Sex.co.nz

Better ask a few questions if she tells you she’s a virgin.  More and more women are choosing to become “born-again virgins,” and often you won’t even be able to tell the difference.  Surgery to reattach the hymen is on the rise, especially among women who were born in more liberated countries but plan to be married in countries where they must be a virgin on their wedding day … or risk being rejected or even killed.

Reattaching the hymen is an extreme procedure, and many question whether or not it’s even possible to claim to be a virgin for the second time.  That’s not stopping religious organizations from promoting “revirginization.”  According to Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest, “Virginity means more than sexual inexperience. It also means a childlike heart that, once lost, can be found anew.”  A person who asks for help from God to clear away past sins and commits in their heart to celibacy until marriage could, in that view, be considered a “virgin” in the spiritual sense.

But Laura Carpenter, author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences, says that 75% of the men she surveyed didn’t believe it was possible to become a virgin again, while only 25% of women shared that view.  Once a person has had their first sexual experience, no forgiveness from God or medical surgery could change that fact.

The question then becomes: what form of sexual experience are we talking about?  Can you consider yourself a virgin if you’ve engaged in other forms of sexual play aside from vaginal intercourse?  Many young people today practice oral sex in the belief that it “doesn’t count” as sex since it can’t make anyone pregnant.  So, are you still a virgin if you’ve given someone else oral sex?

These are difficult questions, and no one has any clear answers.  For the women who’ve shelled out nearly NZ$10,000 to get their hymens reattached, such “surgical virginity” is good enough.  Perhaps revirginization should be seen as a cultural movement, cousin to the celibacy movement, that helps men and women clear their sexual history of painful baggage.  We all like to believe that we can turn over a new leaf and start over again.  Revirginization offers us that promise.

To find out more about the women who choose to call themselves “born-again virgins,” check out Wendy Keller’s The Cult of the Born-Again Virgin: The New Sexual Revolution.