Women Like Sex Ep. 14: You Cannot Lose What You Do Not Have
Artwork by Ted Nunes
Welcome to Season 2 of Women Like Sex!
What marks a new season? For me, emerging from professional and personal rabbit holes that left no time for this (nudge, nudge) entirely independent, self-funded podcast. So please visit my Patreon!
Really, though, podcast seasons are arbitrary. Like New Year’s, of which we make a big deal and then the next day is…Tuesday, and life goes on. And like virginity, of which we make an arguably bigger deal – except at least we ring in a new year, we don’t ”lose” the previous one.
VIRGINITY IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT WITH NO MEDICAL OR BIOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS. NONE. ZERO.
This episode is guaranteed to upend many people’s ideas, it might even make you mad. Because of the many myths we’re busting on this show, virginity is among the biggest of all.
Helping us unpack the history and consequences of its profound religious (of course), personal and social baggage are historian Anke Bernau (University of Manchester, UK), author of Virgins: A Cultural History, and sociologist Laura Carpenter (Vanderbilt University, US), author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences.
When you ask folks to define virginity, as with sex itself, many say it involves sticking a penis into a vagina and some, that you can prove the first time that vagina has been stuck. You CANNOT. Not through hymens, urine streams, breast shapes or blushing, as you’ll hear in this episode.
Yet the largely religious ideas behind virginity are so persistent, so deeply ingrained, that plenty of folks worldwide believe the hymen is a kind of purity seal that gets broken the first time a girl or woman might gain – please stop calling it a loss! – certain sexual experiences. And some medical professionals “restore” the infamous tissue, despite there being no actual medical need.
For millennia there’s been a push to prove and control sexual purity in females, and hardly ever in males but, sometimes, virginity has offered girls and women a way out of that control. All of this makes sense when you think about it, as my guests have done, at length. Their extensive bodies of work extend beyond virginity research, and I urge you to seek them out (see links above) and to buy their books!
A full transcript of our conversation is available here.
Women Like Sex is a Flipped Script production
Executive Producer / Editor: Natasha Senjanovic
Website Design and Artwork: Ted Nunes
Associate Producer: Edecio Martinez
Music: Funky Fortune by Danny Shields