Are you still ‘intact’ on your wedding night?
Supposedly, you’re a virgin until you’ve had sexual
intercourse with a member of the opposite sex.
But this definition leaves a lot of people
out of the loop. For example, does this mean
gays and lesbians are eternal virgins?
Or that someone who is highly sexual
but stops at intercourse is a virgin?
In theory, under this very traditional
definition of virginity, sex and sexual
intercourse are separated — an interesting notion.
People seem to have many different ways of
defining “virgin.” To some, a virgin is
someone who hasn’t had sexual intercourse
(penis-to-vagina).
To others, a virgin is a person who hasn’t
engaged in any intimate acts, including deep
kissing, genital touching, or oral,
vaginal and anal sex.
Still others may allow certain intimacies,
like kissing and touching below the belt,
while excluding other sex acts.
Some people believe they are a virgin until
they have sex with someone of the opposite sex,
while many believe that people who exclusively
have same-sex partners can and do lose their virginity.
Finally, some believe that mutual consent must occur
and that people who have been sexually assaulted
but haven’t had consensual sex — are still virgins.
Traditionally, the wedding night was often the first
time a couple shared a bed – so you can understand
a willingness to power through the exhaustion,
drunkenness and awkward-to-remove wedding attire.
It’s the reason wedding night sex attained its
near-mythical connotations.
But now the landscape is very different, with the number
of couples who co-habit before marrying far outnumbering
those who don’t – and many newlyweds admit that for them,
wedding night sex didn’t happen at all.
Lisa was expecting her wedding night to be super romantic,
intimate and beautiful “just like in the movies”.
In fact, when she got married two years ago,
she and her husband were so knackered they
were asleep the moment their heads hit the pillows.
“When we got in bed we just knew sex was
off the cards. We were unbelievably tired”.
Female Virginity:
Women As Property
The idea of a woman’s first penis-in-vagina sexual
encounter being something significant and life altering
has its origins in women being considered property.
Virginity is a social construction which came
about because of the commodification of women.
Since women were (and sometimes still are)
considered property when they got married,
they were passed on to their husbands from their fathers.
You know the whole father-walks-his-daughter-down-the-aisle
tradition? Well, it represents a transfer of property from
her father to her husband. Her father was literally giving her away.