I Lost My Virginity to a Tree: An Exploration of What Defines Virginity

When I was 10 years old, a tree took away my innocence.

I, an extreme skiing kid, ran into a tree. After falling into the snow, I felt a weird aching in my bathing suit area. It didn’t feel like a burn or sting. It was this gnawing, uncomfortable feeling I had never felt before and because of that, it weirded me out. I got up and wobbled down the hill to meet my parents at the bottom. “I crashed into a tree!” I cried. I then pulled my mom’s coat and she leaned down next to me. “It hurt my private parts,” I whispered into her ear. “You’re fine,” my mom affirmed and we hopped on the chair lift up the hill. But I didn’t feel fine: everything felt tender, sensitive and wrong.

“Mom, I think I’m bleeding”

“Where ya bleeding?” my dad asked.

“Nothing, Dad!”

My mom informed me that if I thought I was bleeding I should go home. So, I skied myself to our condo, burst open my ski boots and ran into the bathroom. I found my white, polka dot underwear covered in blood. A tree took away my virginity.

If I were living in medieval times, I would have failed their “virginity tests.” For centuries, having an intact hymen defined  what it meant to be a virgin, wrote Karen Harris and Lori Caskey-Sigety in their book The Medieval Vagina: An Hysterical and Historical Look at All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages. Women were expected to “remain chaste until marriage” and one who “broke her family’s honor if she was not chaste was often punished,” according to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation article, “Defining Virginity”. The hymen is a piece of fleshy tissue located at the opening of the vagina, according to Planned Parenthood.org’s “Virginity” section. The main way of knowing if a woman had been penetrated was by checking for a hymen; if the hymen was not yet broken, the woman was considered a virgin.

Another method was the proof of blood test. If “honeymoon sheets are streaked with blood” it was evidence the wife was a virgin, according to The Medieval Vagina: An Hysterical and Historical Look at All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages. Sometimes the bloody sheets were even paraded around. “Katherine of Aragon, legend says, kept her blood-stained honeymoon bedding for years.” If the sheets weren’t bloody, the woman, who was then considered a slut, was punished or even killed. With my broken hymen, I would have been one of these sluts. I, like many brides, would have had to “acquire a vial of blood” and sprinkle it over my bed sheets. Clever medieval brides often used the blood of farm animals for this purpose. "A bit of chicken blood could easily be hidden in a piece of jewelry and spilled on to the sheets under the cover of darkness," according to The Medieval Vagina: An Hysterical and Historical Look at All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages.

But can virginity really be defined by the breaking of a piece of fleshy tissue? If the presence of a hymen means a woman is a virgin, the only way a woman could lose her virginity is through penetrative sex. This definition then assumes that oral and anal sex aren’t legitimate. Bill Clinton used this argument during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. He famously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” according to Time Magazine’s “Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners.” Bill Clinton allegedly engaged in oral sex with his intern and with this assertion, he denied that oral sex (a.k.a non-hymen-breaking sex) counts as actual sex.

So, does this definition imply that people who have only engaged in homosexual sex are virgins? Planned Parenthood argues otherwise. “Having a hymen and being a virgin are not the same thing,” according to Planned Parenthood.org’s “Virginity” section. “In the last few decades, the term or label ‘virgin’ has become confusing,” according to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s “Defining Virginity” article. The standard of a woman being penetrated by a penis doesn’t include “persons of both genders as well as transgendered persons and all persons of sexual orientations (straight, gay, and bisexual).”  

“I only had anal sex, so I’m still a virgin,” whispered a girl in my high school summer camp cabin. But was she a virgin? Comedic artists Garfunkel and Oates make fun of this argument in their song, “The Loophole.” They belt the lyrics “fuck me in the ass because I love Jesus” and “it’s hard to be pure as me, to resist the urge to lose my vaginal virginity,” according to Genius.com’s “The Loophole Lyrics.” The song is ironic because anal sex seems far from chaste, but does not break the hymen. Therefore, does it not constitute a loss of virginity?

This is exactly what my camp cabin mate argued. She insisted that she was a virgin, but she must have had a few doubts, because she still prayed to be forgiven and to become a “born again virgin” just in case. So maybe virginity is only a state of mind. If a woman feels virginal, she is.  

This virginal state of mind is another definition of virginity. A virgin is more than just one who has never performed specific sexual activities. Virginity is also defined as “the state or condition of being pure...or unused,” according to Dictionary.com. People aspire to be a virgin because it’s a positive state; it’s clean and fresh. For example, a drink is known as “virgin” when it doesn’t contain any alcohol.

During the 14th century, an obsession with virginity and purity flourished, wrote Angella d’Avignon in the May 2016 The Establishment article, “Why Have We Always Been So Obsessed With Virginity?” She explains that the Virgin Mary became the “New Eve”: “since Mary was the mediator between the holy and the earthly, her popularity adjusted the socially held belief that women were the source of evil.”

Because virginity has two definitions--not having penetrative sex and being pure--little girls are programed to see sex as an evil, sinful act. This view is promoted by “events designed to preserve virginity, specifically female virginity, in America, like purity pledges and purity balls,” wrote Marcie Bianco in the August 2014 Mic article, “The Way We Think About Virginity in America is Finally Changing.” “These types of events, which literally link a person's sexual activity to their self-worth, could presumably add to the feelings of anxiety and guilt.”  This outlook breeds slut-shaming. While women are no longer punished by being hanged for bloodless sheets, guilt is the modern choice of punishment.

But I didn’t feel guilt after my “first time.” I always knew I wasn’t going to bleed and because of this, it didn’t seem like a huge milestone in my life. Afterwards, I wasn’t haunted by the feeling that I was no longer pure nor did I feel like a I had instantly become a woman. I am not alone in my casual feelings about virginity. This view on virginity is slowly transforming into a new social norm. “Evidence that women's guilt has decreased and could continue decreasing over time is not only a sign of changing gender norms….but reflects the extent to which norms around female sexuality are influenced by social and cultural events,” wrote Marcie Bianco in the August 2014 Mic article, “The Way We Think About Virginity in America is Finally Changing.”

But even while telling this story, I still define it as my “first time.” Women feel like they must document the moment they lose their virginity. It’s even common for a woman to be asked, “Who did you lose your virginity to?” The verb “losing” implies two things: one, that there was something fundamental there for the taking; and two, that someone took it from her. There is an underlying message that the woman is being controlled by someone else. The act of taking away virginity gives the taker a large amount of power. Many cultures still place a woman’s entire value on her virginity. Just like in medieval times, a woman may seem unmarriageable if she isn’t a virgin. Therefore, because virginity is a fundamental thing to take, the taker may exert a major influence on a woman’s life. Moreover, if virginity is defined as a hymen breaking, this is something only a female body can do. In that case, men never really lose their virginity. Instead, it is their duty to take virginities. The concept of virginity now becomes just another piece of the patriarchy.

While I didn’t feel guilt, I grew up wondering how I would lose my virginity. Who would I lose it to? Where would I lose it? What would I be wearing? Would it be magical? I love to make the joke that I lost my virginity to a tree, but in reality there was no exact moment that I lost my virginity. Once I became sexually active, nothing about my personality changed: I wasn’t a different or a less pure person. Also, no specific type of sex was “the real deal”and no specific action took away my virginity. The fact that I feel the need to define specifically when I lost my virginity and to whom (or what) I lost my virginity only plays into my internalized misogyny. Here are the facts: I did not lose anything. I crashed into a tree and an anatomical body part stretched open a bit.