Psychology Today seemed too eager to brush off its hands and close the book on this topic. "This one's pretty easy," they wrote. Is that so? What about man-on-man sex? Surely no pregnancy can come of this, yet we'd still be very hesitant to refer to our best gay guy friend who's played bottom to a hundred different partners as a virgin based on the concept of paternity certainty. What about a woman who's never had sex with a man but is artificially inseminated and becomes pregnant? Now a father is involved, even if anonymously, for certain. Yet based on PT's hasty logic, her virginity would still be intact.

Even if you take the evolutionary answer as the truth, this doesn't mean we should let it be such a huge part of our society. There's far too many people out there fighting the idea of ownership of another human being to let the paternity certainty argument satisfy anyone. Sex in our culture today is almost a completely distinct concept from reproduction, and it's about time our codes of conduct began to recognize that. If sex today is about sharing our desires, making ourselves vulnerable, fulfilling our fantasies and being intimate with another person, then our concept of virginity today should recognize that.

It's the sort of authoritative tone we see from sources like PT that put so much pressure on good people like Hannah to buy into these absurd and rather arbitrary standards. On the one side they're being told who they have sex with doesn't have to be the person they marry, and that they should enjoy it and be open to new things. And on the other they're being told their sex doesn't count. We need to abandon these antiquated conceptualizations of virginity.

Anyone who has had to anxiously undress someone else for the first time, be naked in front of another person in an erotic setting, fumble through words of an inexperienced conversation of seduction, or squirm in and out of uncomfortable first try positions deserves to have swiped his or her V-Card just as much as the next person.

-- Colin Adamo