Game show host Shan: Welcome to Like a Virgin, where no question is off-limits, and the answers might surprise you.

Today, our contestants are: 

Teen Shan!

A chick from the 1980s!

And a maiden from the Middle Ages!

First question: How can you tell if a woman isn't a virgin?

Teen Shan: From how she walks? She got, like, a sway, you know? 

Game show host Shan: Yeah, no. Contestant two?

1980s Teen: No doy — if she's got tampons in her purse. 

Game show host Shan: Not even close. Contestant number three, and I'm terrified of what you're about to say. 

Medieval Maiden: 'Tis but a simple task. Brew a potion of herbs, onions, and garlic. Place a weighty covering upon the maiden as she sitteth in a chair above the fire, and allow the vapors to waft up into her v—

Game show host Shan: NOPE. Clearly we need to get into this. 

[Reveals herself as Shan, mock gasp]

Shan Boodram: Hi, I'm Shan Boodram, this is Crash Course: Sex Ed, and today we're talking about virginity: is it really a thing? We'll be right back after these messages. 

[Theme music]

When someone thinks "virgin,":their mind often goes to the only sex act that can make a baby: penis-in-vagina. Which is complicated, since that's not what all sex looks like, but it's where we'll camp out for today. 

Nobody knows exactly when we started caring about virginity, but a leading theory is that it goes all the way back to the invention of farming. 

Which sounds like I'm making it up, but I swear I'm not messing with you. 

Farming coincided with the invention of property. So suddenly, ownership mattered: my land, my crops, my stuff—and hold on, which of these kids are mine? 

In these patriarchal societies, "Who's your daddy?" was an important question. And the only way for men to be sure about their biological dadhood was to invent a system where women were expected to reserve sex for their husbands. 

Old MacDonald had a farm... and control over his wife's sex life. 

Over the centuries, virginity became a whole thing in the West, embedded in everything from artwork and religion to laws and teen movies. 

And premarital virginity became such a prized quality in women, people were like, "No no no no, we can't just take her word for it. We need to prove that she's telling the truth. 

In 17th century England, people theorised you could tell a virgin from the proportions of her neck. 

Before that, in Renaissance Europe, it was thought that a virgin could be sussed out based on the clarity of her pee. 

And of course, virginity detectives have long honed in on the hymen. 

Don't know her? She's a thin membrane near the opening of the vagina. Literally just some tissue left over after the vagina forms during fetal development. 

You may have heard that the hymen breaks—like the seal on a jar—the first time a person with a vagina has P-in-V sex, changing them physically forever. 

But it doesn't work like that. And it's nothing like popping a cherry, so let's just ban that phrase forever.

Some people with vaginas don't have much of a hymen to begin with. And for those who do, that tissue often thins away way before they're sexually active, from exercising, riding a bike, using a tampon, or just existing. 

Many people never know their hymen's there, much less when it's gone. 

Still, this myth is so globally pervasive that some parents still ask doctors to "test" their child's virginity by checking the hymen and the stretchiness of the vagina... but according to medical experts, neither of those things tell you anything about whether that person has had sex. 

The vagina doesn't permanently stretch out the first, or any of the times, that someone has sex. The va-jay-jay is like a rubber band; it just bounces back. 

Trust me on thsy one. I birthed two babies. 

It's also a myth that a person with a vagina always bleeds or experiences pain the first time they have sex. It can happen, but not always.

And it might have nothing to do with the hymen. Discomfort can happen for lots of reasons, including tension, position, speed, or not being lubricated well enough—even if it's your 3,000th time. 

Sex doesn't have to be painful, and if it is, your doctor can help you out with that. 

All of this is to say: virginity is not a medical reality. There's no physical way of telling whether a person has had penis-in-vagina sex—not from the hymen any more than from the earlobe. 

So if virginity isn't a physical state of being, what is it?

Think of virginity like money. It's real in the sense that some people care about lot about it, and it impacts our lives — I mean, having sex for the first time is a real experience.

And it can be a big moment in someone's life! 

But the value we assign to virginity? That’s something that cultures have just made up

Morespecifically, virginityisan exampleofa sexualscript—one of the many social expectations about how to behave when it comes to sex. 

This idea was first proposed in the 1960s by sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon, who argued that human sexuality is less driven by biological instincts than the social meanings we create. 

You can think of scripts like stage directions in a given time and place. 

Like, if you send me the eggplant emoji, I'm gonna think you're flirting. 

Sexual scripts train people in what's "normal" or "correct" sexual behaviour, and they often interact with scripts for gender—society's typecast roles for men and women. 

On top of that, traditional sexual scripts in the West are highly heteronormative, presuming that only men and women have sex with each other. Oh, and those women sharing a life together? Yeah, they're just roommates. 

Like, here's a sexual script you might have heard before: Men mainly care about the physical parts of sex, and the emotional relationship with their partner... well that's less important. Meanwhile, for women, it's all about the emotions. 

But those traditional scripts aren't for everybody, and if they don't work for you, you can write your own story. Especially when the scripts handed to you do more harm than good. 

For example, multiple studies have found that women living in cultures that prize virginity are often more reluctant to have conversations about sexual health or access to certain types of healthcare. 

Take pap smears. They involve swabbing the cervix to check for cancerous cells, and are recommended for everyone with a vagina who's over 21. 

But in cultures that value purity, some women avoid getting the procedure, thinking it'll threaten their status as a virgin or reveal that they have had P-in-V sex. 

And like we talked about in Episode 4, gendered sexual scripts often cast people in rigid roles they didn’t choose. 

Like, that script about men not prioritising emotional intimacy? That starts developing early, as boys get cast in gender roles that go something like: "Explore! Be assertive! But don't talk about feelings!" 

Compare that with the script traditionally handed to girls: "Settle down! Be careful! Think of others' feelings!"

Growing up with these scripts can shape our expectations, creating miscommunications that make it seem like men and women are innately different.

So different they might as well be from different planets, a claim made by the 1992 book "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus".

In it, you'll find statements like: men like the news, the weather, gadgets, gizmos, and uniforms. Women care about feelings, beauty, relationships, and wearing a different outfit every day. 

But these claims aren't well supported by research. The gender similarities hypothesis, proposed by psychologist Janet Hyde, asserts that men and women are more alike than they are different. 

In a study on areas where men and women are often assumed to part ways, like math skills and the gift of gab, Hyde found no statistically significant differences. 

When it came to sexuality, the largest gender differences were frequency of masturbation and attitudes towards casual sex. 

But how much of that ties into sexual scripts?

Some researchers have also pointed out that boys are taught to touch their genitals from an early age so they can aim while peeing, which can lead to more exploration, and more experience with what feels good to them. 

"For kids your age it's just something normal."

Meanwhile, girls are often taught that their vulva is something they shouldn't touch. 

[TV test sound effect, card that reads: advice for girls not found]

And can we really talk about attitudes toward casual sex without addressing the virgin script in the room?

That gendered double-standard that tells girls it's shameful to have sex while telling boys it's shameful to be a virgin?

Or how about the flip that happens as we get older, from "Oh my gosh, you're too young to have sex!" to "What do you mean you haven't done it yet?"

Either way, decades of research show that these narrow scripts are not good for us. 

The good news is, these scripts don't have to be your story. Your culture hands you a draft, not a blueprint of how to live your life.

Even people who like the traditional script may find it limiting at some point — like when a man  needs to cry, or a woman wants to enjoy some casual sex without getting branded with a scarlet letter!

So, go ahead: Edit them, scribble in the margins, write your own plot.

For years, I was told that my first experience of P-in-V sex "bad" because it didn't look like most people's. And it wasn't until I took a big ol' red marker to the virginity script that I was able to own and appreciate my story. 

And the more freedom we grant each other to write our own stories, the better off we all are. 

So is virginity really a thing? 

Well, it isn't a physical absolute, and it doesn't have any inherent value.

It's one of the many scripts our society hands to us. But those aren't objective truths, and you get to decide which parts you want to keep, and which parts you write yourself. 

Next time, we're busting myths about STIs. See you then. 

This episode of Crash Course: Sex Ed was produced in partnership with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. If you're interested in learning more, visit their website for resources that explore the topics we discussed in the video today. 

Thank you for watching this episode, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis and was made with the help of all these purely awesome people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.