The Church and Virginity 2

I thought I'd add some additional thoughts to my previous post.

This virginity belief targets women far more than it does men.  In popular culture, we see it in the way that evangelicals have been hosting "purity balls," where fathers take their daughters to a dance and the daughters promise to remain virgins until they get married.  But there are other ways as well.

It should be noted that only among women can we "confirm" whether someone is a virgin or not, thanks to women's hymens and whether or not they remain intact.  I say "confirm" with quotes around it because there are many causes why a woman's might be broken, especially as we do become more and more equal, thanks to the physical demands of women's sports.  But, in our obsession with virginity and "purity," we now offer surgery to "repair" damage to a hymen that might have occurred from sports or from sex.

Men do not have such problems.  There is no obvious difference between a man who has had sex and a man who has not.

But the differences do not stop there, and in the evangelical churches I attended, we were taught many lies that further established the virginity of the woman as of paramount importance to the virginity of the man.

One such lie is the idea that a woman's vagina expands the first time she has sex, that the muscles around it relax and reform themselves, and that this only occurs that first time.  The muscles then become rigid, the tissue of the vagina has stretched as far as it will go.  It will never shrink nor grow further than after that moment.  As a result, if a woman has had sex with a bigger man, she will be too loose for a smaller one; if a woman has had sex with a smaller man, she will be too tight for a bigger one.  This lie appears to be told as a "case for remaining a virgin until marriage," for the woman, because if it were true, it would result in perpetually unsatisfying sex with anyone other than the man with whom the woman had sex the very first time.

Of course, it also results in that horrible concept that a woman who has had sex is "used up."  A man cannot be "used up" because sex doesn't change the man's penis in any way.

For those who don't know, this concept of single-time-sizing is completely false.  Even when I believed it, I questioned how it was possible given that a woman also gives birth to children, and clearly a woman's vagina would have to resize itself to do that.  Of course, a woman's vagina resizes itself very frequently - a "loose vagina" is not the sign of a woman who is sexually active with multiple partners, and tightness does not denote virginity.  Anyone who has had sex with the same partner more than once knows this to be the case.  The lie only works for virgins.

(oh, and virgins, if you need proof, here's an article.)
 
Another lie of this variety is the idea that when a man and woman have sex, the woman's vaginal chemistry changes, so that the pH is balanced for that man.  That's not quite true.  The fact is that the vagina is typically mildly acidic, and semen is very mildly basic. So, what happens is a very slight elevation of pH during intercourse.  However, there are a myriad number of reasons why that pH might change, and while this change might be dangerous for a woman, regular doctors visits are part of the preventative maintenance on that - which is part of why they're recommended for women.  So this is not so much a lie as a re-reading of a truth in a deceitful way, and the whole point of this deceit is the same as the previous one - that it is used to help convince a woman that she should only have sex with one man ever.

Where did these lies come from?  Well, it seems likely that they are a "purple monkey dishwasher" kind of thing (referencing the Simpsons episode where Bart whispers something at the back of a crowd and by the time it reaches the front, those three words are tagged on to the end).  There is real science buried deeply under the lies, just as all lies have a tiny bit of truth in them to make them believable.  The real science is given lip service (oh, you better believe that pun is intended) but then modified to make a case that the liar wants to make - that is, that women must remain virgins until marriage, and after marriage must remain with only one partner.  That case is ostensibly based on the Bible, although it's notable that the Bible talks about the virginity and loyalty of both the man and the woman, while these lies predominantly target women.

Far more likely is it that these lies are an attempt to gain some level of control over the body of the woman.  Women alone give birth, and because of that, only maternity is certain.  Paternity is always in question (unless you get a DNA test for each of your children).  A woman can have sex with multiple partners and none of them would ever know unless she slipped up, but she could have the child of one and convince another that the child is his.  A man has no such power.  By coming up with religious restrictions on infidelity, and by further reinforcing those restrictions with woman-centric lies, the man can attempt to hold emotional power over the woman, proving his paternity or releasing himself of fault should that paternity be invalidated. 

-edit- remembered part of the argument regarding chemistry, and updated to reflect better research.