What is a Virgin?

What does it mean to be virgin?

The dictionary definition of virgin refers to a maiden, a young girl or woman, or to “innocence”, the state of being untouched, chaste. This means innocence of knowledge and experience of sex.

In ancient times, a virgin referred to an independent woman, belonging to no man. It did not directly refer to sexual experience. The word virgin has the same Latin root as virile, which derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill. The Great Goddess figures such as Ishtar, Diana, and Isis were called virgin, which meant sexually independent.

Under patriarchy, virginity is defined from a male perspective. A virgin is a woman who has never has sexual intercourse. Physical proof of virginity is invested in the intact hymen, a membrane partially covering the vaginal opening.

In many religions and cultures, a woman is taught to “save her virginity” as a gift for her husband upon marriage. This practice often implies that a woman’s virginity, ie, her body and sexuality, belongs to a man – first her father, and/or brothers, and then to her husband. Women who are sexually active outside of marriage are reviled, ostracized, shamed, punished, even killed.

What is a modern woman to think of her virginity?

In a society that has forgotten the initiations into womanhood, manhood, and the rites and arts of sexuality and pleasure, women receive conflicting messages about virginity. Sex education, if it exists at all, focuses on preventing pregnancy and disease. Abstinence only policies are all about suppression of information that is natural and necessary to becoming whole human beings.

Virginity becomes a thing that can be lost.

Parents or religion may teach that virginity is precious when you are saving it for your husband, or someone you love. The virgin state becomes more important than the woman herself.

Peers or pop culture might view virginity as something as not valuable or important at all. Losing it becomes something to get over with.

Complicating things for a young woman, boys and men live by different standards. Their virginity is not precious, or to be saved for their virgin bride. Young men learn that a woman’s virginity is a trophy to be taken, a man’s rite — and right — of passage.

Men feel entitled to women’s bodies. They learn to feel entitled to sex.

So many women had their virginity stolen by coercion, pressure, rape or abuse, often by their so-called protectors.

In all of these contexts, losing virginity means something is lost in the woman herself. She devalues herself, as society devalues her. She is not seen as a woman who belongs to herself. She become “damaged goods.” Even in the post-feminism era, this idea persists. A woman who is sexually active, NOT a virgin, is damaged. Sullied. Dirty. It’s in the collective unconscious.

My story

I was raised in a culture that valued virginity. The only sex education I had was that I was to save my virginity for marriage, only I wasn’t even sure what that meant. In high school, I had a boyfriend who was in college. I felt the urges of hormones, and he certainly did. He pressured me to have sex. I resisted because damn it, I was going to save myself for marriage. I was a good girl.

I was also a curious girl. There was so much secrecy and shame around sex, that I finally decided the only way to find out what it was was to just do it. So I had sex with my boyfriend. It was illuminating, though disappointing. The aftermath of guilt and shame was horrendous. I had so much anxiety I wound up in a shrink’s office. But I wouldn’t tell anyone that I was no longer a virgin, especially not the shrink.

It was extra confusing coming of age under the influence of free love and feminism. Women were now sexually liberated. Protected by contraception and legal abortion, it was OK to have sex whenever we wanted to. Just like it was for men. But without any understanding of what sex really means to a woman, many women felt intuitively that something got lost in translation.

Often that loss was herself.

Reclaiming your lost self

Most of my clients have shame and regret about losing their virginity. Some threw it away, maybe even casually, or drunkenly. Some had a disappointing wedding night. For some losing virginity set the stage for promiscuity. Some survived childhood sex abuse or rape. Even women who didn’t have a particular charge around the so-called loss of virginity feel some confusion and disconnect around their sexual experience.

But I have good news!

Just as a vague sense of defilement may lurk in the collective unconscious, something else is also hiding there.

Women remember being sacred.

We remember when our sexuality, our blood, our pleasure was a divine sacrament to the goddess.

That is why when I guide a woman through initiation I include a ritual restoration of virginity.

We co-create a ritual that is meaningful for her. No matter her age, we enact the initiation from maiden to woman that she did not have as a young woman. We include elements of grief and forgiveness, and symbols of power and pleasure.

We include a shamanic drum journey and breath work that reclaims her sacred self. She remembers that she never lost anything.

Virgin is someone you are.

Virgin is someone you choose to be.

A woman who belongs to herself. A woman whose body is hers alone. A woman who values herself and honors her sexuality.

Sacred woman.

She is restored to the state of innocence. For what is innocence but that time before we learned that sex is bad.

For too many of us, we cannot remember when that was, for we have always struggled with being bad, wrong, or less than.

When we reclaim our virginity all of that disappears.

We find what we never lost.

Does your Soul cry out for support on your journey as a sacred woman?
Reach out to me today.
I can support you to reclaim your innocence, your power, and your self-ownership.