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Oh you fortunate person that has not encountered the (yes, on Tumblr way back, but also around the place way back as in several years ago) notion that this is not a simple definition and it's all to do with the patriarchy and ackshully it only means "an unmarried woman" so the virgin goddesses could well have been having sex, so there male chauvinists! The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality! Virgin doesn't mean hasn't had sex and why are you so obsessed with my hymen anyway?
Fourteen year olds encounter feminism for the first time and go bonkers, in other words. They don't seem to think about male virgins, or if they do, they dismiss it as "men can't be virgins anyway and it doesn't matter" for some idiotic reason, don't ask me to remember why it was.
But you don’t have to listen to 14 year olds on tumbler.
Until they grow older and get hired at HR at my employer. Microaggressions etc were in official training.
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We don't.
Still, a distressingly descriptive model to explain the last ~10 years of Western society is "virtually every left-leaning politician, journalist, educator or media figure started treating 14-year-olds on Tumblr as infallible fonts of wisdom". Even if the 14-year-olds on Tumblr are wrong, they seem to be disproportionately influential figures in our culture. So it's probably a sensible idea to at least be aware of what they believe even if you disagree with it.
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Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?
Now that I think about it, it is a sort of forerunner argument to the trans activist contention: biology no real.
"Virginity" is only a social construct and merely means "unmarried woman". So a woman could be a literal whore but if she's not married and never has been, she's a virgin!
I think most of us would agree that is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity.
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Based on the practices you referenced, it seems like it's certainly not only a way to control women and their sexuality; rather, it's a way to instrumentally control women and their sexuality for the purpose of fulfilling some other need, in this case paternity certainty for high status men. Given that, the chain of reasoning seems to be the reverse, actually; people want paternity certainty, and virginity is, for biological reasons, intricately tied to paternity certainty, and so people form an obsession with (preserving) virginity, which, for physical reasons, requires control of women and their sexuality. People are instrumentally controlling women and their sexuality only as a way to fulfill their obsession with virginity (which is in itself an instrumental goal on the way towards paternity certainty), rather than the other way around.
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