A Pageant That Celebrates Virginity

I was visiting one of those Nigerian news site one day, I don’t recall what site it had been, but I saw something that was very interesting. I saw a photograph of a young woman being crowned in a pageantry. I looked at her and was confused because she didn’t look like your usual pageant, although she was quite pretty. Then I saw the headline of the news article which read miss virginity, I didn’t know whether to be shocked or amused, so I decided to be skeptical about it. There couldn’t possibly be such a pageant in this hypersexualized day and age, maybe the news site had made up the story. So I decided to do a bit of research, and I found that there actually is a Miss Virginity Pageant that celebrates women keeping their virginity.

The contestants were between the ages of 16 to 30. I am not sure how long the winner was supposed to keep her virginity for, but that’s inconsequential to the idea that a group of people (men) actually sat down and decided to come up with a pageant like this. Again, I didn’t know whether to applaud them to scream at the obvious double standard. If someone can conceive the idea of a miss virginity, why can’t the same be done for men?

Now, I’m all for the idea of a woman keeping the “cookie” in the “cookie jar” before marriage, but I’d like to see men keep their zippers up as well. Why do women have to be the only ones to keep their chastity? It doesn’t seem fair at all for a woman to keep herself until marriage only to end up with a man who certainly was not keeping himself for her. But who cares about fairness? After all, we live in a society where a young man having sex is a sign of coming into manhood, he is applauded for finally becoming a man. However, a woman who looses her virginity before marriage is made to feel ashamed about it,  and an unchaste husband actually expects his wife to be chaste!

I settled for applauding the creators of this pageant for encouraging young women to wait till marriage before having sex because I figured there’s a lot of sexually transmitted diseases out there, so they were in a sense saving lives. This was how I chose to see it, but if I had chosen to see it differently, I would have screamed patriarchy! How can a group of men presume to dictate to these women when they should or shouldn’t have sex, while men were free to decide for themselves.

Again, I am %100 for the idea of a woman waiting till marriage before having sex if that’s her choice. But I had like to see the same standard set for men. Why not?