Female virginity and female singleness are now, supposedly at least, so rare that they shock. Because they had heard of my book about single women and today’s church, a TV production company recently contacted me. Could I find them a woman who was a virgin? they asked ? they were making a programme where people reveal unusual secrets. Today female virginity shocks just as much as ‘nymphomania’ shocked the Victorians. 
We must be thankful in part for this. Female sexuality is now in a better state than it was in Victorian England, when women were categorised into three types: virgin spinsters, wives who only tolerated sex, or whores. Throughout the twentieth century, from Marie Stopes’s 1918 sex manual ‘Married Love’ to The Hite Report and Anne Koedt’s article ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,’ women’s capacity for sexual pleasure has been defended and explained in ever increasing detail. Today we read Cosmo and watch Sex and the City, where being a single woman is, more than anything else, about having a lot of sex.
But sexual freedom has not brought women the freedom they hoped for, and denigration of women’s singleness, virginity or celibacy is no mark of liberation.
Last year’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles revealed growing rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Abortion continues to rise, reaching its peak among women of the twenty-something age group, young women who are the daughters of the second wave feminists, the next generation for whom everything was supposed to be better. STDs are no mark of liberation, and neither is putting yourself through the traumatic experience that is abortion, as Polly Toynbee pointed out in the recent Guardian series on feminism.
The feminist call for women’s right to choose their sexuality has, in this post-feminist era, been transformed into an emphasis on compulsory sex, a state in which women are no longer free to choose not to have sex, not to be part of a couple.
We must be thankful in part for this. Female sexuality is now in a better state than it was in Victorian England, when women were categorised into three types: virgin spinsters, wives who only tolerated sex, or whores. Throughout the twentieth century, from Marie Stopes’s 1918 sex manual ‘Married Love’ to The Hite Report and Anne Koedt’s article ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,’ women’s capacity for sexual pleasure has been defended and explained in ever increasing detail. Today we read Cosmo and watch Sex and the City, where being a single woman is, more than anything else, about having a lot of sex.But sexual freedom has not brought women the freedom they hoped for, and denigration of women’s singleness, virginity or celibacy is no mark of liberation.
Last year’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles revealed growing rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Abortion continues to rise, reaching its peak among women of the twenty-something age group, young women who are the daughters of the second wave feminists, the next generation for whom everything was supposed to be better. STDs are no mark of liberation, and neither is putting yourself through the traumatic experience that is abortion, as Polly Toynbee pointed out in the recent Guardian series on feminism.The feminist call for women’s right to choose their sexuality has, in this post-feminist era, been transformed into an emphasis on compulsory sex, a state in which women are no longer free to choose not to have sex, not to be part of a couple.
