Virginity once meant more than the condition of one’s cherry. According to Gordon Rattray Taylor’s Sex in History, the Romans distinguished between virgo, “an unmarried woman,” and virgo intacta, “a woman who had never known a man.”Ditto for the Greeks, to whom a virgin was a woman who had opted for personal autonomy instead of submitting herself to the narrow caged life of marriage. Virginity was considered less a physical state than a way of being. A woman getting married was seen as selling her independence, causing others to say she had “lost her virginity.” The only way to restore it was to sleep with a god, leaving most men out. Men for the most part continue to be infatuated with the notion. As Tamara Broder (Anjelica Huston) noted in the film Enemies, A Love Story, “Men love virgins. If every man had his way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and get up a virgin.”
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