I have a confession to make. Although I am the birth mother of two grown sons, I never lost my virginity.

No, I know exactly what I did with it.

Despite that I gave up my virginity some time back—decades ago, actually—only recently did I give it much thought. And it made me annoyed. Because I viscerally apprehended—flash!—how the language we automatically deploy virtually forces everyone to think of women—and women to think of themselves—as ditzes who can't even keep track of our own private parts! As if we mislay our virginity like a set of car keys. Oops! I can't find my virginity! How stupid can a person get!

Guys don't talk about IT nearly as much as we do. But when they do it's certainly not about "losing their virginity." Instead, they mention something about "doing it" for the first time. The "it," mind you, is an act we guys and girls are tangled up in together. But when the clinch ends and we both climb out of the very same bed we were in, they've accomplished something. And we've lost a part of ourselves we can never hope to regain.

For men that rite of passage is a plus. For us it's a minus. We have an experience that adds a powerful new dimension to relationships, that deepens our capacity to feel, that deepens our experience in the world. But somehow we come out of it with less than we started with, while the boys get bragging rights.

Of course, I'm not talking about virginity stolen, another matter entirely. Rape or coerced is criminal no matter a woman's age, marital or virginity status. The issue is what we do and, just as important, what we say, apparently of our own .

Language always structures the way people think. It goes without saying—but here I am saying it anyway—that it is the function of every culture to hand over to its members a pre-fabricated vocabulary by which they have some hope of sharing meaning.

We absorb many words and phrases before we have the ability or to question them. And many of those words have a highly shady past. But once we acquire a phrase and its words and meaning are locked together automatically, it becomes the very lens we look through, at ourselves and indeed at all of life. We forfeit a slice of consciousness.

It's hard not to slip into such a well-carved groove. But when we pick up and use the exact same pejorative words that others have prefabricated for us, especially about our own experience, we wind up collaborating in our own inferiority.

To "lose" one's virginity: I toss the phrase around in my brain to get the full measure of it. It is overflowing with negativity. Losing anything is an action only by default. When we "lose" our virginity we inadvertently fail to retain something. We turn ourselves not just into passive creatures but into victims of our own passivity.

We don't "misplace" our virginity. We "lose" it, thereby putting ourselves beyond any hope of recovering it. Thereafter we exist in a state of deprivation. We are defective. We are missing a vital working part and will be for the rest of our lives.

As virginity, once lost, is not recoverable, the phrase suggests that we should be in for our missing virginity for the rest of our lives. We will be forever less than whole.

And then to "lose," virginity or anything else, is a frank admission of defeat. And so we come, as a , to be seen as permanent "losers," eternal second-class citizens, particularly in comparison to that other flavor of humanity, male.

If we misplace our own virginity, something that's integrally a part of us, how can we dithering creatures possibly hope to manage anything else of value? We just can't be trusted to get important things right. At bottom, we're all just a bunch of dumb broads.

As for me, I didn't lose my virginity. When I didn't need it anymore, I quietly discarded it. And I haven't spent a moment looking for it since.