My favorite genre of movies is coming of age films, from Marc Webb to John Hughes I love it all. A prime moment in all coming of age movies is when it is revealed that a main character is a virgin. Backtrack to 1985 when The Breakfast Club directed by John Hughes opens up the dialogue that the popular girl played by Molly Ringwald is, in fact, a virgin. A turning point in most movies and TV shows, the idea of ‘losing your virginity’ and ‘no longer being a virgin’ is a social construct that is very harmful to society.

Let’s talk science for a second, it’s impossible for doctors to be able to tell if a patient is a virgin or not. Don’t fight me on this, seriously look it up. So where did virginity come from and why does it hold such a big place in our society and how we view growing up? The word virgin itself comes from the old French word meaning literally "maiden" or "virgin"—a sexually intact young woman or "sexually inexperienced woman.” But virginity mainly comes from religion. Most religions rely on abstinence being key and the fact that only sinners lose this so-called virginity before marriage.

This coming-of-age concept leaves very little to the imagination when it is featured in pop culture and, in addition, also excludes the LGBTQ+ community. Virginity erases the LGBTQ+ community and shames women in the process. A problem with virginity is who is to say who is a virgin and who isn’t? This thought process is what excludes the LGBTQ+ community from the conversation and makes the term altogether outdated. Virginity is a hetero-normative concept making the whole conversation exclude a lot of people. Men are praised for losing their virginities young while women are supposed to keep the “purity” of their bodies until a certain age. Even then, women continued to be judged by the details of this loss of innocence, questions like who it was, how serious was the relationship and how old you were continue to surface even after your youth years.

Virginity was made to slut-shame women into not taking their actions and their bodies into their own hands. Instead this term takes it from them, making sex and sexual actions its own term that can be given to you and taken away from you. As if the person who you have sex with takes something from you, something you can’t ever get back. Yikes. It’s time to turn the conversation away from virginity and onto sexual health. Teaching abstinence in high school has never worked and taking virginity out of the curriculum is the best way to give the youth some clear direction on more important issues like consent and protection. This social adaption of the action of ‘losing your virginity’ is harmful in society because it is a constant reminder or how we devalue women for taking charge of their sexuality and their bodies.