Female virginity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Female virginity is closely interwoven with personal or even family honour in many cultures, especially those known as shame societies, in which the loss of virginity before marriage is a matter of deep shame. For example, among the Bantu of South Africa, virginity testing or even the suturing of the labia majora (called infibulation) has been commonplace. Traditionally, Kenuzi girls (of the Sudan) are married before puberty (Godard, 1867), by adult men who inspect them manually for virginity (Kenedy, 1970). Female circumcision is later performed at puberty to ensure chastity (Barclay, 1964).
History evidences laws and customs that required a man who seduced or raped a virgin to take responsibility for the consequences of his offense by marrying the girl or by paying compensation to her father on her behalf.
Emphasizing the monetary value of female virginity, some women have offered their virginity for sale. In 2004, a lesbian student from the University of Bristol was said to have sold her virginity online for £8,400, and Londoner Rosie Reid, 18, reportedly slept with a 44-year-old BT engineer in a Euston hotel room against payment for her virginity. In 2008, Italian model Raffaella Fico, then 20 years old, offered her virginity for 1 million Euros. In that same year, an American using the pseudonym Natalie Dylan announced she would accept bids for her virginity through a Nevada brothel's web site.
Some historians and anthropologists note that many societies that place a high value on virginity before marriage, before the sexual revolution, actually have a large amount of premarital sexual activity that does not involve vaginal penetration: for example, oral sex, anal sex and mutual masturbation. This is considered by some people "technical" virginity, as vaginal intercourse has not occurred but the participants are sexually active. In recent years, "technical" virginity has become popular among teenagers. In 1999, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which examines the definition of sex based on a 1991 random sample of 599 college students from 29 states found that sixty percent said oral-genital contact did not constitute having sex. "That's the 'technical virginity' thing that's going on," said Stephanie Sanders, associate director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University. Sanders, as the co-author of the study, and along with other researchers, titled the findings "Would You Say You 'Had Sex' If ...?"
There are anthropological reasons for the view that vaginal penetration, especially on the part of the woman, is especially indicative of a change in status, a threshold irrevocably crossed, the most incontrovertible "loss of virginity".
See also
