A boy cannot be a virgin.
How?
Because the word Virgin has nothing to do with Sex.
Before the church got hold of the “v” word and it became a question asked in hushed snarky voices about teenage girls and possible brides to be auctioned off in social circles, virginity meant something completely opposite to what people use it for today.
And the word only belonged to women. It has nothing to do with “losing” something (quite the lost and found pile isn’t it at an all girls school…?) because the word “virgin” essentially means a woman who belongs to herself.
When a woman is a virgin she can own land, make decisions for herself and sign her own name without requiring the permission of a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, or any man with a claim on her body or her property to do any of it.
She was and is sovereign, completely answerable to herself.
That is it lovers. That is the whole definition.
No man has ever been able to be that, because no man was ever not that. Men were and are in EVERY single corner of this human led world, always permitted to own themselves. The concept was so unremarkable for them it did not even need a word.
Virgin was a word that named female sovereignty specifically because female sovereignty was rare enough to require naming.
The “original virgins” of this world, were not girls who had not had sex. They were women who had not been “claimed” and decided to live on their own terms. (always a danger really aren’t we?)
So when did it flip? When did “virgin” stop meaning sovereign woman and start meaning sexually inexperienced girl?
“strangely” ( or not so ) enough, around the same time that female sovereignty itself became all so threatening.
As patriarchal religious and legal systems tightened their grip on everything (on land, on inheritance and of course on the bodies of women) the word got quietly and very deliberately redirected. Instead of naming a woman’s independence, it started naming her sexual status relative to men. Had she been with one? No? Then she was a virgin. She was intact, oh so pure and highly valuable. NOW… it is only when she comes inot sexual contact with a…m.a.n..that her value drops..so it is quite the oxymoron…. if you catch my drift…but that is another little topic for later this week.
The word went from describing what a woman owned to describing what she had not yet given away of herself…
And right there my loves is the entire project of patriarchy, packed into a one word vocabulary change.
And what is…… almost ……funny, almost….. is that in this new definition, a boy still can not be a virgin.
Not really.
Because the cultural weight of the word has always landed on her. Her purity and her value tethered to her loss. A boy who has not had sex is just... a boy who has not had sex yet. ( what is wrong with him type thing ) he is in waiting. You know..almost ready. Practically a rite of passage. Yet a girl who has not had sex is deemed pure and becomes tainted once she has.
The same act. ..a “Sexual Debut” I like to call it…has completely opposite meaning depending on which body it happens to.
Why does the original meaning matter? because it created even more lack of safety for women when it became a thing. Men may think it is a word..but the cost of Virginity world wide is f*cking hefty. And the cost of being or not being involves a man…yet the woman is punished, and at times by death….
Virginity means sovereignty over land, over decisions, over her body and the right to exist as an autonomous being that is not tethered to a man.
Systematically, through law and religion and the slow rewriting of language itself, the constriction and control of women, stripped them of their sovereignty and replaced it with permission needed by the ones born from the women asking. Women needed permission from their fathers before marriage, and then from their husbands after it. In many countries, until embarrassingly recently, women could not own property, sign contracts, open bank accounts, or practice professions without a man’s name attached.
And if you are thinking yeah yeah Melissa ( yawn yawn ) …that is in the past….know that 40% of the world’s economies still have at least one legal restriction on women’s property rights. Women’s right to inherit their husband’s property is denied in more than 100 countries. 164 countries legally recognize women’s right to own land, but only 52 actually guarantee it in practice. The law may exists but the reality does not.
And the number that puts it all in one place is only 14 out of 195 countries have full legal equality for women across the board. Property, inheritance, work, marriage, legal standing….everything. The land figures, the inheritance figures, the permission-to-work figures — they are all just slices of that same picture.
14 out of 195 countries….
That’s the world women are living in right now.
This is why the modern day complex of the new meaning of “virgin” is such a dangerous thing….. they made it to mean “the girl” waiting to be handed over.
Not a sovereign woman.
I think about this when I work with women who have lost touch or do not know their own desire, their own pleasure, their own sense of what they actually want. Not what they have been told to want nor what makes them easier to keep, but what they genuinely, bodily, unflinchingly want.
So many women when I ask them what they want, give me a list of needs. We have been conditioned to place needs into “hope-full wants”. And that my loves is a huge part of my work with women. Dismantling this paradigm…to their freedom.
So here is what I want you to take with you gorgeous one.
The original virgin was not waiting for anyone and she was definitely not preserving anything for a man to claim and take as his. She was complete and autonomous for just waking up and breathing basically. And that came with all her very own choices… her land, her body, her sexual desires and needs and her name.
That is not a radical feminist invention.
That is the etymology.
Look it up if you are rolling your eyes right now…💋
And if you have been walking around believing that your value is connected to who you have or have not slept with ( firstly..if you slept you are good…no “harm” done they say….if you fucked..well you are or are not fucked..depending on who is asking ) Just know that this insidious belief was installed in you by the very same system that robbed and changed the meaning of that word, so you would feel a certain way.
Gorgeous woman..you were always the sovereign one.
Ready to truly feel that within your body, yourself and your life?
Book a discovery call with me here and lets about how I can support you.
Always with Pleasure.
M
💋