Gynecologists Still Verify Virginity Because Systems Enforce Myths

Poet Hollie McNish argues that virginity is a social construct, a myth used to control and shame people, particularly women.

The word itself has no real biological basis. But then the actual behavior emerges from the article's own reporting. Gynecological exams are still performed to "verify" virginity, marriages are dissolved on its absence. Women are medically treated as though this abstraction were a measurable fact.

The article documents a myth with consequences so material that it shapes medical decisions, marital prospects. Legal systems across multiple countries. This is where the argument turns on itself—you cannot simultaneously claim something is mythical and that it determines outcomes.

A myth, by definition, has no causal power. Yet the evidence shows virginity functioning exactly as currency functions, or citizenship, or credit scores—these are constructs without biological basis either. Nobody calls them myths. They are treated as real because enough people with institutional authority treat them as verifiable and consequential. The power derives not from the thing's intrinsic reality but from the enforcement infrastructure behind it.

McNish's error is calling something mythical while documenting its material fragility. If virginity were truly mythical, gynecologists wouldn't perform these exams—the fact that they do means the myth has been institutionalized. The dangerous move in dismantling it is pretending the belief is the problem rather than the system that operationalizes the belief. You cannot reason someone out of a construct they didn't reason themselves into. You can only make the enforcement too costly or too socially embarrassing to sustain.

This matters everywhere you're trying to change a system that benefits from your compliance. Assume the opposition isn't intellectually confused. Assume they're operating a functioning protection racket for their own position. The person defending an unjust rule is rarely confused about its unreality. They're defending the apparatus that lets them transfer risk to you.