I'm more than a little frustrated with what I see as some pretty ass-backwards, bogged-down, body-obsessed bullshit about virginity. Look at how we talk about it, like it's a tangible thing: I want to lose my virginity or I'm going to give so-and-so my virginity. It's embedded in the language but it makes you sound like you missed the clue-bus, because virginity is not something you can wrap up in a box and give someone. Nor is it a favorite hat that you wear until you come to some arbitrary decision that you've grown out of it and it's time to graduate to a new hat. Puhleese.
Granted, part of what stymies a conversation like this is the awareness that you must actually have had sex to comprehend what I mean. Otherwise your input, bluntly, is about as valuable/valid as me trying to hold forth on the values of natural childbirth. Having never been through labor, nor having ever attempted to pass a bowling ball, nor having ever taken my lower lip and pulled it up over my head, I can't speak with any knowledge on natural childbirth other than to quote people who have, and to state my one-step-removed opinion about those other people's experiences. Clearly if the only people I know to quote are people who found natural childbirth utterly excruciating, then this will color my one-step-removed opinion.
( But back to virginity. )
Granted, part of what stymies a conversation like this is the awareness that you must actually have had sex to comprehend what I mean. Otherwise your input, bluntly, is about as valuable/valid as me trying to hold forth on the values of natural childbirth. Having never been through labor, nor having ever attempted to pass a bowling ball, nor having ever taken my lower lip and pulled it up over my head, I can't speak with any knowledge on natural childbirth other than to quote people who have, and to state my one-step-removed opinion about those other people's experiences. Clearly if the only people I know to quote are people who found natural childbirth utterly excruciating, then this will color my one-step-removed opinion.
( But back to virginity. )