I know the “second virginity” craze is nothing new, but the whole thing strikes me as ridiculous and sad enough to merit comment.
Virginity fetishism is at heart about the idea that women are objects, and that those objects become less valuable when they’ve been “used” by someone else. A shiny new hymen on your wedding day is, apparently, the Bentley of the Religious Right — a fairly rare acquisition and therefore a major status symbol. The fact that it’s attached to an actual person is less of an issue. Just look at how religious groups discuss reclaiming “lost” virginity:
“Have you already unwrapped the priceless gift of virginity and given it away?” asks the Web site for the Pregnancy Resource Center of Northeast Ohio, where Watts began working part-time after she reclaimed her virginity. “Do you now feel like ‘second-hand goods’ and no longer worthy to be cherished? Do you ever wish you could re-wrap it and give it only to your future husband or wife? Guess what…? You can decide today to commit to abstinence, wrapping a brand-new gift of virginity to present to your husband or wife on your wedding night.”
Because a husband or wife who thinks you should be a virgin until marriage is the last person who’s going to think you’re second-hand goods, right?
And a woman isn’t a gift. Neither is a vagina. But that’s the conservative vision of sex and marriage: It’s an economic union that entails a simple exchange of sex, child-rearing and house-keeping for financial security and social status.
Some women are going even further and having their hymens surgically rebuilt. Occasionally, it’s for pretty important reasons — like saving your own skin:
Many of Dr. Red Alinsod’s patients are not looking for a new state of mind, they want a new hymen. They come to his clinic in Laguna Beach, Calif., and pay $5,000 because their honor, and sometimes their lives, depend on it.
“Right now is the start of my busy time,” he says, “because in spring, or during summer vacation, the women go overseas and get married and they have to be all repaired by the time of their arranged weddings in the lands of their birth.”
Alinsod’s typical patient may have been born and raised in the United States, but with significant family in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, the Middle East. Without evidence a new bride is a virgin, she risks being rejected, or, worse, the victim of an “honor killing.”
“These women are very scared,” Alinsod says. “The majority do fear for their lives. So this is a life-saving procedure in the majority of women I deal with. They are afraid they will be killed by the youngest member of their family, or the youngest member of the groom’s family,” because young men are often given light jail sentences for the murders.
It’s interesting how we look at those crazy brown immigrants who fetishize virginity with generalized horror, but as long as the message is coming from good Christian white folks, we teach it in public schools. The virginity obsession is a staple of just about every fundamentalist religion I can think of, and it permeates societies across the world, but it’s only really criticized by conservatives and the mainstream media when it can also be used to encourage xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Virginity fetishism is fucked, whether it’s in Indonesia or Colombia or Spain or the United States of America. And right-wing misogynists who promote this women-as-objects worldview need to accept some responsibility for the thoroughly screwed up messages they’re sending to women, girls, boys and men.
Also, note to crazy virginity fetishists: Losing your virginity sucks. Yes, the first time you have sex can be a great milestone, and it can be nice and romantic and emotionally lovely, but at the end of the day, someone is using his penis to break through a membrane inside your vagina (assuming that an intact hymen is an accurate indicator of virginity, which it most certainly isn’t, but that’s another post). Does it hurt for everyone? No, but it’s not usually a comfortable experience, and if you’re married to (or preparing to be married to) a dude who thinks it’s hot to make you repeat the physically painful experience of having your hymen broken just so he can feel like his new purchase is vacuum-sealed — or if part of the reason he’s marrying you is precisely because no one’s “unwrapped the present” — it’s time to DTMFA.
Most women aren’t taking the extreme step of surgically re-forming their hymens; they’re simply deciding that their virginity has been magically restored. Men, it should be noted, don’t seem to get all upset over this virginity thing — perhaps because they aren’t constantly shamed for being “damaged goods” just because they had sex before marriage like 95 percent of other Americans. The reporter, who just published a book about sex in America, writes:
The fact that some women believe they are able to recapture a kind of sexually virginal state underlines the idea that virginity is not nearly the black-and-white issue most of us think, that it has come to be as much a concept as a fact.
I kind of like this virginity-as-concept thing, because it illustrates just how out of touch with reality the religious right truly is — and if you dig a little bit, it demonstrates how dangerous their ignorance can be.
Sure, it’s kind of funny that people decide to simply “re-claim” their virgin status, but at the end of the day I don’t think virginity is really all that important, so if you want to say you’re a virgin, re-claim away — as the article says, it’ll only end up damaging the virginity movement, since the entire concept of being a virgin will be rendered meaningless. I’m all for that. Where it gets dangerous is in education. To most people reading this article, the virginity fetishists sound like nutbags who are simply entertaining fodder for a weird story; but in reality, they’re the people who are getting paid to teach your kids about sex. The abstinence-only movement is at the forefront of virginity reclamation, and their message is that the only 100% way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is to remain a virgin until you’re married — and once you’re married, you’re totally safe. Condoms and birth control are never necessary, and besides, the abstinence-only crowd says that they fail most of the time anyway. Setting aside the fact that such a calculus doesn’t actually work in the first place, it definitely isn’t going to work if virginity is nothing more than a state of mind. The first virgin in the article, for example, has two kids. The abstinence movement is laying the groundwork for a major public health crisis when they tell people that they can re-invent their sexual histories and God will magically wipe the slate clean. Couple that with a big dose of sex-related shame, and it’s not going to be surprising when the virginity crowd is less likely to use contraception and condoms, more likely to get STIs, less likely to know they have an STI (and therefore more likely to spread it), more likely to misrepresent their status to their partners, and generally more likely to be a part of all sorts of public health problems.
In other words, this is a two-pronged issue. The first problem is the fetishization of virginity and what it means for women when we’re not treated as people, but as objects to be given in marriage who therefore have an obligation to keep ourselves in “new” condition for our future husband. And the second is the broader public health issues that arise when sex is considered shameful and wishful thinking becomes more important than reality.
But if virginity is nothing more than a state of mind, what else can I re-claim? Rent has gotten really expensive lately — think my landlord will buy it when I tell him that Manhattan is just a state of mind, and because I’ve decided to reclaim my status as a Brooklyn resident? Hopefully that’ll fly when my rent check is $500 short of what he’s expecting.