What if we used the word ‘virgin’ in accordance with its original meaning?

[niyad]

What if we used the word ‘virgin’ in accordance with its original meaning?

In her text Willful Virgin, Marilyn Frye offers a sketch of what she calls “wild women,” or “willful virgins,” suggesting that a reclamation of the term virgin is a necessary feminist move. According to Frye’s redefinition, a virgin is an independent feminist who refuses to kowtow to patriarchal norms of femininity, attractiveness, or sexuality. Virgins, she argues, know that “Their sexual interactions are not sites where people with penises make themselves men and people with vaginas are made women.” Rather, virgins are wild and willful humans, not subjugated property. This revamping of the word takes it back to its original meaning, according to Frye:

“The word ‘virgin’ did not originally mean a woman whose vagina was untouched by any penis, but a free woman, one not betrothed, not bound to, not possessed by any man. It meant a female who is sexually and hence socially her own person. In any version of patriarchy, there are no Virgins in this sense.”

Hear that, purity ball fanatics? There are NO virgins on our patriarchal planet as patriarchy rules out female freedom from male dominance. Granted, according to Frye’s concept of the term, there are many ‘demi-virgins’ or ‘near virgins’ – they are those women not controlled by male bosses, leaders, lovers, etc. However, I am not sure if we have any true virgins as even the woman who is sexually and socially her own person lives within a society in which rape, sexual harassment, and sexism are rampant. She lived within a society that does not allow women to be entirely free of male dominance.

. . .

Historically, virgin was often used to mean ‘unmarried’ – as in not owned by a man. A virgin was thus property for the taking (sadly, not all too different from today…). Another interesting historical tidbit is that the so-called ‘Virgin Mary’ was actually the ‘Young Mary.’ As Barbara G. Walker documents in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, “Hebrew Gospels designated Mary by the word almah, mistakenly translated ‘virgin,’ but really meaning ‘young woman.'” Kind of puts a dent in the whole miraculous conception narrative, doesn’t it? Yet, this narrative took hold because it is so useful for patriarchy. Or, as Walker puts it, “The impossible virgin mother was everyman’s longed-for resolution of Oedipal conflicts: pure maternity, never distracted from her devotion by sexual desires.”
. . .

http://professorwhatif.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/what-if-we-used-the-word-%E2%80%98virgin-in-accordance-with-its-original-meaning/

[Warpy]

1. I seriously question her scholarship on this subject

However in the ancient world, "virgin birth" did mean a woman's first child, not the hocus-pocus stuff the monks made up during the dark ages. The word "virgin" is also used interchangeably with "young woman."

While hero myths did specify heroes born to young women who had never had sex, one generally speculates that what they did was the good old high school trick of hunching wildly without penetration, something well known to deposit semen in close enough proximity to make pregnancy a distinct possibility.