The virginity requirement is slavery.
As always, these opinions are my own and no one else’s. If you like them, you are welcome to adopt them as your own.
In a previous post I describe other ways that sexual repression has had abhorrent consequences.
Recently, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced his daughter’s place on the market for sale into slavery1. It is called a “purity pledge2” by some. He requires his daughter to abstain from sex so that he can assure her purchaser that the goods are of the appropriate quality and that she will be bound as the purchaser’s property for life. Of course, she gets some say about the person to whom she is sold, but probably not as much as she deserves. I say this because parents who make requirements like that generally have little respect for any other freedoms their children might find beneficial. She will probably even think she chose her purchaser of her own free will. That is what Mr. Johnson wants: he wants her to think it’s good, hence the fancy ceremony. I believe that Jon Stewart was fond of the phrase “polish that turd3.” If Mr. Johnson has any male children and his wife performs a similar ceremony with them, then I will have a tiny bit of respect for his viewpoint. It’s still a turd.
This is absolutely disgusting for a number of reasons. That most cultures in the world practice, or at least pay lip service to, this depravity can only be explained by the widespread treatment of women as property.
Treatment as property enables and enshrines abuse
I have been first-hand witness to far too many people, of various gender identities, including men, feeling trapped in horribly abusive relationships. I watched my mother be beaten so badly by her husband that she was bleeding internally somewhere in the stomach area. She did not seek medical attention, and I was 11, so my understanding of her injuries is limited. But it was bad. Happily, that was the last time he beat her. Mom’s mother4, notably without any other women or men in attendance, drove into town to kick his ass out. He was Mom’s third husband. Fortunately for Mom (and me), Mom only worried about economic ruin and had no delusions about virginity being useful.
If a woman is ‘used property’ after she has been married, then she is, even if allowed to divorce, still doomed to societal and economic hardship, and, most notably, difficulty finding another helpmeet. I prefer the term ‘helpmeet’ to ‘spouse’ because it emphasizes marriage as a partnership, and that is what it should be.
And, yeah, likely because of these experiences, I became overly cautious about marrying, and never did.
Here is a brief list of other reasons why I think it is grotesquely inappropriate to require virginity until marriage.
It makes marriage be about sex rather than about partnership
I’m not saying it’s wrong to be monogamous with a partner or that sex should not be part of a marriage or marriage-like partnership. The problem comes from marriage being the only way a person can have sex. In that situation, the ability to have sex becomes the main driver of marriage. Holding such an intense human drive over a person’s head, forcing the person to endure it until agreeing to become enslaved sounds a little too close to the procedure for obtaining a forced confession.
And, it causes the choice to be blind. Abstinence in no way ensures compatibility. A recent video5 explores, among other interesting topics, the struggles of a woman who is in a relationship with a man who is asexual, and the unfortunate effects on him. If the entire purpose for marrying is to have sex, what a horror it must be if the two partners are very sexually incompatible. This paragraph also belongs in the next section.
It encourages bad marriage outcomes (that cannot be righted)
As anyone who has gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach knows, the ability to make rational choices can be significantly impaired when one is under the influence of an internal mechanism that is related to the survival of the species. The virginity requirement forces people to make life-altering decisions in an impaired mental state and, often, at an age where the natural learning phase is focused more on developing risk appreciation6 than on making prudent decisions. See also the paragraph above.
The stakes become too high (dear incels, this is for you)
You get only one chance. You’ve never done it before. If you make a mistake, you have to live with it for the rest of your life. This is precisely the recipe for people to freeze up and start obsessing over perfection, either theirs or someone else’s.
This is also the worst possible state for making important life decisions.
The other result, famously bemoaned by the incels7, is that intimacy of all types suffers. I have deep sympathy with the men (and others) who are upset at not being able to find partners for sexual interactions.
Actually, I empathize with them. Given my status as an outspoken leader with controversial opinions in a religious movement that many would love to call a cult, I have to be exceedingly cautious about sex. In fact, it’s been so long since I had intercourse that I appear to have a fukken hymen again. I didn’t know that could happen, and I’m not pleased.
The stakes are already far too high, and the current administration wants to make them even higher. We need the sexual revolution again. It needs to be easier to have sex, not harder.
If the culture can also manage to stop penalizing people for having children, there will be more of them as well. Bonus points for making it easier to raise children8.
Seriously, it’s bad for health
I know from painful experience that if one continually “toughs it out,” things stop working. For me, it was sleep. I am absolutely nocturnal9. Until I started graduate school, I was doing ok, and could sleep pretty much anywhere, anytime. Up until then, I could always adjust my schedule to allow for some day-sleep. I didn’t realize at the time what it meant that I needed it. I thought I just really liked to sleep, and I did, and I still do. But, grad school changed things. Suddenly, I had an endless pile of work, and could no longer pop off for a nap mid-day. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but the mechanism that causes “sleep pressure” became extremely unreliable. If I happen to stay awake for 24-ish hours, sleep pressure stops happening altogether. It’s not mania. It’s just that my body stops bothering to waste energy on a process that is obviously not having the intended effect. As soon as I recognize that state, I go immediately to bed. It’s scary as hell to experience that.
The current culture expects people to “resist their urges.” To me, it sounds like a long, slow, torturous variation on genital mutilation. The damage being done is almost certainly permanent. Good luck getting funding to study it.
Consistently resisting the urge to breathe is nearly impossible.
Consistently resisting the urge to eat has obvious and unfortunate results.
Consistently resisting the urge to sleep causes all manner of problems resembling various psychoses, even if one has not broken the underlying mechanism.
There is no moral or ethical justification for requiring people to consistently, for years on end, resist their sexual urges. We must stop doing it.
- Just use your favorite method to search on “mike johnson speaker daughter purity pledge”. ↩︎
- At least he can disavow having invented it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstinence_pledge ↩︎
- Used as a recurring theme on The Daily Show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show ↩︎
- Grandma was a product of her times and her membership in the culture of the deep south, so she and I had many disagreements, but I had enormous respect for her from that moment on. ↩︎
- The Mystery of the Romans. https://youtu.be/IBeP_E5Iwwc?si=Li3Sk3nv-g0R8X8z ↩︎
- I was once a teenager and, later, a young adult. I was fairly responsible, but… ↩︎
- Note to the incels: The right-wing sexual repression is the cause of your problems, not the liberals. Hard-right rhetoric makes terrible foreplay. ↩︎
- Trump once suggested paying women $5000 to have children. THAT IS AN INSULT. Obviously, the folks in power who are currently trying to increase fertility have no concept of what it takes for a middle-ish-class person to raise a child. ↩︎
- I am aware that this is ‘impossible.’ I apologize for not conforming to the wisdom of modern medicine and, more importantly, the relentless needs of the economy, but my health is more important. I need several hours of daytime sleep every day. I sleep in full sun with no curtains, mask, etc. Being outside in full sun makes me feel tired and brain-foggy. I really miss having Kroger be open 24h. ↩︎