How virgin travelled from green shoots to skydivers and unicorn hunts
The Latin behind virgin probably grew from a family of words about being green and fresh, including one for a strip of wood. English first used it around 1200 for consecrated church women, stretched it to Mary a century later, and today will happily call a first-time skydiver a virgin.
Virgin reached English through Old French virgine from Latin virgo, maiden. Linguists think virgo formed by analogy with words built on vireo, to be green or flourishing, mostly used of plants; virga, a strip of wood, is one relative. The oldest English example sits in a Middle English manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, dated to about 1200, where uirgines appear beside martyrs and confessors. There it means members of the Order of Virgins, consecrated women recorded by the Church Fathers since the early church.
Meaning then widened in stages. By about 1300 the word was applied to Mary, mother of Jesus, which tied it explicitly to sexual inexperience. Roughly a hundred years later it covered any virtuous or naive young woman, religious or not. Modern English no longer limits it by age or sex: the title Virgin Queen fits a grown woman, men can be virgins, and the old sense of uninitiated survives in phrases such as virgin knight and virgin field.
Medieval bestiaries claimed that a unicorn could only be caught or tamed by using a virgin as bait, because of her supposed purity, and Renaissance painters returned to that scene often. The writer Hanne Blank observes that virginity serves no known biological need and brings no demonstrable evolutionary benefit; its weight is entirely social. Feminist critics such as Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth, add that no standard medical definition exists and no test can prove it.
Even the boundary is disputed. A 1999 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, using answers gathered in 1991 from 599 randomly chosen students across 29 US states, found that 60 percent did not count oral contact as sex. Stephanie Sanders of the Kinsey Institute, a co-author, called it technical virginity; the team titled the paper Would You Say You Had Sex If. A 2008 Guttmacher Institute study by Laura Lindberg concluded that teenagers swapping oral sex for intercourse to stay technically virgins is largely a myth.
Source: Virginity
