The amount of friends I had while a Christian who bled on their wedding night NOT from a hymen but from being too dry was literally all of them.

To the point where my wedding gift was always lube. Because all of my friends ended up tearing and then not having sex for three weeks https://twitter.com/thepursuinglife/status/1391155913495506946

And obviously the psychological harm is super important too and I can’t really get into that because I simply DO NOT WANT TO. But.

I also had a friend who had sex, then broke up, met someone else and married them and spent hours praying to God that on their wedding night, they

would bleed and hurt like it was the first time. So they believed God had restored their virginity because they bled so badly and were in pain.

That’s not God miraculously restoring a hymen, that’s two people who know nothing about sex having a bad time and the person with the

vagina experiencing actual bodily harm because of that.

I had another friend whose mom told us it would hurt the first 10-15 times.

My first time, I insisted we use lube. And my partner was like, “We’ll make sure you’re relaxed and you’re also so wet, you probably don’t need

it but we will absolutely use it if you want” took me shopping for lubes and we had a great time and I super didn’t need lube. I was mentally waiting for it to hurt and it never did.
It never hurt.
To the point where I wondered if something was wrong with me and I texted a friend

to ask if something was wrong and she was like, “No, baby, it’s because you were enjoying yourself!”

That’s how insidious and intensely connected to rape the purity culture idea of waiting for sex until marriage is.

Now. I will ALWAYS say that if you want to wait until marriage

that is your choice and no one can tell you if it is the right or wrong choice for you. I think it would be terrible to have sex when you weren’t really convinced this was what you wanted. So wait if that’s what you desire! And no one should speak against it!

But. You SHOULD

know as much about sex going in as you can. The physical functions. What’s normal/abnormal. How to enjoy yourself. Consent. Safe words. Lube. Birth control. Foreplay. Premature ejaculation. STI. Vaginismus. Etcetera. It’s your responsibility to yourself and also to your partner.

I also think that a lot of this conversation is of course focused specifically on penis in vagina sex because purity culture is very wrapped up in Christianity and Mormonism, where queer people have been made very unsafe. So if you are staying virgin until marriage and are queer,

then get to know your body and get to know the topics that will come up for you—again, lube, dams, condoms, STI’s, how to properly finger a vagina, how to relax an asshole, etc.