I'm viewing this from the standpoint of men being in control of
property, because they were.

You have property.  You don't have any sexual mores to speak of.  You
want your property transmitted to your children and your children's
children.  You don't want to marry a woman who is already pregnant and
give some other guy's children your property and raise them in your
social level.  You want to make sure they're your children.  You insist
on a virgin wife.  Since the mother is always known, but the father not
always, the man doesn't need to refrain from sexual activity before
marriage.  He and his wife both know that, if she's virgin when they
have sex and she becomes pregnant, the child is theirs.

So, virginity is about property and only applies to the woman.  Of
course, there's possessiveness in love and such, but that's not the
primary issue with virginity.

Over time, virginity takes on a patina of virtue.  There are, of course,
sexual rules for men even in pre-Homeric times, but these have to do
with maintaining the marriage vows once they've been consummated, not
before (Hera is the Greek enforcer of this).  Even then, the rules
aren't really that strong, because there's no danger of not knowing
where their own children come from, for either the woman or the man, if
a man has sex with other women.   Also, this is more about keeping a vow
than about sex.  But, again over time, this new idea of virginity being
purity and the idea of female chastity during marriage being purity and
the of idea male continence during marriage being purity begin to blur.
 Infuse Europe, on top of this blurring, with a Christian idea of sexual
morality and a celibate priesthood.  Now you have male virgins.


Terry O'Grady wrote:

>Dirk ---would you run that virginity/transmission of property/status
>theory by me one more time.  Terry O'Grady
>
>
>