercourse.”
So why do some people still define a woman’s virginity by the state of her hymen? And why is this idea a tougher nut to crack than the hymen itself? And do cars have hymens?
Why are people so fixated on the state of a woman’s hymen? Leave a comment below or join the discussion on Facebook.