Virgin Quotes

“Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Not every human culture places a particular value on virginity, and not every culture that does value it values it the same way or to the same degree. Indeed, a given culture's treatment of virginity can change over time.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“For most of recorded history, the treatment of women's sexual and reproductive health was the almost exclusive bailiwick of women, including the "juries of matrons" who performed the genital examinations required in the evaluation of rape and annulment cases and who were among the rare women considered qualified to give testimony in medieval courts of law.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Virginity had come to carry the symbolic weight of not just a husband's desire to control the ancestry of the children born under his roof but of male desire to control the behavior of women and children. It had become a symbol of successful patriarchy as a whole.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“As one of the large-scale background conditions of human life and human sexuality, our ideals in regard to virginity, like those in regard to gender and class and race, have always depended on historical circumstance.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Swiftly I learned that regardless of the source or when it was written, information relating to virginity is rarely presented in such a way that it is free of bias, superstition, or simply the kind of inaccuracies that often sneak into even academic books under the guise of "things everybody knows".”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Women's issues, and particularly issues pertaining to women's sexual and reproductive lives, are routinely pushed to the bottom of international political and social agendas”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History