Here’s a good article on an insane topic: women who’ve had sex claiming a “second virginity.” Notably, many of these women are not teenagers who regret an early sexual experience. They include women in their twenties with long-term sexual partners and multiple children (!!) and married women spending $5000 to reconstruct their hymens as a present to their husbands (!!!).

This notion of a “second virginity” is obviously repugnant for its dishonesty: the simple fact is that a woman with years of sexual experience cannot honestly claim to be a virgin. However, that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that virginity — i.e. mere ignorance of sex — is upheld as a major value.

Women (and men) should be discriminating in their choice of lovers. A young person ought to think hard about whether and when and with whom to have sex for the first time, just as any person ought to do with any new love interest. However, that need for discrimination does not imply that virginity is any kind of major value, as its champions assume. In modern society, virginity not a value at all — except to jealous fiends and religious dogmatists. Virginity is not even a real quality of a person: it’s just an ignorance of and inexperience with sex. Ignorance of sex means incompetence at sex. So for a rational, value-seeking lover, virginity can only be an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of the pleasures of sex, not a positive value. For a person to seek virginity requires a mangled set of sexual values.

Our culture worships virginity. Even those who reject the dogma of abstinence until marriage often claim to respect the supposed value of virginity. So next time a person speaks of virginity as a prize to be cherished, speak up!