Hymen for Sale
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She’s not particularly pretty, but she’s not ugly, either. Just a normal 22-year-old. She’s bright, evidently, with her degree in Women’s Studies, and her continuing education. She’s now in graduate school, studying to be a marriage and family therapist. Not everyone goes to grad school, so that makes her a little more than standard.
She’s 22, and through some unexplained set of circumstances, she’s still a virgin. Now that’s unusual, in this country. A girl doesn’t retain her intact state that long in North America unless there are social, religious, cultural constraints which render virginity a state of value. So, if she’s kept herself intact for 22 years, she obviously values her virgin state.
Which is why she’s auctioning it off to the highest bidder.
Yes, indeed. This young woman, who is going by “Natalie Dylan” to protect her privacy (good luck with that), is getting the redoubtable Howard Stern to help her sell her hymen to the highest bidder.
Well, not quite. She reserves the right to vet the highest bidders and choose amongst them.
Why would anyone do this?
Grad school isn’t cheap, you know. It costs money to further your education. How can she get some money, quick? What does she judge her most valuable commodity at the moment?
Not her brains. Not her character. Not her education or her knowledge or her youthful energy.
Just her intact hymen.
It is the world’s oldest profession for good reason. There have always been men willing to pay for it; there have always been men willing to pay a premium to be the first through the gates.
Is she demeaning herself? — it’s prostitution, of course — or is the empowering herself? — she’s calling the shots, she’s not going to accept less than the value she places on the commodity she has to sell.
Of course, she’s gleefully making a commodity of herself.
There are so many ways you could approach this: she’s using the people who would use her; she’s being used; she’s making her own rules; she’s confirming the age-old view of women’s value as beginning and ending in their sexuality; she’s getting value for something females usually give away; she has no idea of the true value of what she’s selling…
But, all values aside, the question that puzzles me the most is how someone who has such a cavalier attitude to her virginity has managed to hang onto it for so long.
Women who hang onto their hymen for 22 years are generally “saving it for marriage”. I’ve never yet met someone who was “saving it for the admissions officer”. Can a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old really have decided, so soon, that their virginity was not so much an expression of personhood, autonomy, spirituality, self-denial or romance, as it is an asset to be sold?
When other girls were losing it to callow boyfriends, could Ms. X truly have decided that it was not so much a matter of values or morals, but of investment in a debt-free future?
How did a girl come to be twenty-two years old, still in possession of her virginity, and, if it’s solely a matter of fiscal benefit, not have sold it years before?
It is a puzzle, and it makes me a little sad.
via: First Wives World
September 21st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I’m not sure the idea repels me as much as the fact that she’s going through Howard Stern.
Also, just because she’s technically a virgin doesn’t mean she hasn’t engaged in sexual activity. Or maybe, having a sister working at the Bunny Ranch, she always planned on losing her virginity this way. Call me a cynic.
September 24th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Stories like this make you cynical, that’s for sure. I assume she picked the venerable Mr. Stern because… well, because who else would do it, but also because he’ll reel in the attention, and with it, the potential bidders.
As others have said, she could have had sex, and had her virginity “restored”. Hymen repair is a thriving business in some areas of the globe.
Virgin for real or not, it’s a sordid little story to my way of thinking.