SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA
Can you be a virgin if you've already had sex? It may seem an absurd question, but in the United States many women with a strong Christian identity – including celebrities such as singer Ciara – claim to be born-again virgins. This is an idea modelled on born-again Christians, who claim to be "reborn" thanks to their faith. In practical terms, this means starting their sex lives from scratch, and refusing to have sex before marriage even though they often have years of sexual experience behind them.
Born-again virgins have been the subject of books and TV talk shows, and a search on YouTube will return videos of young women explaining how, in practical terms, to become a virgin again. (Spoiler: all you have to do is decide that you are one.) They urge their audience to recognize that "purity is for everyone" and warn against temptation. (Second spoiler: it's all the devil's fault.)
Seen from France, these born-again virgins seem pretty laughable, and yet this obsession with virginity is not completely unfamiliar to us. The secular, contemporary version of this quest for sexual innocence exists – albeit in more insidious forms. In 2021, influencer Maeva Ghennam caused a stir by extolling the virtues of vaginal rejuvenation: "I'm really lucky, I have a really beautiful vagina, I don't have protruding labia. It's so cool. Right now, it's like I'm 12 years old."
The influencer, who has since retracted her comments, unwillingly revealed an uncomfortable truth: the idea that the less experience a woman has, the better, for both physical and moral reasons, still resonates. In France, no one expects adult women to be virgins anymore, but one prefers them not to have too much experience, and for this experience not to have left too much of a trace. In our worship of tight vaginas, we are more or less consciously seeking the same thing as Ghennam and Ciara.
We see this as well in the practice of the "husband's stitch" – using additional and unnecessary stitches when repaiting a woman's vagina after childbirth. We catch it in our frenetic reeducation of the pelvic floor, even when we don't have any medical problems [a practice that is the norm after childbirth in France, provided by physiotherapists] . We see it in the abundance of vaginal "tightening" capsules and gels available, as well as the "vaginal tightening" machines sold on Amazon which work by ultrasound, radiofrequency or electrostimulation (good luck to anyone trying them out).
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