In the past few weeks, we’ve been having great discussions about sex, abstinence, pregnancy prevention, unplanned pregnancy, virginity, and their ties to religion. But I think there is a bigger question we haven’t raised, yet: why are we so obsessed with virgins, anyway?

A few things to note before I get going: I was baptized Catholic. And I have respect for girls who do wait to have sex until they find the right person and the right time, because frankly, I didn’t. AND, abstinence from sexual activity is the only foolproof way to prevent STIs and pregnancy.

But, I think a lot of the rhetoric about “staying pure” is just plain misogynistic. Think about it: sexual desire is something very, very natural. You see an Olive Garden comercial on TV, and your mouth waters. You watch the sex scene from Cruel Intentions (is the sex scene from Cruel Intentions not the best sex scene of all time? Although I won’t provide the link, you can easily YouTube it), and you get turned on. I really don’t think sex and sexuality is something to discourage among young people and I think that the way that young women are discouraged from their sexuality as teens is what causes a lot of women’s inability to have orgasms or allow themselves to be open to sexual pleasure when they’re older. While there has been a slight effort to show that religions do care about young men’s abstinence, almost all of the pro-abstinence vehicles like chastity balls and purity rings and purity pledges are geared towards young women. You rarely ever see guys as posterchilds for the abstinence-only movement, whereas (see New York Times article referenced below), girls almost always are. On some level, our society still considers young men to be the one’s who want to pursue sex and young women to be sexual gatekeepers who have their purity to safeguard until they’re married.

(And, more intracately, I take offense at the word “pure” meaning virginal. Because what does that make the unvirgins? Impure? There was a New York Times article published yesterday about abstinence-only sex ed, where a source compared people who have sex to pieces of tape that were pulled around the floor and subsequently covered in grime: “You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.” To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.” )

Perhaps what is most frustrating, however, is that the push to stay pure tends to come from more conservative, male-dominated entities like fundamentalist religions. Yet these people aren’t really in touch with what it’s like to be young today. Most of the media that we take in, like teen magazines and teen TV shows, say and show that it’s okay to be sexual and have sex (which is perfectly fine and appropriate, in my opinion. Seventeen magazine offers really great sex ed), which teens are much more likely to listen to than televangelists. So when there are all these media campaigns and sex ed classes that tell students that sex is bad, it does virtually nothing except make them feel guilty for embracing their sexuality.

(The frequent correlation between religion, sexuality, and guilt is probably too academic a discussion to pursue here, but it is interesting to recognize).

I think the best thing to remember, at this point, is that you own your sexuality. You get to decide when and where and with whom you want to have sex, and similarity, you are entitled to your own feelings about your sexuality. If you want to abstain, cool. If not, don’t let anyone tell you that you should feel guilty about having sex, because, simply put, nothing should taint your sexuality. It’s that important.