Seems that the translation of virgins may have erred in much the same way as the translation of circumcision; in its original language circumcision means restraint. The ancients were to practice restraint of the heart, head and physical pleasures.

So many mistakes are being paid for by the innocents that we do need to get things straightened out before we hurt more people.

Best RG

Behind every excuse lies a failure, to justify a failure only compounds its magnitude.

I've never understood the "virgin" allure myself

I've not had much trouble with it. We forget, I think, that it was 1850 before we began to understand the true role of male and female in reproduction. 1850, for crying out loud. It was in that year that a French scientist first saw syngamy, the fusion of egg and sperm. In a seaweed. (1850 was about when microscopes capable of seeing a sperm cell first became generally available.) Demonstrating "sperm and egg" for humans took quite a bit longer. It's not easy to find a human egg. It's not exactly like a chicken egg.

Before 1850, we were clueless about the most important part of the birds and the bees. And believe me, there were some pretty strange ideas out there. Including the one that the woman provides only the space to develop a baby, it is the man who puts the baby there. And if I'm paying the freight, milady, I want that space to be ALL MINE. I ain't raisin' no one else's contributions; I don't want any of that stuff in there, y'hear me? :) (Even within my lifetime, dog fanciers refused to breed a bitch that had been topped by a mongrel, because of the fear that "residual sperm" would render subsequent offspring "mixed" rather than "pure" blood.)

Practically all animals have the same concern. The male will go to great lengths either to exclude other males from access to females, beginning before their first estrus (i.e., virginal) or to produce so much sperm that their load outcompetes everyone else's. Disease is another concern. Multiple partners increases the risk of STDs. (Somehow this wise dictum didn't get applied to male promiscuity very well - in fact, in Shakespeare's time, it was thought that deflowering a virgin was a cure for the clap.)

Only (he said for about the sixth time on BP) modern technology has allowed us to understand enough about our bodies to retire the ages-old misconceptions that led to the "virgin" obsession. Thank a scientist ... :)