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Sunday, June 1, 2008

Myth of the Modern Virgin

In this modern day and age, are women being pressured to be "pure"or to at least portray the persona of being "pure" on their wedding day???

It would seem that Virginity in a bride is most desirable. According to a recent poll of conducted by Australian mens' magazine "FHM": "Of 57,000 men polled ...... 28 per cent hoped to marry a virgin, while 41 percent wanted a bride who had five partners or fewer, and just 5 per cent wanted a bride who had slept with more than 15 men."

The survey ran for a period of two weeks in May; and of the men who were surveyed, it was found that most were in their "late 20s, who had jobs and were university educated."

Further, according to the article by Caroline Marcus in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper today:
"But the ideal may be far from reality, with 2005 research from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Health and Relationships showing that only 11percent of women and 5percent of men aged 16 to 35 had only slept with their current partner. The same study showed Australian men aged 30 to 39 had on average 9.5 sexual partners and women in that age group, 4.7.

University of New England sexuality expert Dr Gail Hawkes said the response was "astounding". "You would not be surprised if we saw that in 1960, not 2008," Dr Hawkes said."


The Brisbane Courier Mail ran a story from France yesterday in which a man divorced his wife on the grounds that she was not a virgin. Apparently there was a huge uproar when it was discovered that a "court had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. Politicians, feminists and human rights activists denounced the verdict, handed down last month but reported in the national press only on Thursday, as an affront to the legal equality of men and women and a violation of a woman's privacy.

The hoodwinked husband's lawyer responded just as forcibly that civil marriage was a legal contract. The court invalidated this one because the wife had lied about what French law calls an "essential quality" of a contracting party, he said.

Prominent feminist Elisabeth Badinter said the courts should defend Muslim women, not pressure them. "The end result will be that some Muslim girls will rush to hospitals to have their hymens sewn back together again," she told France Inter radio.

Muslims make up about eight per cent of the population in France, which has vigorously defended its secular system against their occasional religious demands by banning Islamic headscarves in the civil service and in state schools.

Xavier Labbee, the husband's lawyer, denied that religion had anything to do with the verdict. "The law says that when there is an error concerning essential qualities of one of the spouses, an annulment can be sought," he said on LCI television.

The same clause has been used in French courts to annul marriages in which one person discovered only afterwards that the other had concealed a divorce or had a physical or mental disability that made a normal sexual life impossible.

The rector of a large mosque in the northern city of Lille, where the case was tried, also denied Islam played any role. "

In the US, I have seen a number of programs in which young people are undertaking vows of celibacy (not necessarily virginity) in an attempt to retain some sort of control over their own morality. Rather than having someone attempt to force their moral views upon them, these young folk are steering their own course.

Are we returning to a time when moral standards were a lot different and stricter than they are today??? Is that essentially a bad thing???


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