VIRGINITY AS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: FROM THE POV OF A VIRGIN.

“And I'm at peace with it and that's all I need,

Everything is not for everyone and that is okay

You gotta take me as I am,

I'll be better but I'll never be somebody else.

My guy make you live your life ah,

Person who love you go love you die ah

But you can never satisfy society..

No matter the pressure, be yourself”.

–Simi ‘Original baby’.

Ever heard the saying, “kill two birds with one stone”? Well, I am here to do it with three.

First, as a direct response to the kind of man who says to women, “You are merely existing, not living”, simply because they have never had penetrative sex.

Second, to address the audacity of bringing it up weeks later in a completely unrelated conversation, the same audacity I see in men who crown themselves guardians of virginity while being, ironically, whore-adjacent, and have spent weeks bickering over whether virginity can make or mar a woman.

Third… Well, you will find out soon enough.

Who is a virgin?

If you dared to conduct a poll on this question, the responses would swing you from snort-laughing into your tea to clutching your pearls in furious disbelief, all within the span of a minute. The most common answer is a woman who has not had penetrative sex (Note that the person referred to here is a woman). So, where does that leave people who only engage in other forms of sex?

In my research, I came across a comprehensive systematic review on virginity testing by Olsen and García-Moreno in 2017, both respected public health researchers who focus on women’s health and human rights (It is not lost on me that it was only women that bothered to investigate this age long social and culturally cemented concept but I’ll digress). Their study is the most recent systematic review on the subject.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a systematic review is considered the highest standard of evidence in research. It gathers all available studies on a topic, sometimes spanning decades, and subjects them to strict quality checks before drawing conclusions. In other words, it filters the gunk and leaves us with the clearest, most reliable evidence.

In the review, Olsen and García-Moreno identified three virginity tests:

• hymen examination (inspecting the hymen for tears or perforations),
• two-finger test (inserting the fingers into the vagina to judge laxity),
• per vaginal examination (inserting instruments or two fingers to measure the size of the vaginal opening).
• 
  

Let’s trash science for a bit. In what world does it make sense to violate a human being in this brutish and animalistic manner?

The vagina is a muscular canal made up of smooth muscles along with elastic connective tissue. This implies that it can stretch (during intercourse or childbirth) and can return to its resting size which makes the idea of ‘measuring laxity’ not just absurd, but nonsensical.

But, do not take my word for it. Let’s return to science. The gold standard for any clinical tool is for the tool to have passed the test of the psychometric properties. To be accepted as a sound clinical tool, it must have validity, reliability, sensitivity, specificity. These virginity tests fail on all counts. No wonder the world’s foremost public health authority, the WHO together with the UN Human Rights Office issued a statement calling for the elimination of virginity tests.

“Virginity testing has no scientific or clinical basis….no examination can prove whether a woman or girl has had sexual intercourse”.

Prior to that, WHO published a handbook, “Health Care For Women Subjected To Intimate Partner Violence or Sexual Violence” in 2014 stating unequivocally that health workers must never perform viginity tests characterising it as invasive, degrading and without scentific validity.

Olsen and García-Moreno searched ten electronic databases, including the World Health Organization’s Global Health Library, for articles published from the very beginning of those databases up until 2017. Their conclusion was clear: virginity testing has no medical value.

The results between people who had engaged in penetrative sex and those who had not were inconsistent and unreliable. Physical examinations such as hymen inspections or the “two-finger test” cannot determine sexual history.

The review also looked at the social effect of these tests on women. In Iran, a medical examiner confirmed a suicide directly linked to the trauma of a virginity test result that said a young woman was not a virgin. The harm was not limited to those who “failed.” Even those who “passed” and were confirmed as virgins reported deep anxiety. Some feared that being certified would make them targets for heightened scrutiny, stigma, or even sexual violence.

A 2003 study by Leclerc-Madlala, carried out among South African girls aged 16 to 24, revealed that this fear was not imagined. Girls spoke about worrying that being declared a virgin could put them in danger of rape by brothers, neighbors, or men in their community. The same study exposed one of the most disturbing real-world uses of virginity testing. In KwaZulu-Natal, a local businesswoman openly admitted to hiring only women who had passed virginity tests to work in her factory. She called it a “service to humanity,” claiming it would discourage premarital sex. Her factory had franchises in multiple towns across the province, which meant this policy was not an isolated decision. It was a systemic form of economic discrimination that tied women’s access to work to their sexual history.

Leclerc-Madlala also found that girls who failed virginity tests in some communities were fined for “tainting” the community and shut out from certain types of employment. The same pattern appeared in the 2010 Human Rights report, which documented the fear and retraumatization experienced by survivors of sexual violence who were forced to undergo virginity testing.

In one case, a rape victim’s injuries were made worse because doctors aggravated existing wounds during the examination. Rabajazi et al in 2015 reached a similar conclusion. They found that virginity testing can cause long-term psychological harm, including anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, and even suicidal thoughts. They described it as a practice that works primarily as a form of control over young women and girls.

Culturally, some people argue that someone who has had oral sex is still a virgin. Others disagree. This alone shows how ambiguous and contradictory the concept is. The truth? There is no medical or universally agreed definition of virginity. It is subjective, cultural, and often used as a moral measuring stick against women alone.

Virginity As A Social Construct

The idea of virginity is not rooted in science but in patriarchy. Its origin stretches back to the ancient era when paternity determined inheritance, succession, and land ownership. In societies where property and power passed down the male line, guaranteeing that a child was “legitimate” became paramount. Women’s bodies were policed. A woman’s sexual history, or more precisely, her lack of it, was turned into a form of social currency. Purity became proof of paternity.

Over time, this control was sanctioned by religion and culture. In Christianity, Mariology —the worship and idealization of the Virgin Mary, elevated virginity into a divine standard. The Virgin Mother became the highest archetype of femininity: pure, submissive, untouched, obedient. This standard was one-sided. Men were free, often encouraged, to explore, indulge, and even boast about their sexuality. For women, desire was something to be denied or hidden, and their worth was measured by the absence of sexual experience.

This double standard shows that virginity was never about health or morality. It was about control. Control over lineage. Control over inheritance. Control over women’s autonomy. The echoes of that control still shape how girls and women are judged today. This control seeped into medicine in the form of virginity tests which are instruments of control dressed in the language of medicine.

The Harm of Purity Culture: The Case of Israel DMW and Sheila.

Purity culture does not end at the wedding altar. In fact, marriage often becomes its most sophisticated form, shifting control from community judgement to marital obligation, and transforming the “prized” pre-marital body into a conjugal commodity.

A striking example of purity culture is how Nigerian public figure Israel DMW treated his ex-wife Sheila. After their separation, he reduced everything about her identity to two things: the fact that she was a virgin and that he paid a ridiculously large amount as her bride price.

This is how purity culture works. It narrows a woman’s entire life, value, and story to a checklist of patriarchal expectations: virginity, bride price, submission. Her dreams, intellect, contributions, and humanity disappear.

What remains is a label that can be flaunted or discarded depending on how a man chooses to tell the story.

The whole divorce narrative became painfully one-dimensional. Instead of addressing the complexity of a marriage ending, public conversation revolved around her sexual history and the price that was paid for her.

Even more telling is the claim that her parents charged him more because she was a virgin, as if she were a commodity whose value rose with “untouched” status. Which begs the question: does virginity actually protect women? Or does it make them more susceptible to being treated as property? Does it shield us from the hardships and violations other women face? Or does it simply put us in a different kind of danger, the danger of becoming a prize in a game where even the most useless men think they deserve a turn?

Virginity does not protect. It does not guarantee respect, safety, or love. In reality, it exposes women to another form of exploitation, one that parades itself as honour while stripping away their humanity.

The Burden of “Being the Virgin” in a Relationship

For many women, entering a relationship as a virgin is sold to us like the ultimate moral prize, as if we’ll be handed a gold medal, a tiara, or perhaps a plot of land. Yet the reality is, it is exhausting. A man’s flaws are often excused because he’s “enduring” a relationship without sex.

God forbid the relationship goes on for years. Hoist him onto your shoulders and parade him down the street. He must be a saint. Does he cheat? Does he beat you? Do you know they don’t make them like that anymore? What’s a little gaslighting that you cannot endure you ungrateful bitch?

This double standard makes me question its true nature. Is virginity the best gift you can give your husband or the worst crime you can commit against your boyfriend. Confused? Don’t be. It’s just plain old patriarchy playing its tricks again.

Marriage As A Form of Prostitution

For many women, virginity is framed as their greatest asset before marriage. But once married, the same society that prized their abstinence often demands sexual availability as a wife’s duty. The romanticised “patient man” who waited is suddenly owed unlimited access. If this sounds transactional, that is because it is.

A woman can spend her entire life avoiding transactional sex, only to enter marriage and discover it waiting for her there dressed up as duty, peacekeeping, or love. She may even find herself having sex even if it's two weeks post-partum, to keep her husband faithful, to secure financial support, to apologise after conflict, to maintain household harmony, or simply to keep violence at bay.

The same act once held up as proof of her virtue becomes a tool of control, often without her consent. Virginity does not protect women. It simply shifts the form of exploitation from societal pressure before marriage to marital obligation after it.

This is why some feminist thinkers, from Emma Goldman to Andrea Dworkin, have argued that marriage can function as a socially sanctioned form of prostitution under patriarchal systems. In these systems, a woman’s access to financial support, social status, and even safety is tied to her sexual availability and domestic labour. The transaction is the same, but the packaging is different.

Merely Existing Not Living

In the eyes of society, all women are prostitutes. The only difference is whether the transaction is legal and celebrated, or criminalised and stigmatised. Society has spent centuries telling women their worth lies between their legs. That is why a woman “having lived” is reduced to her sexual experience or lack thereof.

It is also why the statement “You are merely existing, not living” made perfect sense to that man. His mind’s eye sees a woman’s life as the sum of all the “achievements” she has made with her vagina; a husband, children, and the material gain having the two has afforded her.

This is why women who break outside this mould are not only seen as outliers but as threats to the so-called natural order. It is not enough to question virginity testing. Purity culture itself must be dismantled, and that begins with deconstructing the very idea of virginity.

We need to strip away the language, lose, keep, give — as if virginity is a tangible object. It is not. It is an abstract, a concept with no physical form. That language places men at the centre of women’s sexual choices, making female sexuality something to be owned, guarded, or taken.

By deconstructing virginity, we remove it from the marketplace of worth and away from patriarchal control. It becomes what it always should have been: a personal, private aspect of life, irrelevant to anyone else’s judgment.

When the world’s foremost health body says a practice is both unscientific and harmful, that should be the end of the debate. Yet the persistence of virginity testing proves it was never about science. It was, has been, and still is about control. And control loses its power the moment you decide that your worth was never up for negotiation in the first place.

The singer Simi nailed it back in 2017 with her smash-hit track "Original Baby" when she said, “You can never satisfy society, so no matter the pressure, be yourself.”

The point of this essay is not to tell you whether to have sex or not. If you choose to wait, let that decision be yours alone, rooted in your values. Not because it pleases a man or appeases society. That way, when someone questions the fullness of your life based on sexual history or lack thereof, you can look them in the eye, square your shoulders, and carry on, knowing that living fully is yours to define.