Born again virginity, also known as secondary virginity, is a movement perpetrated upon teenagers by Christian groups, especially the Southern Baptist Church. It's recognizable for its slogan, True Love Waits, which bears perhaps the only fragment of wisdom in the entire campaign - the message that girls shouldn't be pressured by asshole boyfriends to have sex.
I use the term 'perpetrated' because, at least when the virgins came to our town, the movement was presented as some sort of grass-roots effort by teenagers, with speakers around our ages explaining exactly why they were abstinent. The church had co-opted peer pressure in an attempt to reach our innocent young hearts. But it was all too clear that the real backers of the movement were youth pastor type grownups trying desperately to appeal to the forces that they believed would motivate us.
They explained exactly what were the emotional consequences of 'premarital sex' and, in a move shockingly reminiscent of the now-defunct DARE program, gave us ways to resist the wiles of our comely woo-ers without seeming uncool.
I have to give them credit - a fairly sizable portion of the students elected to take those cards and pledge to remain sexless until a good, Biblical marriage (actually, this being a public school, the Bible part was merely implied.) To this day one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't ask, during the question-and-answer period, "As a fag, who of course can't legally be married, am I expected to remain celibate for my entire life?" Or better yet, "Since studies confirm over and over the fact that abstinence-only sex education does nothing to reduce the rates of teenage sex, and actually discourages use of contraception, how do you justify the fact that your actions actually cause teenage pregnancy?"
At any rate, I've never had much traffic with the concept of virginity, a concept created and pushed by the patriarchy in an effort to control women's sexual activity. The next few paragraphs might come across as something of a feminist diatribe.
The entire concept of a "born again virgin" is trying to appeal to a meme implanted in a more sexist age, when virginity was essential to the sale of a woman to a husband; men didn't want others horning in on their territory. But it becomes even more ludicrous: not only are we using a term, ostensibly to empower young women (let's face it, that's where the campaign is mostly targeted) that in actuality is a weapon for control on the part of society, but we're misusing it. Virgin means that you haven't had sex! Ever! Not once! It's a binary, either/or, yes/no proposition, a zero or a one. The term has always been an absolute one; it's not predicated upon being pure of heart but pure of flesh. And one time is enough to get pregnant or diseased.
The concept of reclaiming it, appealing though these youth pastors might find it, is contrary to its semantic meaning. I don't mind any effort to undermine the use of the word, but any interpretation of this movement as radical, some sort of challenge to the very idea of virginity and the odd absoluteness of the term, is missing the fact that these people are characterizing virginity as something positive, something that some girls can't ever have back, so they'll have to comfort themselves with the next best thing.
I hate the idea that this movement is reinforcing the valuation of a woman based on traits that make her appealing to men. The program teaches women that they are defined by what goes into their cooters, and any girl who relaxes her will enough to let a man get in there is now "secondary", not a virgin but maybe fit to ride on the bus, toward the back.
Let alone that the entire approach of the program was based on somehow fending off the advances of our lovers, always implicitly representing boys. Not considered was the idea that women might actually like sex. In the Baptist world, women are simple creatures, driven to dirty themselves because of "if you really loved me"s on the part of their boyfriends. This too is a weapon of backwards, antifeminist thought, defining "potency" and "sexuality" as traits reserved for men, who then act them out upon women, who apparently are little more than vessels which men use to fulfill their own desires. And once used, the vessels can't really be cleaned; they are now just 'secondary', born again but not real virgins.
The attempt to portray men as sexual aggressors and women as the passive recipients of sex is ultimately harmful to young women and men. The women are told that they don't have sexual desires, something that isn't born out by their own internal experience; they are expected to not notice their own urges because they don't fit into the Baptist-sponsored domestic angel characterization, the idea that a woman is a pure being, meant to be unsullied by the world and thus confined to the home. Worse yet, this mindset reinforces the image of men as wheedling sex out of unwilling women, a few short steps away from date rape. The young men who had to sit through this program were told once again that they were all potential rapists, and that that's what's expected.
The onus, according to the program, is always upon the women to resist the men. A 20-ish man spoke to us, explaining how 'visual' men were in their thinking, and how they would get so 'turned on' that, in essence, they couldn't help themselves. This was the role model we boys were supposed to be looking up to, this man who couldn't help himself when he saw a pretty little thing in a belly shirt.
Needless to say, I had a problem with this approach to sex education. I find the implication quite troubling that women are to be kept pure until marriage, obligated to fight off the boyfriends who would use emotional manipulation to get into their pants. Worse is the fact that this, through extension to that other cultural archetype, means that the young women in attendance who do feel sexual urges of their own, and maybe think that that's natural and healthy, are relegated to the other side of the virgin coin: the whore.
I guess I'm opposed to this anti-woman, anti-sex approach to education. Teaching people about the emotional and physical consequences of their actions, rather than simply telling them that they shouldn't do something, strikes me as a more effective way to fight teen pregnancy. I suppose I'd feel more inclined to follow a philosophy that wasn't so rooted in archaic, incorrect assumptions about women and men.