In her text Willful Virgin, Marilyn
Frye offers a sketch of what she
calls “wild women,” or “willful
virgins,” suggesting that a
reclamation of the term virgin is
a necessary feminist move.
According to Frye’s redefinition, a
virgin is an independent feminist
who refuses to kowtow to
patriarchal norms of femininity,
attractiveness, or sexuality.
Virgins, she argues, know that
“Their s*xual interactions are not
sites where people with joysticks
make themselves men and
people with vaginas are made
women.” Rather, virgins are wild
and willful humans, not
subjugated property. This
revamping of the word takes it
back to its original meaning,
according to Frye:
“The word ‘virgin’ did not
originally mean a woman
whose vagina was
untouched by any penis, but
a free woman, one not
betrothed, not bound to, not
possessed by any man. It
meant a female who is
s*xually and hence socially
her own person. In any
version of patriarchy, there
are no Virgins in this sense.”
Here that purity ball fanatics?
There are NO virgins on our
patriarchal planet as patriarchy
rules out female freedom from
male dominance. Granted,
according to Frye’s concept of
the term, there are many ‘demi-
virgins’ or ‘near virgins’ – they
are those women not controlled
by male bosses, leaders, lovers,
etc. However, I am not sure if we
have any true virgins as even the
woman who is s*xually and
socially her own person lives
within a society in which rape,
s*xual harassment, and sexism
are rampant. She lived within a
society that does not allow
women to be entirely free of
male dominance.
But, how does Frye’s
recuperation of the term differ
from the use of virgin in
common parlance today? Well,
currently we use virgin to mean:
someone who is ‘holding out’
until marriage and may have
promised their virginity to
dear old dad in a sick,
incestuous romp known as a
purity ball
someone who is ‘tantalizing
jailbait’
a female who has not had
vaginal sex (apparently oral
and anal don’t count)
someone who is s*xually naïve
and may very well be
unf***able (as in ‘not hot’ via
sexist standards)
Most often, the term virgin is
used in association with women
as the female body is the one
designated as property within
patriarchy. Ironically, this is in
keeping with the original
meaning of the term. Yet, today,
‘virgin’ is not used to refer to a
free woman, but to designate
whether a woman’s vagina has
been penetrated by a penis.







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