Anatomy of Control: The Weaponisation of Virginity on Mosher Mag

Virginity is not a real thing. It’s not medical, anatomical, scientific, or tangible. It doesn’t show up on X-rays or blood tests. No doctor can confirm it. No god wrote it in muscle or bone. But it has been used for centuries to define women, destroy them, marry them off, sell them, punish them, and bury them.

Virginity, the concept, has spilled more blood, burned more witches, buried more women alive than any sword ever forged. It isn’t about biology. It never was. It’s a social leash. A barcode. A weapon dressed up in white lace and shame.

The hymen has been falsely positioned as the Holy Grail of moral womanhood. A membrane. A gate. A lock that opens only once, under the “right” conditions. But the reality? The hymen isn’t a seal. It’s just a ring of tissue, sometimes stretchy, sometimes not, sometimes absent altogether.

It can tear during horseback riding, gymnastics, or masturbation. It can remain intact after penetrative sex. It varies wildly between individuals. And yet across cultures, bleeding on the wedding night is treated as a sign of virtue.

In India, families have demanded to see blood-stained bedsheets as proof. In parts of Africa and the Middle East, brides who don’t bleed face “honour” violence or worse. Virginity testing, scientifically invalid and globally condemned, is still practiced by governments, police forces, and families

There are no standards for male virginity. None. Because male purity doesn’t matter. Only female obedience.

It’s less anatomy, more ideology.

It was never about the membrane. It was about control. It was about knowing, or pretending to know, whether a woman had been used. Touched. Tainted.

It was never about your body. It was about everyone else's opinion of it.

Virginity was never just about sex, it was about inheritance.

Throughout history, men obsessed over female chastity not because they cared about morality, but because they cared about paternity. Who gets the land? The castle? The name? You can't be sure unless the woman hasn’t been with anyone else.

So came the rise of the virgin-wife. Virgin queens. Virgin saints. Mary, the "mother" of God, whose worth was entirely rooted in the fact that she supposedly conceived without sex.

In medieval Europe, virginity wasn’t just celebrated, it was enforced.

Young women were sent to convents. Brides were inspected. Kings annulled marriages when they suspected their wives had been “touched.”

In Christian theology, the body was a temple, and a woman’s was always a temple on lockdown.

In Islam and Hinduism, similar patterns emerged. Honour, respect, dowries, all centered around “purity.”

In Orthodox Judaism, a woman’s value was (and in some communities still is) tied to her mikveh visits, her abstinence, her modesty.

This wasn’t about love. It was about lineage.

Virginity culture isn't just about virginity, it's about surveillance.

It starts before you bleed.

You sit with your legs closed. You don’t wear that skirt. You don’t stay out too late. You “save yourself.” You don’t ask what you’re saving yourself for, you just know it’s everything. Your value, your dignity, your worth.

Virginity becomes currency. A commodity. A future bargaining chip in a marriage no one’s asked if you want.

Even now, in this era of supposed liberation, the double standard festers. Boys lose their virginity. Girls give it away. One’s an adventure. The other’s a loss.

You are taught to think of your body as a box with a seal.

Once opened, it can never be re-sealed.

And what kind of man wants leftovers?

This is patriarchy 101: make women afraid of themselves.

Purity culture demands you be pure, but not too frigid.

Attractive — but not sexual. Desired, but not desiring.

You must be modest, untouched, reserved, unless your partner says otherwise. Then, you must become pornographic.

A virgin before, a sex worker after.

It’s a system built to break you and then sell you the cure.

Let’s talk wedding nights.

In medieval Europe, noble brides were paraded with their blood-stained linens to prove they’d been “pure.”

In parts of the Middle East and South Asia, that expectation still exists. Women are killed when no blood shows. Families disown daughters.

Vaginal reconstructive surgery, “virginity restoration," is a booming industry.

In Albania, widowed or unmarried women can choose to become "sworn virgins," living their entire lives celibate just to gain the freedoms of men.

There is no equivalent punishment for male sexuality.

None.

This is violence. Not tradition.

Mary, the mother of God, wasn’t praised for her motherhood. She was praised for being a virgin. She birthed the saviour without being touched by a man. The most divine thing a woman could do, apparently, was reproduce without having sex.

What a setup.

Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, each carry different flavors of this purity obsession. Veils. White dresses. Chastity belts. Sacred flames. Hymens as holy ground.

But what’s purity if not another word for obedience?

And what happens when women break from it?

Witch trials. Forced veiling. Honor killings. Slut-shaming. Silence.

Virginity became the benchmark of morality. The tightrope women had to walk just to be seen as human. Fall off, and you're not a woman, you're a whore.

Let’s not pretend the cruelty is always top-down. Women have learned to survive under patriarchy by becoming its foot soldiers. Mothers inspect their daughters. Friends judge each other. Teachers moralise. Even feminists sometimes trip over the virgin/whore divide, as if “sex positivity” means nothing until you’ve fucked on camera.

We internalise it. Pass it down. Reinforce it.

In purity culture circles (especially in the US), girls are given “promise rings” and taken to father-daughter “purity balls” where they pledge to remain virgins until marriage. Think about that: fathers celebrating their right to their daughters’ sexual inexperience. Grown men surveilling teenage girls like probation officers for God.

This isn’t modesty. It’s fetishised obedience.

And it festers.

Here’s the truth: there is no right way to lose your virginity. Or keep it. Because virginity doesn’t exist. It’s a phantom concept used to control and commodify you.

Some people choose celibacy. Others have sex early and often. Some trans men wear dresses. Some trans women wear suits. Some asexual people masturbate. Some “virgins” have done everything but. None of it defines your morality. None of it defines your worth.

Virginity is not purity. Virginity is not power. Virginity is not real.

Virginity is not a milestone. It’s not sacred. It’s not dirty. It’s not yours to lose or give. It’s a concept built to cage you.

Have sex when you want, or don’t. Bleed, or don’t. Be soft, wild, gentle, vengeful. Make it holy. Make it casual. Make it yours.

Stop measuring your worth by what you haven’t done. Start asking why they’re so obsessed with whether or not you’ve been touched.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com