Topics Sex

Question Why do people praise virginity as a value? Sex is a wonderful part of the human experience, why is it sacralized so? Isn't it just as silly to say "I'm saving myself for marriage" as it is to say "I'm only eating pork chops for the first time on my wedding reception" or setting some other normal human event to happen on a specified day? Shouldn't we want to experience the best things in life as soon as possible (of course we shouldn't experience sex when we're ten, but you get my meaning)? I'm not going for sexual promiscuity but why is it so important to say "you were my first" or for a person to think they were the other person's first?

Accepted:
May 12, 2009

Comments

I'll leave it to Freudians and others to speculate on what part of some people's psyches makes virginity seem valuable. Suffice it to say that I share your bewilderment. Obvious caveats and qualifications assumed, there's no clear reason why staying a virgin should be considered virtuous. (Odd, by the way that there is a close conventional association between virtue and virginity.)

That said, it's not really so strange that we might think about the first person we made love with -- or even kissed, for that matter -- with a certain wistfulness. But that's different from wishing that the person we eventually end up with should have been the first.