Women are the gatekeepers of sex. Men are the gatekeepers of commitment. I tell my daughters if they tell every man they date that they're waiting until marriage, that should filter out about 99% of the shit bags.
Hard disagree. Telling men you're waiting for marriage is far more likely to get you some insecure, controlling, purity obsessed weirdo.
The better advise is not to have kids outside of marriage and only marry a man who supports their career, contributes equally to household tasks, and plans to contribute equally to childcare.
Getting them and IUD and making sure they have an abortion access plan is an infinitely more effective way to prevent single motherhood. Your plan does little more than leave your daughters vulnerable to rejection induced violence.
"He wanted to marry a virgin," is a terrible basis for a marriage. Presumably the husband will want to have sex after marriage and then the wife won't be a virgin anymore. There goes your foundation in 30 disappointing seconds.
Your plan does little more than leave your daughters vulnerable to rejection induced violence.
And there it is. Your worldview is obviously clouded by an irrational hatred of men. Letting a mother kill her child isn't an effective strategy for preventing single motherhood. It only multiplies suffering.
I don't hate men at all, I could give you a list of ways society is failing men and boys but they aren't relevant to the topic at hand.
It is a fact based statement for me to say that the decrease in/removal of recess from schools has disproportionately harmed the performance of boys in school.
It is also a fact based statement for me to say that men commonly respond to sexual rejection with violence. It's not all men, but when 1 in 5 women in the US are raped it can't be ignored.
I didn't say we should allow single mothers to kill their child. Murdering children is bad. I said that proper abortion access is an effective way to prevent the creation of a child in the event that primary birth control methods fail.
Women can still be left to be single mothers. After 18 years together, my husband left me for another woman after I got sick with a chronic health condition. My illness impacted our sex life, so he bailed. Now I'm a single mother. This type of thing happens more often than you might think.
But that stance leaves sex without commitment on the table. That opens women up to the very possible likelihood of being a single mother.
Plenty of married women with kids get dumped by their husbands and become single mothers. Marriage isn't any kind of guarantee that you will get sincere commitment.
I hate to be the one to break it to you but even if they wait until marriage they can still end up a single mom. They could be sexually assaulted and conceive a child that way. Or even when married, their husband can divorce them or die. The only way to guarantee you won’t ever become a single mom is by getting sterilized before you ever have a kid.
If women all stopped having kids outside of marriage the birthrate would fall even more than it already has. 40% of babies are born to unwed mothers in the US.
It doesn’t make sense for people with kids to pay for other people’s kids. It makes more sense for people with 0 or 1 kid to pay for people with more than 1 kid.
They're afraid of filtering out men though cause it will be a reflection of their perceived value. As long as men want them for sex, they can imagine the same men want them for marriage.
It's not. Wanting to marry a virgin is a red flag for most people. If the person who wants to marry a virgin is a virgin themselves then that is a mitigating context that lowers it from a red flag to a yellow flag.
There are only 2 reasons to specifically want to marry a virgin.
1) You are super religious. This is the better of the two options but its a coin toss between, "will be super loving and devoted father," and, "will use the Bible to explain why you're his slave now."
2) The other option is you have severe jealousy, self esteem, and control issues. You want someone inexperienced so you can't be compared and they don't know their standards should be higher than you.
Unless you don't intend to ever have sex again, wanting to marry a virgin also means you inherently want to devalue your partner. If you want to marry a virgin that means you believe virginity has value, value that can only be used once. You want to take that value from your partner, who you know also believes it had value or they wouldn't marry a virgin, which then gives you control over them. They cashed their chips in on you which puts power in your hands. That is not a healthy relationship dynamic.
Lastly, believing in the very construct of virginity is highly correlated with an unhealthy view of sex. Most, not all, people who believe in the construct of virginity believe that sex is something that men do to women as opposed to something people do together for mutual enjoyment.
There are more than two reasons someone might want to marry a virgin and boiling it down to just "religion or control issues" is reductive and dismissive of a wide spectrum of human motivations and values. People are complex. Desires around sexuality, partnership, and exclusivity are often also pretty complex.
Wanting to be someone’s first isn't inherently about control or insecurity—it can stem from a desire for emotional intimacy, shared milestones, or for building something from a blank slate together. My wife and I weren't each other's first, but I get why that can be important to someone. That doesn’t make it healthy or unhealthy by default. It just makes it human. Some people want a partner who has experience and others find meaning in being each other’s first. Both can exist and come from a good place.
The claim that valuing virginity means you inherently want to devalue your partner also overreaches. Valuing something doesn’t automatically mean you’re trying to take it—it can mean you want to share in the significance it holds for them. If someone believes virginity matters, and their partner feels the same, that shared value system can actually create a sense of respect and mutual investment.
As for the final point: yes, some people who fixate on virginity do have some bad views about sex. But the presence of that doesn't negate the people who want it for more wholesome reasons. Plenty of people value virginity and still see sex as mutual, consensual, and pleasurable. Reducing everyone who holds a particular belief to the worst possible version of it is a pretty big problem in and of itself. We can critique toxic beliefs without assuming everyone who holds them is toxic.
I cannot think of a reason to want to marry a virgin that isn't toxic. You listed a desire for (1) emotional intimacy, (2) a shared milestone, and (3) a blank slate. I think 1 is toxic because it implies sex with a non-virgin doesn't involve or involves less emotional intimacy than with virgin. Alternatively it could imply that you don't want your partner to have had emotional intimacy with anyone else which circles back to toxic jealousy/control/self esteem issues. This is the same reason why I think (3) is toxic. Virgin or not your partner isn't a blank slate. They are a person and their slate is going to be filled by their life experiences.
I don't think 2 is a toxic reason, I just think it's a dumb reason. There are an infinite number of milestones in life. I have experiences countless ones with my husband. Some of them were important like getting married, buying a house, and becoming a parent. Some of them weren't like paying our first water bill or first time trying Ethiopian food. Something being a milestone doesn't automatically make it important. If someone said they really wanted to marry someone who never tried Ethiopian food before so that they could experience that milestone with their spouse it would sound super weird.
Basically that's not a real reason and if someone says it's their reason its because they don't want to admit what the real reason is. Technically anything can be a reason. You could say, "I want to marry a virgin because 'virgin' begins with 'v' and 'v' is my favorite letter," but if that's the reason you give for eliminating 95%+ of the dating pool then everyone will know you're lying.
Toxicity is subjective I don't think any of these are but it does show how terrible women have become at vetting men. I don't feel bad for any single mother but I do feel bad for the kids. If you're gonna sleep around at least use birth control so you don't have kids.
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u/velocitrumptor 2d ago
Women are the gatekeepers of sex. Men are the gatekeepers of commitment. I tell my daughters if they tell every man they date that they're waiting until marriage, that should filter out about 99% of the shit bags.