Are you still a virgin if you…? The letter vs the spirit of the law

Before you start, I know it’s Monday morning, but is there a bad time to talk about virginity or whether one is still a virgin? No, thought not, so I’ll just proceed, shall I?

I was speaking with a male friend yesterday who said he’d spent a year dating a lady. He reeled off all of her great character traits and included her virginity and her desire to hold on to it until marriage as one of these traits.

I know this young man to be a part-time born again Christian, part-time Yoruba demon so I was fascinated to find out how he dealt with a virgin, me working under the mistaken assumption that virgin meant a lady as pure as the driven snow and “had not known a man.”

Imagine my surprise when he told me that they had done everything save penetration. And that some of this ‘everything’ included mutual masturbation on video when they were apart (iPhone Face Time and Skype apps – can you see your lives outside??), and him going down on her when they were together.

Shuo?? Is this the kind of virginity Jesus died for? Are we following the letter of the law or the spirit of the law? If you have maybe four, five boyfriends before you get married and you let all of them do you like car wash then yes, you are technically still a virgin on your wedding night, but are you virtuous? Does the hitherto lack of penetration  make a virgin more in tune with virtue than those who have gone all the way?

In matters of sexuality, I firmly believe that everyone should be able to look themselves in the mirror before, during and after the fact. Yes, there will be errors in judgement, a couple of slip-ups and a few “Chai, see my life” moments along the way, but by and large, you should be able to say that I have lived my sex life according to my rules and my comfort levels. If that comfort level means that you are genuinely uncomfortable with the concept of penetration and always stop short of the actual act, then do you, sweetums.

I know women at every point of the sex continuum – completely chaste virgins, the cautious dabblers, the intrepid adventurers, those who have stopped short of penetration, those who have gone the whole nine yards and are now back to celibacy…your body is yours to do with and I try to keep out of other women’s vaginas.

I just feel like…trying to rationalise the holy scriptures, trying to determine just how bad you can be in order to still make heaven, or not giving in all the way to a sexual desire – not because of a strong moral compass but because you think it means you can still (technically) say you’re a virgin – is kinda making a mockery of the entire thing. It means you think you’ve found a cheat mode to an eternal spiritual thumbs up and that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.