THE SCHOOL OF LIFE VIDEO SERIES: Shaming Virginity

Our era of sexual liberation encourages us to have sex; but at the same time, hugely stigmatizes those who don’t have it, from choice or circumstances. It’s time to liberate the idea of lingering or ongoing virginity from the shame it’s currently surrounded by.

We'd like to say this stigmatization of virginity is just a myth spread by the media, but according to a new study in The Journal of Sex Research, people are also judgmental of virgins in real life.

The goal of true sexual liberation, the sort we should all be interested in, is not to shift stigma around, it is to remove all stigma around all consensual sexual choices. True liberation means liberating us not just to have sex a lot, with different partners, in ecstatic clinches, but also to not have sex or to have sex quite late on or, for that matter, to have bad or inept or clumsy sex – and never to feel bad on this account. True sexual liberation should liberate us not just to be athletic and tantric and polyecstatic – but also to be weird, reclusive, interestingly shy, intelligently embarrassed and about as peculiar as we want to be – and still retain the right to honor and like ourselves.  MORE