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A virgin is someone who's never had sex.

Many traditional cultures view virginity as a positive. However, when this view is restricted to females - which is often - it represents a very chauvinistic attitude.

Although it's better to get in a good deal of practice if you want to find a person/people you wish to commit to, using all of those experiences to benchmark your current partner can be perceived as being a total jerk.


Some cultures view virginity as something as a commodity and a largely desirable trait in a woman, like paying the father of a woman with the understanding she is a virgin. The Bible also seems to value virginity in a wife over the life of the woman. Islamic culture in particular makes mention of having 72 virgins in paradise after the person has martyred themselves. This translation is, of course, debated by many Islamic apologists.

Biblical use[edit]

In the Bible, Mary the mother of Jesus is called a virgin, specifically parthenos (sexually pure woman) in the original Greek of the New Testament. The birth of Jesus is claimed to have been a virgin birth.

Further, this virgin birth is claimed to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy from Isaiah. However, Isaiah wrote in Hebrew, not Greek, and he used the Hebrew word actually meaning "young woman." Bethulah means "woman who has not had sex" (c.f. Isaiah 62:5); almah, the word used in Isaiah 7:14, means just "young woman" and only sometimes "sexually pure woman," the correct meaning to be ascertained from context.[1][2] Dictionaries were not invented until the 18th Century CE and before that words did not always have precise definitions.

The Jews of the first century C.E. typically read their scriptures in the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint. And the Septuagint translated almah as parthenos, making it seem that Isaiah was talking about a virgin birth rather than just a young woman giving birth. Moreover, Isaiah in the Hebrew Tanakh employed present participle, not future tense; the Greek translators changed it to future in the Septuagint. This was the inspiration for the gospel myth of the virgin birth. Thus, the Gospel of Matthew attempts to justify the divinity of Jesus with a prophecy that was never actually made.


Virginity, in men, is often shamed as a sign of being an undesirable loser. An argumentum ad cellarium fallaciously dismisses a man's arguments by saying he's a basement-dwelling virgin.


  2. Michael Paulkovich; Robert M. Price (2016). Beyond the Crusades (3 ed.). American Atheist Press. pp. 34–35. ISBN 978-1-57884-037-3.