Conclusion
Perhaps the only definite conclusion one can make after perusing the five cases of virgins who finally became women in this study-some at an extremely late period in their lives-is that the myths of virginity, tied in with those of "sanctity" and "sinfulness" still linger with us even as we are rapidly drawing toward the third and final quarter of this twentieth century. That this should be the case is alarming, particularly in view of the fact that as the cases presented here demonstrated, it is the woman as well as the man who thinks that sex is evil until it is "sanctified" by the vows and ceremony of marriage who is the most likely candidate for the psychiatrist's couch.
Why must this be so? Why is there still-even in the midst of what is termed "sexual permissiveness," of the "sexual revolution"-an aura of mythos surrounding the reality of biology, physiology, and natural sexuality? The answer more than likely lies in the fact that ever since man discovered his ability to invent stories and the gullibility of others to believe in them, he's been creating gods in his own image and attributing to these gods abilities and powers that man himself either did not possess or possessed to a limited extent. One of these attributive abilities that man bestowed upon his divinities was to punish for evil deeds and, eventually, for what man, for one reason or another, decided to classify as evil.
He applied this further in a reverse process; thus, for example, that without which there would be no such thing as virginity-as it is defined today-namely, the thin membrane that blocks the entrance to the vagina, man named hymen, for the god of love. The matter of the "blessedness" of virginity and its relationship to the Christian religion has already been touched upon within the internal commentary of this work.
Of course, this attitude toward virginity neither has been, nor is, universal. Yet, when one considers the fact that the segment of humanity that is known as the Western Society has been during the past several decades exporting not only its food and weapons, but its myth-laden beliefs to the "underdeveloped" nations of the world, one cannot but feel some apprehension for those parts of the world in which the inhabitants have not been touched by the genius of Western man's abilities to hang irresolutely onto the phantasmic tail of the nonexistent comet of man's primitive beliefs.
This is not to suggest that virgins are to be deflowered at the earliest age possible; that is a barbaric practice. Rather, it is to suggest that man cease his concern with the vengeful deity-from whom man has not heard in almost two millennia (if the last connection with that deity was not, in fact, a loose one, a case of the wind in the willows)-and turn to the realities of man's body and mind and emotions.
To cite again a few words from Eustace Chesser's work:
. . . St. Augustine said, "Love (God) and do what you will." The injunction is often quoted and generally misunderstood. What he meant was that if you love God you will not wish to break the moral law. His teaching laid the foundations of the elaborate moral system created by the Roman Catholic Church. This is legalistic through and through. It is a vast superstructure of "Do's" and "Don'ts." The official doctrine of the
Church even now is that contraception is always wrong and . . . the man and wife who practice it . . . are committing a sin. Outside marriage it is doubly wrong.
By contrast a subjective morality judges in accordance with our mental and emotional attitudes. It accepts Augustine's dictum without reference to God. The rule then becomes "Love, and do what you like.' There is no reference to a detailed moral law. No such law is known. Moral rules are made by man, and what man has made, he can unmake.. . .
And if the unmaking, or modification, of those laws will guarantee less unhappiness-both emotional and psychological-in the lives of men and women, then man should seriously start considering modifying and unmaking those laws that have manacled our minds and bodies to the clay out of which we rose.