Lesbian views on virginity

I had decided LONG before I figured out I wasn't exactly straight that I would not be teaching my children the "virginity" standard at all. When I explained to my husband the sorts of devastating, shaming illustrations & role-playing girls are put through in abstinence-based sexual education (even the non-faith-based versions), he suddenly found himself agreeing with me that this was a damaging and horrible thing to teach children. When I shared my experience with him, it put what HE had been taught in a very different light... the boy side of the abstinence-based sex ed tends heavily toward reinforcing gender stereotypes, teaching boys to judge girls based on their appearance, how they dress, etc.

Even now boys are taught to avoid the "bad" girls. In the same time as we are trying to empower our young women, our young men are being well-trained in the same old slut-shaming crap. A girl who wears a shorter skirt or a well-fitted blouse can't just be dressing to please herself because she likes the way it looks, no, she's dressing to get attention from boys, so she's a "skank". A girl who hangs out with lots of different guys can't just be a girl with lots of friends who happen to be boys, no, she's a slut and probably doing all of them under the bleachers. And so on.

Everything I've found in scripture on sexuality, I read it as ... descriptive, rather than proscriptive. "This is how we [the original culture] deal with these issues", as opposed to "these are the laws by which you must govern the sexuality of your offspring forever and ever amen". Otherwise I'd be in big trouble, as the victim of repeated incestuous rape before I was old enough to process what was even happening. I do not find anything in the Bible that requires me to teach my daughters to be ashamed of their bodies or their sexuality, or teach my sons to view female sexuality as dirty or threatening, and thus likewise be ashamed of their own sexual feelings.

What I *will* be teaching my children is that sex with another person (any other person) is special and SHOULD be special, that it should not be treated casually, and should never ever forced or coerced. It absolutely should be saved for people you trust and love, and who trust and love you in return. Not because the Bible says so, but because this is what I believe at my core. The fact that my willing sexual experiences have only ever been with people I trusted with EVERYTHING I am, and that my husband is the only person besides me who has ever given me an orgasm, this is something I treasure. Before someone asks, no, we weren't legally married the first time he got me off, or had actual intercourse either, and I actually did that on purpose because the whole virgin-slut-shame complex was seriously effing with my head.

I'm honestly not sure I'm even going to bring the term "virgin" into the discussion at all, and if I do, it will be along the lines it was explained by the character Inara on Firefly (yup, I am a PROUD browncoat!)... "It's not embarrassing to be a virgin. [Or, by extension, shameful to have "lost" that status] It's simply one state of being."

 

Yes the silence and double standards on male sexual harrassment causes a lot of it going unsaid. Thanks for the response! Rape statistics are 20xs higher in America than in Japan, 4xs higher than in Germany and 12xs higher than I forgot where. We have the highest sexual assault rate of any industrial country. Awful!

@FallingDown7 thanks! You too! (*hug*) Thanks for the friend request!

 

Very beautiful post, Thanks.