Alina Percea is an eighteen year-old Romanian university student. She stands 5 feet 6 inches tall and has brown eyes. She is also a virgin. At least that’s the description she gave in her profile on a German dating site she was using to auction off her virginity.
Alina is part of growing trend of young women across the globe who are tapping into what we now know is a huge market of wealthy men willing to pay top dollar for the privilege of deflowering an attractive virgin. In the last two weeks alone stories popped up about two separate girls, one in Northern Ireland and one in New Zealand, who had attempted to auction off their virginity online.
This most recent wave of hymen hustlers first entered the public consciousness in September 2008 when Natalie Dylan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Dylan), a 22-year-old from San Diego auctioned off her virginity in a transaction brokered by the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada. Dylan claimed to have received offers from more than 10,000 suitors with the bids reaching as high as $3.7mil (USD). This amount eclipses the 6650 Euros paid to Alina Percea as well as the $32 000 (USD) garnered by their New Zealand counterpart.
The huge disparity in price can likely be explained by a couple of factors. Both Alina Percea and the young woman from New Zealand had advertised strictly online and only offered scant descriptions of their physical appearance without providing any photographs. By contrast, Dylan announced her campaign on the nationally syndicated Howard Stern Radio Show and had become a minor celebrity by the time the final bids were made, having appeared on several television talk shows including The Tyra Banks Show.
It’s also likely that Dylan benefited from the fact that the United States is much more sexually conservative than both New Zealand and almost all of Europe, at least in law if not in practice. This faith-driven conservatism has spawned an American obsession with virginity that has several bizarre manifestations. The willingness to pay $3.7 million to be a woman’s “first” is one of these manifestations, but there are many others.
It seems virginity has come back into fashion among American teenagers. While I’m not aware of any data that shows teens are actually waiting longer to have sex, it’s clear that just saying you’re a virgin can earn you some caché. There have been a string female pop stars who’ve professed their intention to remain abstinent until marriage, including Jordan Sparks and, most notably, Britney Spears, although we all know how that turned out.
And this fad isn’t just limited to the girls. The Jonas Brothers have also been known to sport purity rings as a proud declaration of their “promises to [themselves] and to God that [they’ll] stay pure until [they’re] married.” The oldest of the trio recently got married at the age of 22. I guess he just couldn’t wait any longer.
A little further down on the creepy scale are lies the purity ball, which remains popular in certain American evangelical and fundamentalist Christian circles. At these events, girls as young as 5 dress up in fancy gowns and are accompanied by their fathers to a prom-like gathering, where father and daughter slow-dance and participate in rituals including a pledge by the daughters to remain pure and make sure that their fathers remain the only man in their lives until they are married. For this reason, these events are sometimes referred to as “purity weddings”.
Fortunately for this sect of religious zealots, they have little regard for research and evidence that doesn’t support their dogma. If they did, they’d discover that, not only is this exclusive promotion of abstinence ineffective in reducing pre-marital sex, but the young victims of this indoctrination (i.e. those who’ve made purity pledges) are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex, and are less likely to use condoms once they become sexually active.
So, as I’m sure the man who paid $3.7 mil to sleep with Natalie Dylan will agree, when it comes to virginity, you don’t always get what you bargain for.