Cool, sweet post from Ily of asexy beast about one of my fondest subjects: the way language influences, and is influenced by, our thoughts and actions.
“Falling in love”
“Getting kissed”
“Losing your virginity”
We all know I love to talk about words and their “hidden meanings”. But I’ve never really talked about them as a group before. This post is all about words and phrases related to sexual and romantic comings-of-age, and the fact that they use such passive language. Here’s a few things that this sort of language implies to me:
- Inevitablility. I don’t know where or when, but it’s pretty much certain that I will lose my favorite lip gloss. Apparently, your virginity is just as easy to misplace.
- On that note, effortlessness. None of the above concepts imply any work on our part. But if getting kissed is what you’re after, sitting around with closed eyes and pursed lips won’t do much for you.
- Lack of power. When love comes at you, you may be powerless to stop it. But when the same ideas apply to sex…we have a problem.
Maybe this all seems a little far-fetched. But welcome to my world of words.
...
Another interesting thing about these phrases is that they’re gender-neutral. I would expect in our double-standard-happy culture for women, delicate flowers that we are, to lose our virginity, while men ruggedly get to have sex for the first time. Apparently, we are all delicate flowers when it comes to this stuff. But in my opinion, we shouldn’t have to be.
To be honest, I think it would be far better if we could all say we got to have sex for the first time, and lose the whole “losing virginity” concept.
Because, seriously, in terms of coherent, thing-in-the-world-identifying language, if there was ever a thing that was only conceptual it would be the idea of having this thing called “virginity,” that referred to something you don’t have… that can be lost when you have the thing that makes it lost. (I’m sure, say, George Carlin could have put that more clearly. But he’d have made it funny too. And considering the mayhem the notion of virginity has caused both men and women over the last, oh, 6,000 years anyway, a sober analysis seems more appropriate.)
Submitted by 2774 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-03-14 15:48.
Heh -- one of the occasional consistent bits of d/s stuff that happens in my life is the order, "Fuck me now."
I suspect my sense of connotation on it is active, not penetrative, and there's a fascinating thing about how these are assumed synonymous....
Submitted by 2774 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-03-14 10:11.
I had a long discussion with a friend about the semantics of "fucking" versus "getting fucked." He maintained that "fucking" means "penetrating," while I'd rather it be a reciprocal word--she fucked him, he fucked her. "She got fucked" makes it sound like she was just lying there.
Lately, though, I heard a construction I might like even more--"fucking with." "She's been fucking with Rob." If you can ignore the "I'm just fuckin' with ya" colloquialism, I think it's a wonderful way to put things. She wasn't fucking Rob and he wasn't fucking her--they were fucking together.
[I've thought the same thing, Holly, but still balked because of that "I'm just fucking with you" bit. What's kind of interesting is that not everybody sees "fucking" as "act of penetrating." In high school a lot of women were just as likely to say they fucked a boy as to say they let themselves be fucked. Whatever you want to call "doing it" to say "[doing it] with" is way better than "[doing it] *to.*" Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 2774 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-03-14 16:55.
Actually, there's probably a good reason for those wordings...
"Fall in love" may sound passive, but it really is passive - from a purely conscious point of view. It's not like most people choose to fall in love.
"Getting kissed" can be blamed at least partly on the fact that English doesn't have a good way of expressing verbs that occur at a nonspecific point of time. I suppose "do kissing" would work, but using "do" in that way isn't supported in "proper" grammar. Some people apparently extrapolate that to "got kissed" for the past tense and "will get kissed" for the future tense despite the fact that there are other commonly-used ways of expressing this that do not rely on a passive voice.
"Losing your virginity" - Virginity is defined as if it were a state of being. (It doesn't have to be defined that way - it can also be considered a consequence of inaction, for example - but hey, I didn't invent English.) I can't seem to come up with an active-voice way of saying that a state of being is/was/will be ending without also sounding like it's something bad that needs to be gotten rid of. For example, how would you like to delete, remove, or expunge your virginity? Or perhaps verb it, like "devirginize"? It seems to me, for an asexual person, this type of thing would actually be worse.
I bet you can guess that linguistics is one of my hobbies.
Submitted by 2774 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-03-14 23:54.
"Ending your virginity" seems like a fairly neutral (leaning slightly towards positive, but not a huge amount) way of phrasing it.
[Hi Zeborah. Yes, it's perfectly gender neutral. And that's great as far as it goes. My point is that "losing virginity" is sort of a double-negative. A *neutral* double-negative but still negative compared to something but positively affirmative but still neutral like "having sex for the first time." Thanks! --fl]