Virginity Check. What is it actually?

Famous rapper and actor T.I recently appeared on the podcast Ladies Like Us With Nazanin and Nadia, announcing that he takes his oldest daughter, Deyjah, to the gynecologist every year to check her hymen to confirm that she’s still a virgin.  “Deyjah’s 18, just graduated high school now and she’s attending her first year of college, figuring it out for herself. And yes, not only have we had the conversation, we have yearly trips to the gynecologist to check her hymen,” As if he hadn’t already embarrassed his daughter enough by publicly speaking about her sexual health, he added, “I will say, as of her 18th birthday, her hymen is still intact.”  After he spoke so publicly about something that should be kept private, his daughter, Deyajah went and unfollowed her father on Instagram.

As she should! Letting your parents know that they’ve crossed a boundary and lost your trust is important. If it means unfollowing them on social media then so be it. 

There are many things wrong with T.I bringing his daughter to a gynecologist to make sure her hymen is intact to ensure she’s still a virgin.  First things first, the hymen doesn’t determine if someone is a virgin or not. Having an intact hymen does not mean you’re a virgin. Some people naturally have hymens that are more open, and there are activities besides sex that can stretch your hymen like riding a bike, doing sports, or putting a tampon.

Doctors tried to relay this to him, but T.I. insisted that he still needed to see the results. It’s funny how he didn’t go through all of this trouble with his sexually active 15-year-old son. T.I said, “So I say, ‘Look, Doc, she don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports. Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my results expeditiously.” T.I calling it his results just feel like some gross ownership over his daughter’s body. It gives off the same energy as dads who say they would threaten boys with a gun for wanting to be with their daughters along with many other disturbing acts that are a declaration of paternal ownership. Hearing how T.I believes that you can easily determine if someone is a virgin by a “test” made me realize that he’s not the only person who believes this. Heck! Most people in our society believe that virginity actually exists.

Did that catch you off guard? Me saying that virginity doesn’t exist? You heard right. Virginity is a huge, fat, myth that was created by… us. Still confused? Well, I’m going to explain why virginity is nothing but a social construct.

As a society, we really obsess over the idea of virginity. It’s a very important thing to have if you’re a woman and a very confusing thing to have if you’re a man. Female virginity is valuable to society, unlike a man’s; in fact, it’s better for a man’s social standing if he is not a virgin. And this links to the sexual double standard: Women are shamed for having sex and men are praised for it

Virginity as a concept also exists for guys, but it doesn’t have almost the same social importance. Women are taught that their virginity is precious, even a commodity. If they “lose” it the wrong way with the wrong person or at the wrong time, then we identify them as easy or even call them “corrupted”. Meanwhile, men don’t have to stress about being ridiculed or humiliated for “losing” their virginity, but some due face ridicule about not losing their virginity making them feel insecure about not having sex leading them to feel pressure to lose it.

Virginity is thought to be a sign of pureness.  That tells women that their value is intrinsically connected to how much sex you’ve had. There is a negative relationship with how much sex you’ve had and how much society thinks your worth to be. For men, there’s a positive relationship between how much sex they have and the worth that society believes them to have. Men are socially rewarded for having sex, and women are socially punished.

The concept of virginity not only shames women into thinking there is a loss in value from investigating their sexuality and immortalizes violence and discrimination against women who do choose to have sex, but It also implies that unless you’ve had a penis in your vagina, or put your penis into a vagina, then you haven’t had sex. Virginity eradicates the experiences of non-heterosexual people. It depicts their sex as invalid and not as real as heterosexual sex. Even oral and anal sex doesn’t “count” in our society, despite both having the word “sex” which just further proves how ridiculous the concept of virginity is.

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