Virginity: Women's Body as a State of Mind: Destiny becomes Biology

2014

Many cultures, from antiquity to the present, have attached great importance to female virginity: the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi, the Vestal Virgins in Rome, and of course the Virgin Mary, the spiritual mother of countless virgin saints and nuns. The concept of virginity has been shaped, interpreted, and represented in Western civilization in many domains -theology, law, medicine, literature, the visual arts, and the diverse facets of popular culture. The fact that virginity has been associated almost exclusively with women's bodies has had a critical influence on Western civilization's notion of femininity. It seems to be impossible to discuss the female body, female sexuality, or female spirituality in isolation from the concept of virginity and the way it has shaped social attitudes towards women, their legal status, their living conditions, and their self-awareness.

This paper analyzes every rabbinic source concerning the topic of virginity claims and traces the development of these laws and the literature in which they are embedded from their earliest appearances in the Mishnah and Tosefta through the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud. There are several trends that emerge. In the earliest tannaitic stratum of the literature, one finds that virginity claims are already difficult for a husband to bring to court and even more difficult to successfully prove, thereby causing his wife to lose her ketubbah. We will demonstrate this through analysis of several tannaitic passages, passages which have been frequently misunderstood in scholarly literature. By the early amoraic stratum, one finds the beginnings of a response to the tannaitic trend to deny virginity claims. This response represents a pivotal moment in the legal development of virginity claims and has not been properly understood by scholars. Understanding this development is a key toward the deciphering of several talmudic passages. Towards the end of the amoraic period, two counterapproaches to virginity claims emerge, one which appears to preclude by legislation the very possibility of such claims, and another by which the husband's virginity claim is always accepted, presuming that he would never fabricate such a claim. This paper contributes several fresh understandings of previously misinterpreted passages and as such is important to the future study of rabbinic attitudes toward female virginity in particular and sexuality in general.

Reproductive System & Sexual Disorders, 2016

Traditionally cultures around the world place a high value on virginity in women leading to tremendous pressure on girls and their families. Today it continues to play the role of a major determinant in their future sexual lives. Historically and socially it is considered an exalted virtue denoting purity. However, with the recent changes in sexual freedom amongst women, it is necessary to examine certain recent issues with reference to feminine sexuality as well its bio-psycho-social roots. It is important to understand the significance of social constraints on sexuality and reproduction within the different cultural systems along with the dominant influence of religious sentiments on virginity. Also it is imperative to have an understanding of how some of these historical value systems enforced in society play a causative role in sexual dysfunction amongst women today and be cognizant of methods to ameliorate the same.

Pulp fictions of medieval England, 2018

The earliest surviving representation of an English bourgeois family at prayer appears in a fifteenth-century book of hours, now known as the Bolton Hours, made for members of a York mercantile family. 1 The picture-one of a sequence of full-page illustrations-depicts a Crucifix-Trinity with four figures kneeling in front of it: a father and mother in the centre, flanked by a son and a daughter on the left and right. They all have scrolls issuing from their mouths, on which are written two Latin couplets. 2 The first couplet is spoken by the boy and the man, who share a rhyme. The boy says: 'O father, o son, you who are called the kind spirit' (O pater o nate tu spiritus alme vocate), and the father says: 'Grant what we seek from you through your compassion' (Quod petimus a te concede tua pietate). The second couplet, which completes the prayer, is spoken by the woman and the girl. The mother says: 'Heavenly majesty, threefold god, one power' (Celica magestas trinus deus una potestas), and the girl says: 'You who dispense gifts, make us chaste and honourable' (Premia qui prestas nos castas fac et honestas). Her 'us' cannot refer to them all, though: the feminine plural endings of the Latin adjectives 'castas' (chaste) and 'honestas' (honourable) in the last line make it clear that it is the chastity and honour of the two women only, and not of the men, which is being prayed for by the family as a whole. What is at stake in 'castas' and 'honestas' is not only, or even primarily, a set of religious values, despite the religious context, but a social ethic. 'Chaste' and 'honourable' are part of a public discourse of female respectability in the fifteenth century. The family is represented as united around this issue: the sexual conduct and good name of its female members. And in this

This study attempts to underscore the gender positions taken up by young men and women with regard to virginity. This research has been an endeavor aimed at understanding the experiential space that the youth comes from and the subjectivities they derive from their perspective on their own sexuality. Using the qualitative research technique of discourse analysis, the focus was to develop an image of the sexual life of the participants specifically converging around the notion of virginity. From an analysis of the narratives it became apparent that the idea of virginity was much bigger in the minds of the female participants than the males. Though there has been a slight shift wherein the women give themselves some accountability with regard to agency and choice, however, it is obvious that their basic ideology about virginity still remains in the clutches of the dominant discourses of societal morality. The male participants held an easy going outlook towards virginity and thought of it more as a rite of passage than anything else. This study could be an entry point into whether there has been a shift in gender roles and subjectivities with regard to virginity and whether this is just a physical phenomenon or has been made into much more than that by attaching societal and personal decrees to it.

Sisters in Wisdom, 2013

Twelve Women Disciples from East and West. A joint project incorporating Christian women saints in the Latin and Orthodox traditions. This is the Introduction, a "Treatise on Virginity"

2020

The social and symbolic meaning ascribed to virginity has been profoundly reconfigured between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, with a decline in the importance of female virginity upon marriage, along with the de-Christianization of its conception, among others. While it partly lost its social meaning, the loss of virginity remains an important and intimate personal moment for both men and women, one that actively contributes to the social construction of gender identities.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1986

The fervor with which large numbers of early Christian women pursued lives of asceticism and renunciation is a curious feet in the history of women in late antiquity. In recent years, several feminist scholars have attempted to explain the attraction of the ascetic life for early Christian women by demonstrating that renunciation of the world paradoxically offered women the possibility of moving outside the constraints of socially and sexually conventional roles, of exercising power, and of experiencing a sense of worth which was often unavailable to them within the traditional setting of marriage. 1 The purpose of this essay is to engage the question of the attraction of asceticism for women from a slightly different perspective, to try to determine the effect of worldly renunciation and celibacy on the lives and sexuality of early Christian women and on the culture which constructed women's limited options in the first place. The first section of the paper deals with the question of method and the problem of sources; the second section treats the idea of virginity as the fathers of the church and other male writers of the period portrayed it. The third section attempts to portray the diversity of women's practice of virginity and to set this experience in the context of the other options available to women at this moment in history; the fourth section seeks to draw conclusions about the meaning of virginity and renunciation for women's sexuality in late antiquity.

International Journal of Education, Culture and Society, 2022

The purpose of this essay was to identify the advantages of virginity and chastity for health as well as the negative effects of lack thereof. These harms, which can extend to familial and larger social consequences, have been examined from a biological and psychological perspective. The topic is supported by gynecological, biological, and psychological studies. If there isn't any specific research to support a certain inference, then it has been addressed using widely accepted scientific concepts. The essay covered the advantages of virginity and chastity, including how they can deepen relationships via fidelity and committed bonds, improve first sex experiences through novelty, lubricate and tighten the vagina, and protect against illnesses. However, relationships have suffered as a result of several partners or polyamorous relationships, vaginal laxity, and STDs. The practice of prostitution was also discussed, along with the social, psychological, and health costs associated with it. The study concluded that laws should be adopted to prohibit and punish extramarital sex rather than prioritizing the proposal of temporary band-aids to these issues, such as the promotion of condoms, STD treatments, etc., in order to protect individual morality, familial relationships, society from exploiting women, and health laws.