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The hymen’s a myth and virginity’s a construct. It’s time to let both go
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The move, a further amendment to the Health and Care Bill, comes hot on the heels of another change to the bill introduced in November 2021 and intended to make “virginity testing” in England and Wales a criminal offense.
Given the harms described by victims of both practices, these UK legislative changes are welcome, but if anything, they should be seen as a beginning and not an end. It is not just testing and repair that is harmful. The very concept of “virginity” is. And it’s one societal construct that continues to have extraordinary power in so-called conservative and liberal cultures alike.
While not universally the case, in a gender-binary, heteronormative world in which a girl’s value is intrinsically less than that of a boy, her virginity becomes a commodity she trades — or that is traded for her — in exchange for better societal prospects. Most obviously, this means improving the chances of a “good marriage,” but not exclusively. Virginity has also, for example, been a condition for academic progression, as with the ill-conceived proposal for “maiden bursaries” in South Africa: a scheme that offered university scholarships to young women on the condition they remained virgins.
The hymen — and its structural integrity — is the cornerstone of purity cultures, yet as Irish journalist Lynn Enright explains in an extract from her book Vagina: A Re-Education, “it’s pretty obvious that there is a disconnect between the imagined hymen and the real, biological hymen … The hymen is not a tautly pulled skin protecting a girl’s vagina. It is a ‘thin fold of mucous membrane situated at the orifice of the vagina’.”
Despite the fact that the hymen as it is conceived is more mythical than real, the desire to preserve or prove one’s virginity has also created pressure for young women to have anal sex in the first instance and penetrative sex in the second.
Like most other harmful patriarchal norms, the idea of virginity does boys no favors either….
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Source : cnn
