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Sexual Ethics, Spring 2017

The Lead

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"Virgin" and "Maiden" redirect here. For other uses, see Virgin (disambiguation) and Maiden (disambiguation).

Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse. There are cultural and religious traditions that place special value and significance on this state, predominantly towards unmarried females, associated with notions of personal purity, honor and worth.

Like chastity, the concept of virginity has traditionally involved sexual abstinence. The concept of virginity usually involves moral or religious issues and can have consequences in terms of social status and in interpersonal relationships. Although virginity has social implications and had significant legal implications in some societies in the past, it has no legal consequences in most societies today. While historically prominent, legal implications have greatly diminished over the years. However the social, personal and religious implications have persisted.

The term virgin originally only referred to sexually inexperienced women, but has evolved to encompass a range of definitions, as found in traditional, modern, and ethical concepts. Heterosexual individuals may or may not consider loss of virginity to occur only through penile-vaginal penetration, while people of other sexual orientationsoften include oral sex, anal sex or mutual masturbation in their definitions of losing one's virginity. The social implications of virginity still remain in many societies, and can have varying affects on an individual's social agency based upon location. A concise definition of virginity, and the loss thereof, has yet to be agreed upon. It has been defined as "as a gift, stigma, or part of a process" by American University students, and remains ambiguous. While biologically speaking the loss of virginity is referring to the breaking of a hymen, or the first penetration, it is often a definition that is to be defined by those involved in the sexual acts. Defining virginity, and virginity in and of itself, can be examined through different aspects including social, personal, religious and biological.

Cultural Value of Virginity:

When compared with virgins, nonvirgins have been shown to have higher levels of independence, less desire for achievement, more criticism from society and a greater level of deviance.

Social psychology

Some cultural anthropologists argue that romantic love and sexual jealousy are universal features of human relationships. Social values related to virginity reflect both sexual jealousy and ideals of romantic love, and appear to be deeply embedded in human nature.

Psychology explores the connection between thought and behavior. Seeking understanding of social (or anti-social) behaviors includes sexual behavior. Joan Kahn and Kathryn London studied U.S. women married between 1965 and 1985 to see if virginity at marriage influenced risk of divorce.

This article examines the relationship between premarital sexual activity and the long-term risk of divorce among U.S. women married between 1965 and 1985. Simple cross-tabulations from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth indicate that women who were sexually active before marriage faced a considerably higher risk of marital disruption than women who were virgin brides. A bivariate probit model is employed to examine three possible explanations for this positive relationship: (a) a direct causal effect, (b) an indirect effect through intervening "high risk" behaviors (such as having a premarital birth or marrying at a young age), and (c) a selectivity effect representing prior differences between virgins and non-virgins (such as family background or attitudes and values). After a variety of observable characteristics are controlled, non-virgins still face a much higher risk of divorce than virgins. However, when the analysis controls for unobserved characteristics affecting both the likelihood of having premarital sex and the likelihood of divorce, the differential is no longer significant. These results suggest that the positive relationship between premarital sex and the risk of divorce can be attributed to prior unobserved differences (e.g., the willingness to break traditional norms) rather than to a direct causal effect.

In this study, we see that women who were virgins at the time of marriage were shown to have less marital upset. It was shown that when observable characteristics were controlled, women who were non-virgins at the time of marriage had a higher risk for divorce. However, it was also shown that the link between premarital sex and the risk of divorce were attributed to prior unobserved differences, such as deviating from norms.

A study conducted by Smith and Schaffer found that someone's first sexual experience has been linked to their sexual performance for years to come. Participants who's first intercourse was pleasant showed more satisfaction in their current sex lives.

Definitions of virginity loss Definitions of Virginity Loss

There are varying understandings as to which types of sexual activities result in loss of virginity. The traditional view is that virginity is only lost through vaginal penetration by the penis, consensual or non-consensual, and that acts of oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation or other forms of non-penetrative sex do not result in loss of virginity. A person who engages in such acts without having engaged in vaginal intercourse is often regarded among heterosexuals and researchers as "technically a virgin". By contrast, gay or lesbian individuals often describe such acts as resulting in loss of virginity. Some gay males regard penile-anal penetration as resulting in loss of virginity, but not oral sex or non-penetrative sex, and lesbians may regard oral sex or fingering as loss of virginity. Some lesbians who debate the traditional definition consider whether or not non-penile forms of vaginal penetration constitute virginity loss, while other gay men and lesbians assert that the term virginity is meaningless to them because of the prevalence of the traditional definition. Whether a person can lose his or her virginity through rape is also subject to debate. with the belief that virginity can only be lost through consensual sex being prevalent in some studies. In a study done by Laura Carpenter, many men and women discussed how they felt virginity could not be taken through rape, suggesting that virginity was a psychological rather than physical. They also went on to describe losing their virginities in one of three ways: "as a gift, stigma or part of the process."

Researcher and author Laura M. Carpenter also states that despite perceptions of what determines virginity loss being as varied among gay men and lesbians as they are among heterosexuals, and in some cases more varied among the former, that the matter has been described to her as people viewing sexual acts relating to virginity loss as "acts that correspond to your sexual orientation," which suggests the following: "So 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."

Virginity Pledges

Virginity pledges (or abstinence pledges) made by heterosexual teenagers and young adults may also include the practice of "technical virginity". In a peer-reviewed study by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner, which looked at virginity pledgers five years after their pledge, they found that the pledgers have similar proportions of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and at least as high proportions of anal and oral sex as those who have not made a virginity pledge, and deduced that there was substitution of oral and anal sex for vaginal sex among the pledgers. However, the data for anal sex without vaginal sex reported by males did not reflect this directly.

In a peer-reviewed study about virginity pledges (commitments made by teenagers and young adults to refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage), sociologists Peter Bearman of Columbia and Hannah Brueckner of Yale estimated that male pledgers were 4.1 times more likely to remain virgins by age 25 than those who did not pledge (25% vs 6%), and estimated that female pledgers were 3.5 times more likely to remain virgins by age 25 than those who did not pledge (21% vs 6%).

Early Loss of Virginity

Early loss of virginity has been shown to be linked to factors such as level of education, desire for deviance, independence, biological factors like age and gender, and social factors such as parental supervision or religious affiliation, with the most common being sociodemographic variables. Along with this, sexual abuse has also been shown to have a link to later risky sexual behaviors and a younger age of voluntary sexual intercourse. Unfortunately, adverse effects for losing virginity at an early age include lower chance of economic stability, lower level of education, social isolation, marital disruption and greater medical consequences. These medical consequences consist of an increase in STDs, cervical cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, fertility and unwanted pregnancies.