A Question about Virginity
By Dr. Carol Queen • Aug 19th, 2009 • Category: Blog, Carol QueenDr. Carol Queen, Ph.D answers a question from our Social Networks.
Question: (A comment on our YouTube.com Channel)
Hi,
First of all, I want to thank you for your great channel and your awesome videos . Please keep them up and I’ll always be waiting for your new videos 
.
Secondly, I need a help and I really appreciate it if you could help me in that . I wanted to know how to know if my gf is a virgin unless the blood ? . Because I heard once that some girls don’t bleed inspite of being virgins . Could it be by seeing or …. !? . I’ll be so grateful if you helped .
Thanks alot
Momio
OK, this answer is for all you over-18 virgins and partners, because you under-18ers are not even reading this, and if you are, you should quickly change channels to Scarleteen. And soon, when you can vote, please pressure your elected representatives for better sex education. (Plus under-18ers are not allowed to do anything legally except be virgins. Remember?)
Virginity in this context, I believe, refers to penis-vagina intercourse, although there are a zillion ways to be virgins if you don’t take that as the definition–you’re a virgin, colloquially at least, around anything you’ve never done before. I’m a bungee-jumping virgin! This allows all of us to lose our virginities over and over, if we want. And since so many of us really need a do-over, this is fortunate.
Not all women bleed upon first intercourse, for a variety of reasons. In a culture where even young women have access to tampons, the hymen may have been stretched by using them; some kinds of exercise (including but not limited to masturbation) may have stretched a woman’s hymen enough so that it doesn’t cover the vaginal opening; and some females didn’t have much hymen tissue to begin with. So not every virgin bleeds, in spite of all the expectation that this is the Virginity Signal. Nor can you take a look at her hymen and know for sure. In truth, there is no such signal that will give you the unqualified information that a woman has never experienced vaginal penetration by something, much less by a penis.
About the only two things you can do are to trust what your partner says, and not care too much about whether it’s true. It might be a good idea to start with the second approach, since pressure from partners (or social systems) that find virginity to be super-important can give women a reason not to be truthful about this question. Indeed, in some contexts, a woman who admits she’s not a virgin faces rejection, humiliation, and even violence, and anyone participating in such a system has already given her a reason to hide any experience she might have. Whereas anyone saying “I love/desire you for you, and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before we got together” has actually made it a lot easier and safer for her to be honest.
Speaking for all the ex-virgins (they didn’t elect me to do that, I’m just seizing this opportunity), many women find first intercourse to be a pretty intense, sometimes scary, sometimes painful situation, and one element of this can be the pressure to prove you’re a virgin even when you are. And while many young (as well as older) women find they love having intercourse, sometimes the first experience is not so great or is even terrible, and a woman who’s experienced it might really wish she really were still a virgin. Hearing judgment or pressure about whether she is will not make it any easier for her in either case, I can assure you. So I don’t suggest you might want to focus on all the reasons you want to be with her (rather than anything else that might have happened in her life before she met you) only to make the situation easier for you, but also easier for her — and by extension, this will make the experience better for both of you.
If the question is whether you should have protected, i.e. condomed intercourse with her, the answer doesn’t change regardless of whether she’s a virgin; the answer is yes. Correctly using a condom (including using water-based lubricant along with it) means you have one less reason to consider her virginity, she has one less reason to consider yours, and you both have less reason to worry how much your lives might be altered if she gets pregnant without that being part of your plans.
I hope this helps! Good luck!
–CQ
Dr. Carol Queen >> Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator and activist with a doctorate in sexology. First as an organizer in the lesbian/gay community, where she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States, and later in the emerging international bisexual community, as a sex worker and a practitioner of alternative sexualities, she typically teaches and writes from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects. See her website: www.carolqueen.com.
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