No, you cannot lose your virginity with a tampon. Horse riding won’t do it either. The fact that some of these myths prevail is part of the reason I’m betting the second most common sentence that goes through someone’s head after having sex for the first time – straight after, “Was that it?!” – did I really just lose my virginity?

Part of the problem with the eternal question of what “counts” as losing your virginity is that there’s no comprehensive, realistic definition of what sex is. Not really.

Most people understand virginity to mean the first time a person has heterosexual vaginal intercourse, but this is an incredibly narrow vision of human sexuality. It’s a bit silly, not to mention offensive, for instance, to suggest that only straight sex is real sex. Or to tell women that losing their virginity is based on whether or not they have a hymen (an invented association). For young people raised on abstinence-only education who think that having oral or anal sex doesn’t count, the confusion over virginity isn’t just a rhetorical issue but one with health implications. The question can also present a painful conundrum for those who are survivors of rape.

When I wrote my 2009 book The Purity Myth, I found that there is no widely accepted medical definition of virginity. I spoke to historian and author Hanne Blank, who noted that she scoured the best medical libraries in the US and found that there was “no diagnostic standard for virginity”. It’s a concept that’s more cultural than medical – an outdated idea that’s been used more to shame than to mark sexual initiation. But still, people want a way to mark the first time they’ve been sexually intimate.

I’ve suggested in the past that perhaps a person’s first orgasm with a partner should count as losing their virginity. This seems like a pleasure-based standard that puts the power of “virginity” back in individuals’ hands, so to speak. But I’ve since been taken to task – rightly, I believe – because this is not a definition that includes or is sensitive to the large number of people who don’t orgasm from sexual activity.

So where does that leave us? Heather Corrina, founder of the sex education website Scarleteen, has written that she wishes the concept of virginity would just “go away”, but she understands that it won’t, and so answered a young woman’s question about whether or not she had really had sex in the best way I’ve seen to date.

“If you want to ‘count’ this experience as having something to do with virginity you can,” Corrina wrote. “If you do not want to count it as something to do with your virginity, you get to do that, too. The same goes with sex: what sex is or isn’t for any of us varies because we’re all so different and so are all of our sexual experiences. We don’t all have the same bodies, identities, sexualities, sexual opportunities or the same sexual relationships. So long as the way you define sex feels true to you and your experiences in the moment, then that’s your right definition.”

If we want to attach meaning to a “first” then surely we should be the ones who decide what, exactly, that first time was.

Of course, the problem is that while we can (and should) deride the idea of virginity as outdated and useless – or tell young people that they can decide what it means for themselves – there is still the problem of how everyone else views virginity.

Across the world, virginity has a stranglehold on the way people think about sex, sexuality and – most dangerously – women’s value and moral worth. There are still virginity tests, purity balls, and the ever-present idea that good women are chaste while women who aren’t are somehow bad, dirty, or used goods. It’s not enough to say that virginity shouldn’t mean anything; we have to find a way for that argument to have meaning and impact.

Perhaps it’s a matter of more doctors coming out of the woodwork to explain that no, hymens don’t mean anything, or that virginity is a subjective experience. Maybe young people should refuse to mark their first sexual experience, or lawmakers should stop equating sexuality with deviancy. So long as white wedding dresses, American pie movies and the Republican party exist, I don’t have much hope that virginity will lose its grip on the public imagination though – in the US anyway.

But here’s the good news: for those who do mark the first time they have sex, it’s getting better (for women, at least). A recent broad study, conducted over 23 years and following nearly 6,000 young people, published this summer in the Journal of Sex Research, found that women are enjoying their first sexual experience more today than in years past. That seems a lot more important than what exactly happened in bed that made the experience a “real” one.