Posts Tagged: virginity

Amber Rose’s Walk of No Shame

For decades adults have been traversing the perils of walking home the morning after a hook up with their makeup smeared, hair disheveled in what is classically known as The Walk of Shame. Yet, Amber Rose is taking to the streets in her clothes from last night to declare that The Walk of Shame is no more! Amber Rose with the help of Funny or Die explores what it would be like if people didn’t shame those for enjoying sex and high fived those who got their socks rocked. In their eyes, if you’re walking The Walk of Fame you’re “living your best life!”

Image: Funny or Die

Image: Funny or Die

How Was Your First Kiss? TLC’s Virgin Diaries

Well, I’m speechless; not because TLC has managed to produce another wedding show that exploits extreme lifestyles and not because finding an unmarried virgin is like discovering the mythical unicorn. I am speechless at the sheer awkwardness of what they’ve captured for their premiere episode set to air this Sunday. Watch the below to know what I’m talking about:

Now that we’ve all been reminded of our first kiss, here comes our paranoia creeping in – did we look like that during our first kiss? And the awkwardness gets worse when they start to describe how it will all go down on the wedding night – starting with separate showers.

It’s not that the sexual choice of staying a virgin is wrong by any means, it’s that we just love a good kissing/sex virgin story. Remember 1999’s Never Been Kissed, which was also an episode on Glee. And if you really know your pop culture, there’s even a similar episode in Saved By The Bell. There’s the 40 Year Old Virgin and most recently the Mormon story about a virgin human marrying a 110-year old virgin vampire with a steamy, bedpost-crushing wedding night virgin scene that has all the ‘tweens screaming. There are plenty more movies that you can read about here. Despite most of us being sexually experienced on our wedding night (95%), we still want to make a HUGE deal about virginity. We treat it as something really serious ‘to lose your v-card or not to lose your v-card’ but we also treat it with a severe amount of spectacle. How can you defend something as meaningful, but then splay it out for cheap laughs and entertaining awkward moments?

 

Religion and Marriage

This chart has been circling the Internet. What’s interesting about wedding tradition today is that it is mostly shaped by pop culture and media, whereas back in the day it was influenced mostly by religion. This chart lays out the various verses that relate to marriage, sex and women’s issues. While a lot of these practices are not as commonly practiced, I thought I might address ones that are:

Man + Women (Nuclear Family) bride who could not prove her virginity was stoned to death – this still happens in the middle east and sub-Sahara in what is justified as an honor killing. Honor killings are not limited to stoning but can also include burning, acid burning and other forms of abuse. For example, in Iraq 2007, a 17-year old girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, was stoned to death in an honor killing because she fell in love with someone outside her religion. She was from a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, and the boy was a Sunni Muslim. Iraqi Security forces stood by and watched as she was dragged into a square and publically flogged until her death. Pools of her blood collected around her body in the middle of the street. Not one person in the crowd tried to save her. The entire event was captured on camera and released on the Internet (Warning: Graphic Violence)

Man + Woman  + Woman’s Property – This was called coverture and wasn’t outlawed until 1933.

Man + Woman + Woman + Woman – An estimated 30,000 to 50,000 people live a polygamist lifestyle in the US.

Rapist + His Victim – While no one forced a victim to marry their rapist, one parallel issue that could be drawn is how state abortion laws treat pregnant victims of rape. First, states that outlaw abortions outright are leaving little choice for its constituents, along with the states that limit the victim’s freedom to chose the outcome of their pregnancy and have control over their own bodies.

Male Slave + Female Slave – The Department of Justice estimates that more than 250,000 American youth are at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Each year an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold, or forced across the world’s borders [2003 U.S. State Department estimate]. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as 5, who fall victim to the sex trade. in 1999 that more than 200 international matchmaking services operated in the United States, arranging 4,000 to 6,000 marriages annually between American men and foreign women, mostly from the Philippines and former Soviet Union.