I’d like to suggest we all do something slightly radical. Something that is super personal, but on a larger scale, could transform our understanding of sex and sexuality for the better.

Despite our inevitable variety in sexual experiences, preferences, and knowledge, one thing we all share is our initial state of inexperience. The word “virgin” is defined as someone who has never had sexual intercourse — but there’s a number of problems with this narrow interpretation.

Firstly, it prioritizes the physical act of sex, the definition of which has always been hijacked by heteronormativity; sex is assumed to be a penis entering a vagina, and this is sex in its most socially valid and accepted form. Therefore, according to the dictionary, any person who has had a penis in their vagina or vice-versa, is no longer a virgin. The emotionality, intimacy, pleasure, consent status or personal significance of this experience is overlooked in this understanding of sex. But what if we prioritized pleasure over our obsession with penetration? What if we expanded “valid” sex to include non-hetero sex by default, too? How, then, would virginity change?

In addition to this, our current idea of virginity is upheld by centuries of patriarchal dominance over sex; it is anti-womxn*, anti-queer, blind to consent, and continues to be weaponized against womxn all over the world in so many ways, often as a way to prevent our sexual expression and development. The myth of the hymen (aka the vaginal corona) ‘breaking’ is supposed to be proof of whether a womxn’s had penetrative sex or not. It is completely nonsensical, there is actually no reliable way to tell. This practice came about from paternity fears, back when it was more difficult to identify who the father of a child was other than ensuring that the mother had only had sex with one man. People wanted to know a child was theirs for sure, so that political and social power and wealth could be properly inherited.

So, the patriarchy commodified womxn’s virginity, she would only then be valuable and marry-able as a virgin. The myth that people would be able to tell from the state of her vagina if she’d had sex with someone was supposed to act as a kind of mental cock-block; an imposed deterrent for womxn to embrace their sexuality. This patriarchal form of control in turn influenced many religious doctrines and continues to dominate social views on virginity, even in the 21st century.

Womxn are told to expect sex to feel painful, we’re told we are of less value to society as sexual beings and that ‘innocence’ is a currency that once sacrificed, cannot be redeemed. Not only does this deny us our right to pleasure, it suggests that the essence of womxnhood lies in an absence of independent sexuality. No wonder our pleasure is so often disregarded in conversations around sex, in pornography, and unfortunately for us, in real life.

Social and historical fetishization of virginity is also the origin of slut-shaming; the stigma around sexually active and experienced womxn, or simply any womxn who slightly transgresses society’s desire for us to be ‘pure.’ One of the paradoxes of patriarchy is that while these forces attempt to chastise womxn’s sexual expression, they simultaneously also hyper-sexualize and objectify womxn; we are permitted to be sexualized by men, but sexuality that is not an extension of or an aid to male pleasure is forbidden.

With the current language we use, our concept of sex is tainted before we’ve even had a chance to experience it; sex is demonized, maybe even dreaded by some. According to the popular verbiage, virginity defines our worth. We say we’ve ‘lost’ our virginity, as if something precious has been permanently taken away. For womxn especially, this is a statement laden with negativity. Removing this reductive rhetoric from discussions of first sexual experiences could cause a huge shift in our feelings towards the growth of our sexual identities.

Rather than subscribing to an archaic, oppressive framework, I challenge us to redefine virginity. I suggest we revolutionize it, so that its meaning is one of fluidity and independence; a definition that each individual has autonomy over, one that isn’t fundamentally a means of controlling and commodifying womxn.

Let’s define losing virginity as gaining pleasure, obtaining new connections, as learning, as intimacy, as an experience rather than an act. Let’s define it as a brick in the building of one’s sexual identity (the construction of which begins far prior to shared intimacy). Let’s define it as plural, as able to happen multiple times in different ways. It is a beginning, rather than a singular event that has no future. A watershed moment in each individual’s sexual history. Let’s define is as not contingent on another person, as able to be experienced alone. We should view it as an exchange, extending the sentence “I lost my virginity” with a “and gained…” whatever it may be in that instance; intimacy, orgasm, pleasure, knowledge, experience, confidence, satisfaction, self-love, appreciation, passion…

By prioritizing our positive sexual experiences, negative experiences that may have felt like definitive ‘firsts’ no longer have the power to control and define us. Why force everyone’s idea of virginity into one template when we are all so different and varied in our identities? If we give ourselves the freedom to self-define virginity, perhaps we will discover the moment we ‘lost’ it, hasn’t actually happened yet, or we will be surprised by it happening again in a different context.

For me, the first and most transformative experience of losing my virginity so far — where I felt I gained something completely new — sexual power and complete intimacy, was receiving oral from someone I was emotionally invested in for the first time. After that, penetrative sex actually felt pretty un-important; that act changed me far more in society’s eyes than it affected my personal sexual identity and growth. The first time I had sex with a girl changed me again in a very different way. With this “virginity loss”, I gained a entirely new understanding of my sexuality, shared intimacy, my body and female pleasure… So, take a moment to revise your sexual history, whether you’ve shared your body intimately yet or not, and try to figure out which virginity losses have given you the most, which have felt most personally significant, which ones changed you. Perhaps they’re not just moments, but people or a period of time, an act or a feeling.

Whatever you discover, from now on, you define your own sexual history, and only you own your virginities of the past, present, and future.

*The writer uses womxn here as an alternative to ‘women’ as it is more inclusive and not a defined by a relationship to men.

Photos (in order of appearance) by Jairo Granados, Alexa Fahlman, and Kama Snow.