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Kathleen Ward . Mr. Walker. English Language And Composition

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Kathleen Ward
Mr. Walker
English Language and Composition 6
19 January 2017
Popping the Flower and All That Nonsense Can a cherry be popped or a flower stolen? The extensive vocabulary used to label a woman’s sexuality is often more extensive than the knowledge known about the topic in the minds of people who use these band-aid terms. Sex education in schools often portrays the concept of virginity as something greater or lesser than it is depending on one’s perspective. It is either classified too strictly and used as a weapon or it is brushed aside to avoid a few immature snickers. This is how myths begin in school corridors that later spread to the adult world as truth. Unfortunately these playground jokes turn into a harmful …show more content…

While this is not always so extreme, it is living on every continent. Cleopatra Ndlovu tells of these accounts in her essay Virginity Testing Raises Many Questions. In Zimbabwe, girls as young as five years old are being tested to make sure they are virgins. “An elderly woman asks her to lie down, opens her legs, and then inserts into her vagina a finger--which has been inserted in other girls ' private parts that day--to see if she is still a virgin,” (Ndlovu). As traumatizing as this is, the abuse is not widespread in the community. Boys are not tested. One could argue that the community is not testing them because there is no way to test men. While this sounds probable, there are issues within the argument. The first being that the tests on women are not accurate in any sense. The second being that men are simply held with different expectations. “Boys, in contrast, are not subjected to such intimate examinations. Boys and men are not even expected to remain abstinent before or faithful during marriage . Their sexual "purity" is not questioned,” (Ndlovu). The double standards are blatantly obvious. The careful watching of women is common in today 's first world cultures as well. Slut. It’s an easy title to lay upon women to degrade them. The word it used by both men and women alike. Being called a slut has become one of the worst things to be considered as a girl. Typically a slut

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