Hi, pornies. I hope you are feeling great today. ^^ I don't come with a book yet, but soon I'll share a porn review! However, for now, there's a topic I want to discuss and know what you think about: Virginity. Does it matter? How is it defined? What does it mean to be a virgin? Nowadays there are those who care about it and those who don't, so who's right? Well, here's what I think about it.
I think we can all agree that the initial definition of virginity, the one we knew first, is the lack of sexual experience, mostly regarding penetrative sex. That would be the most traditional and known as far I'm concerned, but it is the best one? I'm not that sure.
Virginity is directly related to a state of purity, innocence, like the innocence of a child. However, if we keep sex in mind, I wouldn't say that sexual virginity is lost whe you have penetrative sex for the first time. Your first time is your first time, and it has nothing to do with penetration.
Karen Bouris spoke about something interesting in her book (although wih very bad reviews on Amazon) The First Time: What Parents and Teenage Girls Should Know About "Losing Your Virginity": if we keep the traditional idea of virginity in mind, then technically speaking almost all lesbians are virgins, which then would lead to the debate of what is "lesbian virginity". And don't get me started on masturbation, sexual toys, and if they count as sex, becuase then none of us readign is would be a virgin (if you haven never touched yourself, well, you're a rarity; not a bad thing, mind you, just... peculiar in the modern world).
I don't think a level of purity that lets you touch a unicorn would be so easily taken away, not in a physical way, at least. If being an innocent is the same as being a virgin but in the sexual way, then it would mean you're a virgin until you discover who you are as a sexual being. On Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences, Laura M. Carpenter explains something about this:
If you're a gay male, you're supposed to have anal sex because that's what gay men do. And if you're a gay woman, then you're supposed to have oral sex, because that's what gay women do. And so those become, like markers, for when virginity is lost.
In her book Virgin: The Untouched History, Hanne Blank explains that "virginity reflects no known biological imperative and grants no demonstrable evolutionary advantage." I agree with her, although I can't deny that the first time one does something leaves a big impression on the mind. The first times I explored what I like and dislike did that to me, and they have lead me in a path to know who I am sexually speaking. I can only imagine what I'm going to discover when I have penetrative sex.
However, this doesn't mean that you evolve or become a better version of yourself when you loose your virginity, which is ironic for us men in the Western world. I've been mocked and ridiculed by family and friend for staying virgin at my 25, and I'm not the only case.
In Their Own Right: Addressing the Sexual and Reproductive Health Needs of Men Worldwide, by The Guttmacher Institute, determined that:
In almost all countries, the majority of men 20–24 report having had sexual intercourse before their 20th birthday; in a few countries, substantial proportions of men in their early 20s were still sexually inexperienced by age 20.
And The Young Men's Clinic: Addressing Men's Reproductive Health and Responsibilities, by Bruce Armstrong, says the following:
It is particularly important to increase primary and secondary prevention efforts that target men in their early 20s, who are more likely than younger males to engage in risky sexual behaviors and to have adverse reproductive health outcomes.
The 20s seems to be the age for men to have sex, so technically speaking I'm still on time to social standards. However, similarly to what a friend told me these days when we talked about this, who is sociaty to determine who we are in our intimacy? You don't loose it when you have sex for the first time, but when you give that innocence, that private part of yourself, to someone else during sex.
If you are a pure, innocent being, then it is only you can allow someone else to take that away from you. You can have as much sex as you want, but it will be only sex if that's what you want it to be. You're exploring yourself, having fun, whatever you want to call it (and please make it always consensual and responsible), but the moment you give yourself, when you are making love and connecting with someone else, that's when you're not as innocent. Why? Becuase you're allowing yourself to be vulnerable in a new level.
What do you think about this? Personally, I'm not letting go my physical or metaphorical virginity still, but I feel more comfortable knowing what it means for me and where I stand regarding this topic. I used to think that I wanted to stay virgin until marriage, but now I know it's not much about marriage but about having the right person with me (I could speak about the right people, but since I'm still not sure about being polyamorous or not, I can't say so and it's not my place to say what virignity is for poly people).
No comments:
Post a Comment