Ladies, think about how people reacted to you "losing" your virginity. Was your mother disappointed or saddened? Did your dad become outraged and threaten that boy? Did your peers at school judge you and call you demeaning names?

Gentlemen, now you think about how people reacted to you "losing" your virginity. Did your dad say "Atta boy!"? Did your friends high-five you?

How often have you heard women called "sluts," "whores," "thots," or "hoes"? How often have you heard men who use their bodies the same way those women do referred to as "players"?

I can tell you that I've heard women called degrading names like those far too often. Usually, they're called that just for doing consensual things with their own bodies. I believe that this all begins with your first sex education class in elementary school. In the sixth grade, I started sex education. At the time, I was attending a public school. They split the class into a group of boys and girls. I remember talking a lot about nutrition and barely even touching on sexual education which I thought was acceptable since we were twelve-year-olds. After that year, I attended a private, Christian school from the seventh to ninth grade. For those three years where my classmates and I were going through bodily changes with puberty, I did not once have a sex education class. At most, abstinence was mentioned here and there. I heard many times, not only at school but at church, that my body is a "temple of God" and that I should keep it clean and protect it at all costs. This included not "defiling" myself by having sex.

Now, I'm not bashing those who think that waiting until marriage for personal, religious, or whatever reasons is best. That is everyone's personal right. But, it is also everyone's personal right to do what they very well please with their bodies. No one should be criticized for that. It is extremely damaging to tell a teenage girl that she is somehow ruined herself or that she is less of a person because she decided to have sex. In a world where young women are more rapidly developing eating disorders and issues with loving their own bodies already, it does no good to ridicule them for using their bodies.

Virginity used to be about making sure that you did not have children out of wedlock. But this isn't the 1500s anymore and there is a wide variety of contraceptives. Nowadays, virginity is used an excuse for men and media to tell women what to do with their bodies and, in some ways, keep them controlled. We need to stop attacking women and start empowering them. They are the reason we're all alive anyways.