A few months ago, I saw a t-shirt that said: “I’m a virgin (this is an old shirt).” I thought it was a funny, slightly feminist message, so I bought it. I didn’t see anything wrong with the shirt, but apparently other people do. The first time I wore my shirt, an older lady yelled an obscenity that I won’t repeat at me.

Now, keep in mind I’m 18-years-old, and I appear even older. Why then, did this woman feel the need to call me a nasty word just for not being a virgin? The simple answer is that society views “purity” among young women as something desirable. This dates back for as many years as I could find, but probably started when men would sell their daughters into marriage.

Marrying a virgin was both a social and evolutionary benefit because a virgin had no sons with other men, therefore carrying on your family name. Why, though, in a society where women aren’t being sold into marriages, did the idea of virginity keeping a woman pure persist? It’s not for reasons of preserving the family name like it used to be so long ago.

Well, without being too graphic, nowadays I believe it’s for reasons of sexual pleasure. The Facebook page “No Hymen No Diamond,” which strongly supports marrying a woman with her hymen still intact, is full of men who seem to think of women more as conquests than live partners. The issue here is that most of the men who demand that their wives be virgins upon marriage have no clue how a vagina actually works. You don’t get “loose” from having sex. The vagina is a muscle, which can expand and contract enough to push out a child.

This isn’t even touching on the immense pressure that society puts on young men to have sex from a young age, which I might cover in a different article. Young men are expected to be “ladies men,” even by their parents, long before puberty.

Unfortunately, we as a society will probably continue this trend for thousands of more years, so I say do what you want. Whether you’re a man, woman or a variation of the two, sex is neither good nor bad, it just is. If you want to save yourself until you find your soulmate, be my guest, but if you’d rather hook up with someone you met at a party, that’s fine too. What really matters is that you’re both ready and consent to anything that goes on. Apart from that, no one can judge you.