Virginity Sold at a Price
In some unsettling news, a college student in New Zealand auctioned off her virginity to pay for tuition. All real love, all real romance, all meaningful commitment dies when virginity becomes characterized as a commodity. There is much at stake for all of us when a girl sells her virginity online to a stranger. We are pressed to ask: What is virginity? Who gets to define it? Why is it important?
Feminists must not be the ones to define virginity because they misapprehend womanhood entirely. The definition must be placed beyond their manipulation. Virginity is becoming a commodity because feminism has divorced women from their roles as wives and mothers. Girls have been taught to place a low premium on virginity because they have been deceived into placing a low premium on marriage. Virginity is becoming a commodity because feminists underestimate men. There are men who will offer women something far more respectful and permanent than $31,900 for loving them enough to wait. In a culture where the thought of two people waiting until marriage to consummate their love is ridiculed and deemed nearly impossible, there is no room for error in how we value virginity.
It falls upon conservatives to define virginity, truly and completely. Virginity is about so much more than simply not having sex. It's about saving certain areas of one's personality and life to share with only one other person. It involves personal development and nonsexual preparation. It gives us a sense of what is sacred and what is possible. It is the beginning of a history of intimacy. Virginity finds its highest expression not when we keep it, but when give it to the man we love and to whom we are committed. Virginity speaks to the first and last of our lives. Those who dare to put a price on virginity do not even begin to see how much it is really worth.
I'm completely flabbergasted and disturbed.
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I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alena
http://ovarianpain.net
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Wow, I had no idea feminists were the ones putting on purity balls.
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You make an excellent point about virginity. I never thought about it like you described it in your last paragraph. I especially liked this sentence. "Virginity finds its highest expression not when we keep it, but when give it to the man we love and to whom we are committed."
That is so true! Thank you for exposing the lie that young women are led to believe!
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Thank you for reading our blog, and thank you for your comment!
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Feminism has saved women from being defined by their sex and their virginity as commodity, not the opposite. That the young woman you mentioned decided to sell her virginity is more a commentary on the lack of respect her parents have for her education than anything else. It's a common problem among women even in the 21st century: the men in our lives still don't see us as worth the same as our brothers and other men. You seem to forget why fathers, brothers and spurned males in Pakistan burn and throw acid on women, or that Judeo-Christians considered a woman's virginity to be paramount in their "selling" of their daughters to other men. Patriarchy commodified virginity, and now young women are taking that power into their own hands. Sure, the young New Zealander may be misguided, but we have patriarchy to thank, not feminism!
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Thank you for reading and commenting, Auriane!
Under the Dawsonian view of patriarchy, patriarchy was not designed to subjugate or harm women. It was intended to establish a culture that valued family relationships. Under patriarchy, virginity was valued in the greater context of sexual exclusivity between spouses. When virginity is sold as a commodity, it undermines family values.
Women should not respond to the commodification of virginity by commodifying it ourselves. This story should alarm us, and make us think about why this is happening. Is it the pressure that parents place on their daughters to be financially independent? Is it a culture that places immediate gains above long-term rewards? Are we thinking about family values?
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Intended is an awful big word. Sure, it sounds good but in order to enforce that patriarchy goes to extremes like stoning, ostracizing, divorcing, and all the other ways that women are spurned for not being virgins. Intent is all well and good, but it's outcome that actually makes history.
And anyway, you can sit here and say that it falls to conservatives to define virginity all you want, but the fact remains that it is conservatives who have who have done such a fabulous job harshly enforcing virginity at all costs in the past. Why should I trust you to tell me (and my future children) what's right? I define my reality and I set my own moral boundaries. Not you. The moment you seek to define those things for me is the exact moment that you give me the right to do the same for you.
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"Right," "reality," and "moral boundaries" cannot be set by individuals. They are inseparable from the natural law, which is outside the control and purview of any purely human confines. They are eternally defined across cultures and time (and may be discovered through either spiritual or non-spiritual means). Fortunately for us, we, in fact, do not define reality, right, or morality, we merely seek to know and understand them in order to exist in harmony with them and the world, which as a whole is bound by the same reality, right, and morality.
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Nicely put. The post wasn't meant to be a personal attempt to define anyone's reality or moral boundaries, for the reasons you have in your comment.
Thank you so much for your comments, Brittany!
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Your final paragraph is the most exquisite commentary on this subject I think I have ever read. So well-written. Thank you for sharing! I now have the perfect words for my sentiments.
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