How could I check if I am still a virgin?

anonymous
asks:
I just wanna ask could orgasm make me lose my virginity? How could I check if I am still a virgin?
Heather Corinna replies:

The way to check if you're still a virgin is to ask yourself how you define virginity, and see if or how your definition matches up with your experiences.

In other words, there is NO -- and I mean none, zero, nunca, aucun, keine -- physical way to determine if someone is a virgin, because virginity is an idea, not a medical or physical condition.

To some people -- we can even safely say most -- even though it's pretty inaccurate, virginity is defined as when a person has had vaginal intercourse. Given, though, how many people are not heterosexual, and that oral sex and manual sex and other types of sex are also sex, you can perhaps see why that's a problem. Given that that doesn't take into account whether or not someone chooses to have intercourse or not, and how many people are sexually assaulted, it's also obvious why that definition is seriously flawed.

Others might still -- even though it's a very outdated notion -- define virginity as only being for people with vaginas, and as people who still have "intact" hymens. But since the hymen, more accurately called the vaginal corona, isn't something that can be worn away or broken, that's a pretty dopey idea as well, especially since it was popular before we knew what we know now about vaginal anatomy.

Some people define losing virginity as when someone has any sort of sex with someone else. If you're going to subscribe to the idea of virginity, that's probably the most sensible way to define it, since that really does include nearly everyone, and also makes clear it's simply an idea.

Maybe you think having an orgasm means you're not a virgin: if so, that's certainly your perogative. You defining it that way would really be no more or less valid than all of the other ways it has ever been defined. It's pretty outrageous when you find out about the many ways it has been defined -- by sex, by physiology, as something spiritual, by how someone behaved, by parts of the body that didn't even really exist -- and how people have thought they could test for it with some serious kinds of stupid -- like by the color of urine, which is influenced not by sex, but by someone's overall health and diet!

You also have the option of ditching the whole thing and not subscribing to the idea of virginity at all. As someone who came of age having been sexually assaulted before my teens, and also came of age equally attracted to both men and women, for instance, I tossed the idea in the trash myself pretty young just because it clearly didn't take people like me into account. And that's before I knew anything about where the whole idea came from.

While I understand that it's still a really big deal for a lot of people, and there's no getting away from friends using it and talking about it, virginity, on the whole, has some pretty terrible history around it, and was not thought up to make anyone feel good, but instead, to determine someone's value as a person or as property based on sex or their genitals. And that's a pretty lousy way to value -- or rather, devalue -- anyone.

Regardless, it still remains only an idea, never a fact or something proveable. There's no one way any body part of any person looks that looks different when they are or are not a "virgin" and no way for anyone to check if someone else is one save by asking and taking their word for it.

For more on virginity, its history, and how you can figure out what it means to you, see:

More like This