Let’s lose our virginity obsession

Maidi Brown (Letters, 20 June) points out the associations of virginity with concepts of nobility and purity and suggests we need to move on from an obsession with Mary’s reproductive functions. Is it not also time that the Church moved on from its obsession with virginity and the notion that a virgin is a special (and superior) kind of woman, rather than merely a person without a certain life experience?

We don’t have a word for someone who has never visited a foreign country, or played a musical instrument – why should sexual experience be considered any different?

It is folklore, not theology, that makes a virgin a semi-magical being, the only one who can tame a unicorn, or be an acceptable sacrifice to a dragon. And this is down to the idea that sex defiles a woman, that once she has experienced it (even with her husband, or unwillingly), she is no longer “pure” and has “lost” something.

All of which is nothing to do with Christianity, but rather with patriarchy, that sees women as trade goods that need to be separated into “new” and “second-hand” – that’s why virginity matters, quite apart from chastity: one can be thoroughly unchaste and yet still technically a virgin, and wholly chaste, but not.

So please can we stop categorising female saints into “Virgin” and “Other” and do away with the whole paraphernalia that requires separate prayers and antiphons (all going on about their “purity”) for the former, as though their sexual history is what defines them?

J.E. HOWARD (MS), BEDFORD, BEDFORDSHIRE

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