Why bother about virginity?

I currently see no value in encouraging girls to preserve their virginity or ‘delaying sexual debut’ unless we are admitting to be a society that values abuse, inequality, discrimination and patriarchy. 

There are just too many things that are wrong about encouraging girls (and not boys) about holding on to their virginity. I can only discuss a few of them within this limited space.

Marriage?

Firstly, remember Nqobile the 24 year old Masters graduate I spoke about a few weeks ago? Well, she ‘got saved’ at 14 years old and so decided it was a given that as a Christian, she would not have sex until she got married. 

That’s the first problem for me – marriage. This speaks directly to attaching a female’s worth to sex; a sex object that should be guarded for sweet devouring by a man.

This raises another problem, what are we saying to the lesbian girls who will not marry not because they are not interested in marrying a man but because they live in countries where the idea of same sex marriages will never be entertained? 

Or is this our way of saying we will continue to ignore their existence in our communities? How is this not discrimination?

Thirdly, by elevating marriage to the levels of some prestigious reward like an Olympic medal that can only be achieved through hard work (preserving virginity), are we not then saying to girls that they are incomplete without it? Do we see how this is linked to a girl opening herself up to a life of abuse and unhappiness?

Abuse

Here’s how; this girl may, because life happens, lose her virginity to a man before they get married and because we have taught her that she should lose it (another problem – the language used) to the man she marries, she may hold on to this pre-marital sex lover and push hard (along with her and/or his family) for him to marry her even though he may not be the best partner to cater to her needs, ambitions and aspirations.  

Some girls may be so ashamed to losing ‘it’ prematurely and to the ‘wrong’ person and start to self-destruct.

This also means she might marry early, and yet promoters of ‘virginity till marriage’ purport that avoiding early/child marriage is one key reason they advocate for it. 

The man may marry her even against his will, give in to parental and societal pressure linked to ‘finding a gem’ in a virgin, but ultimately setting them both up for gloom when in later years or months or even weeks after their wedding they collapse to the fraud that their marriage always was. 

And as life teaches us, a collapse of volcanic proportions is always preceeded by violent disruptive 

shatters.

Nqobile is a classic example of this. 

“So at 24 I slept with him. Woke up the next day and didn’t love him any more than I had. I don’t know if I loved him or was desperate to. I didn’t hope to marry him or have children with him. We were not compatible. But for the next five months I hoped for a relationship, to be loved unconditionally and to do life with somebody, with him”, she says. 

Eventually she let go and connected with someone who exposed her to sweet poetic sexual encounters – no strings attached.

Protection

Apart from the dangers of falling into the trap of an unhappy relationship/marriage, a girl can fall into other danger zones. 

Recently in neighboring South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province it was discovered that even though most Zulu girls passed the annual virginity testing (ugh!!!) with flying colors, some of these girls were infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV. 

This is because the girls, ever so focused on preserving their virginity and cultural identity, would then offer anal sex to their male lovers. 

And obviously the lovers do not use condoms because anal sex means the girls cannot fall pregnant. Why the highest number of new HIV infections happens among girls aged 15-24?

The other problem with linking virginity to marriage is that it gives the perception that sex inside a marriage is the healthiest kind. 

This is a direct contradiction to other publicly disseminated health messages – that even married couples should exercise consistent condom use; that even in marriages rape and HIV infection can and do happen.

So, in my observation, preserving virginity does not necessarily protect girls from any social ill; instead it leaves them open to physical and mental health vulnerabilities and the same social inequalities faced by non-virgins their age. It’s a good idea to encourage our young to delay their first experience of sexual intercourse but only if;

1)      This crusade includes both boys and girls,

2)      The reasons point more to the importance of knowing oneself first – self-awareness which shapes personal development and personal leadership -  which in turn leads to more informed decision-making in future, and

3)      There are no links to marriage, but rather that sex is one of the most beautiful forms of self-expression.

After a personal journey of self-awareness, Nqobile, who credits her circle of influence for their indirect life coaching which helped her let go of that first sex she was desperate to love, sums it up nicely; “Just two weeks ago an old companion asked if I had changed. I smiled at how I really had changed and in the most perfect and liberating way.”