She’s never had sex before, but she already knows it’s ‘powerful’. She’s had offers from men who want to ‘buy’ her virginity from her – ‘treating it like a product’. It makes her sad ‘that people see purity as something transactional’. There have been offers in the six-figure range, some even higher.
When I ask how many men have propositioned her in this way, 21-year-old Sophie Rain ‘politely’ requests to move on. She’s ‘saving’ her first time for marriage. She’s deeply religious, but, for Sophie, it’s also about ‘self-respect’, ‘discipline’ and knowing her ‘worth’. She does think about sex, though, including how she’d like it to feel ‘safe, sacred and intentional’. She’s also an adult content creator who is reported to have made $43m (£32m) last year from selling what she describes as ‘sensual’ content. But her virginity, she asserts, isn’t for sale – ‘I always say no.’
Auctioning virginity
Laura holds her hand up to her chin, pouting at the mirror. She’s tied a knot in her white shirt and her eyes are wide-open, doe-like, looking away from the camera. She’d definitely get ID’d at the bar. Unlike Sophie, she’s more than willing to monetise her virginity. She’s 22 years old and her picture appears on the escort agency Cinderella Escorts, alongside hundreds of other women who have listed their virginities for sale, on the site, via online auction.
She hit headlines earlier this year, after saying that she auctioned off her virginity for £1.6m to an unknown Hollywood actor. This is all while Sophie remains OnlyFans’ highest-earning star and Bonnie Blue’s ‘bedding virgins’ stunt is reported to have earned £600k per month on OnlyFans (she’s now permanently banned from the site).
Recently, social media star Lil Tay claimed she made $1m (£750,000) within hours of joining OnlyFans, on the eve of her 18th birthday. ‘Every male has been counting down to it and literally telling me to “drop the link” the second I turn 18,’ she said in an Instagram video. A few weeks after joining, she tweeted, ‘Should I sell my virginity to the highest bidder?’
And, just this week, former child influencer Piper Rockelle, who first started appearing in YouTube videos when she was eight, joined OnlyFans, and claims she made millions within an hour on the site. While her virginity was never mentioned, her youth is said to be her biggest 'selling point' with men saying they had been "counting down the days" until they could consume her content.
Everyone's clicking on...
In mainstream culture, this summer saw Channel 4’s Virgin Island break rating records among 16- to 34-year-olds, while Hulu in America launched 'Are You My First?'
The fixation with virginity is nothing new. In the 15th century, Joan of Arc remained a virgin until she died at 19. In Japan, geishas were sometimes involved in the practice of “mizuage”, where a wealthy patron would bid for the right to take her virginity. The practice was outlawed in 1956. In modern pop culture, purity rings and “pledges” took off in the 90s and early 00s, while musical megastars of their era Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson were clearly marketed as ‘wholesome’ and ‘virginal’ (at the time, Spears said she didn’t believe in sex before marriage).
A more sex-positive movement came in the decade that followed and discussions around virginity quietened down. But recently, there’s been a resurging fascination with it and what it means. If sex sells, it seems that, lately, cashing in on not having sex sells even more. It feels like we’re entering a new era of purity culture, where our longstanding obsession with virginity has been reignited during a time when, in theory, social conventions seem to say we can be sexually freer. Politically, though, powerful forces want to see that freedom rolled back. So if virginity still holds so much value, and women such as Sophie are profiting from something that has, traditionally, been used as a form of control, who’s really winning? What does this interest in virginity tell us about our sexuality today? I delved into the world of high-value virginity to find out.
Virgin appeal
In 2023, journalist Daisy Maskell became fascinated by virginity auctions. So, in a stunt that became part of a Channel 4 documentary, she posed as someone auctioning off their virginity. Daisy, who was in her early 20s, used clothing and makeup to make herself appear much younger. ‘It was a wild and weird world,’ she tells me, but what worried her most was the kind of men interested in her. She talked face to face with three bidders over a video call, receiving offers ranging from £20,000 to £200,000. What she found most uncomfortable was how ‘normal’ the men seemed – ‘they had average jobs, they could be your colleagues, your dads, your uncles’. But they made her feel ‘like a piece of meat’; one told her he didn’t want to use a condom and that she wouldn’t get an STI or pregnant because he was over 40. ‘They assumed I was completely naive.’
There are lists of virgins on OnlyFans doing the rounds, too. ‘Heyy im Sophi 18 y/o with A cups and still growing!’ reads one profile; and ‘Hii im 18 and still figuring things out,’ says another. When Sophie launched her Bop House, where she and eight others create social media and OnlyFans content, it attracted criticism. The collective following of the creators amounts to 33 million, and the content that’s produced and pushed out appears youthful – childlike even. Think: trending dances and girls in matching PJs. While OnlyFans insists it has a very rigorous age verification process, the branding and positioning of Sophie and her fellow creators has been described as ‘warped’ and ‘sick’ by experts and social media users alike. As I scrolled on OnlyFans looking for virgins, I imagined the men doing the same thing – what exactly were they looking for? Sophie tells me people are intrigued because content creators such as her are ‘not following the script’.
‘I’m on OnlyFans, but I’m not doing what people expect,’ she says, ‘I talk about virginity, God, boundaries – things that feel out of place in adult spaces, but actually resonate deeply with people who are tired of seeing the same thing online. I’m creating contrast.’ Her audience is made up of men, young and old, who often message her about ‘faith, heartbreak and discipline’. In some ways, Sophie feels like she’s in a relationship with these men. ‘I show up for them, and they show up for me. It’s meaningful.’
Like a virgin
On eBay, I find bottles of ‘fake virginity blood’; on Amazon there’s vaginal tightening gels and blood capsules that can be inserted into the vagina before sex; there are companies selling, for hundreds of pounds, artificial hymen kits (the package comes complete with everything necessary to ‘make you a virgin again’).
These products come with price tags ranging from £50 to £200, and I wonder who is buying and, more pressingly, profiting from these products. And while inserting a capsule into your vagina to “fake” virginity is likely to be more on the niche end of the spectrum, products that claim to “tighten” or “freshen” the vagina are way more mainstream. One popular adult sex shop sells a vaginal tightening gel that “may help enhance pleasure” and uses the lyrics from Madonna’s Like A Virgin as part of its product description.
Then there’s the sharp rise in “designer vaginas”, with procedures ranging from vaginal tightening to labiaplasty, which reshapes or reduces the size of your labia. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons began collecting data on the number of labiaplasty surgeries carried out every year in 2022, owing to the sudden uptick in women seeking the procedure. In 2023, it recorded 680 labiaplasty surgeries taking place in the UK. Sometimes women have the procedure for practical reasons, to reduce chafing, but there has also been a spike in Gen Z women seeking out the treatment (and posting about it online) for aesthetic reasons. The decision to have surgery is a deeply personal one, but when there’s the ever-persistent myth that your vagina should look a certain way, or that being “tighter” creates more sexual pleasure (often framed through the male experience), products and surgeries such as this cross into murky territory. Particularly when you consider the history of similar surgeries and how they were (and, sadly, still are) used as a form of child and honour-based abuse.
‘I’m putting forward a feminist argument that claims the way in which the law treats female genital mutilation is the way in which it should treat female genital cosmetic surgery,’ explains law lecturer Saarrah Ray, who’s a DPhil law candidate at the University of Oxford. Her most recent publications explore the ethical implications of the “husband stitch” (adding one or more extra stitches during the vaginal repair process that sometimes follows a vaginal birth; it supposedly tightens the vagina to increase sexual pleasure for a male partner), virginity testing and hymenoplasty.
The latter was banned in the UK in 2022 – along with “virginity testing”, an examination by a “medical professional” consisting of either a visual inspection of the hymen or a ‘two-finger test to assess the size of the vaginal opening’. Before it was made illegal, clinics in London offered this “service” for hundreds of pounds. Ray first started reading about hymenoplasty in 2020 and was baffled by the reporting surrounding it, reading articles about how women chose the surgery to “treat” their male partners to a “virgin” experience.
‘It was framed as a sexual liberation motive for women,’ she says. ‘It contradicted other news articles reporting that private clinics were offering virginity testing, including the authorisation of virginity certification, often performed upon girls and women against their will.’ Nimco Ali, CEO of The Five Foundation, The Global Partnership To End FGM, also argues that labiaplasty is the same as FGM (female genital mutilation – a procedure where the female genitals are deliberately cut, injured or changed, but there’s no medical reason for this to be done. It’s illegal in the UK).
‘Labiaplasty is the same physical procedure, but just done in a medical setting,’ she says. But, she adds, there are double standards at play. ‘If an African woman tried to get what is classified as a labiaplasty in London, she couldn’t because it’s FGM, but when a white girl has the exact same surgery, it’s classified as a choice.’
Ali is a Somali-born British activist, who was forced to undergo FGM when she was just seven years old – ‘I had agency, I knew I didn’t want this’ – and she now believes choice doesn’t exist in a ‘vacuum’, that women are pressured by external factors such as porn, akin to the coercion behind FGM. ‘For an 18-year-old to be brainwashed to pay for her own mutilation is the most barbaric form of the conversation.’
Essentially, it dresses up our own oppression as wellness. Undercover filming for a 2021 ITV documentary, Britain’s ‘Virginity’ Clinics Uncovered, discovered that some of the plastic surgeons were prepared to flout the law (against hymenoplasty) by calling the procedure something else. Many surgeons now offer “vaginal rejuvenation” on their websites. All this feels particularly insidious when the “vaginal rejuvenation” industry was estimated to be worth £2.66bn in 2023, and is expected to grow by more than 22% by 2030.
Virginity is the OG scam
I had penis-in-vagina sex for the first time when I was 16. My dad dropped me off at my boyfriend’s house when I asked if I could stay over. I remember him giving me this awkward hug as something hung in the air for a moment between us. Like he knew what I was going to do. Perhaps he half-thought I was losing something. And perhaps I half-thought it, too, just for a second. Had I been his son, would he have looked at me in the same way? And could I have proven I was a virgin if someone had made me? Like the promise Cinderella Escorts makes to its clients that all the virgins on its site have a certificate to prove their purity – men are even encouraged to book their own doctor to check (the agency requests that the meeting takes place in Germany, where hymenoplasty is legal). But, a crucial question, what does it really mean to be a virgin? Untouched? Pure? Is virginity something to lose? To sell or be taken?
One of the women on Cinderella Escorts, Klara, says she hasn’t yet found a man to ‘convince’ her to have sex, as if that’s how it should work. Sex with women is to be bargained for by men. But virginity isn’t a medical term, it’s a social construct. Historically, an intact hymen is the so-called physical proof – ‘but not all women are born with a hymen’, notes Ray. So, can virginity be tested or repaired with a hymenoplasty? ‘No,’ she says, ‘there’s no scientific method to prove a woman’s virginity because virginity does not exist,’ she says. It’s just another way to control women and our bodies against something that is immeasurable and unquantifiable.
Conversations around virginity are also rooted in heteronormativity: you only “lose” your virginity when you have penetrative sex with a man’s penis. Virgin Island’s sexologist Aisha Paris Smith agrees; societal perceptions around “virginity” follow an often reductive and harmful ‘love story script’ – that ‘the woman should be meek and sexually passive, and it’s for the man to control when things happen and what happens. If I’m a woman seeking a man, and I want this man to really care for me, then I have to have an innocence about me’. Paris Smith also notes that many women feel the need to hide any past relationships, like they should never have been in them.
It’s 7am in Nevada when the Bunny Ranch’s Madam Suzette answers the phone. This legal brothel is home to two of the highest profile virginity auctions, Natalie Dylan in 2008 and, a decade later, Bailey Gibson. When I ask Madam Suzette about them, she responds in the kind of warm western tones that make me instantly comfortable in her presence. ‘Oh, that was all a marketing ploy,’ she says. She remembers Natalie well, though. ‘She was a very nice girl, a plain Jane,’ says Suzette. ‘It did get serious, but it didn’t actually go through.’
Suzette’s in charge, so she’d remember that kind of money going through the books, as offers went up to $4m (£2.98m), she says. So, what about Bailey? ‘Her face kind of looks familiar,’ Suzette says, but confirms that it didn’t happen. She has no idea where either of the women are now, but she regularly gets emails from girls wanting to sell their virginity (although Suzette gets the feeling there’s always a man behind the girl emailing).
As for the most recent cases dominating the news?
When Cosmopolitan contacted Cinderella Escorts to interview those who had successfully sold theirs, we were offered an email interview – ‘you can verify by a Zoom call that they are answering’ in ‘written form’ they wrote back. As this was the only way Cinderella Escorts said they would do interviews, the conversation went no further. This, we were told, was how ‘all’ media spoke to those who had sold their virginities. Via an anonymous email account, with no proper verification.
When it comes to the value placed on our virginity, so much of it feels like smoke and mirrors, whether it’s online sex stunts that whip up a rage frenzy (and place cash directly in the creators’ pockets) or the supposed auctions, which generate headlines (and, therefore, views to their site). It’s almost impossible to get to the bottom of what actually happens. But does it matter if these auctions and stunts are real or not, when the message they send very much is real? When we hold up virginity and purity to having such “high value”, what damage does this do to those of us who want to feel sexually liberated and free?
Sign of the times
When PrettyLittleThing announced its rebrand earlier this year, for many it was more than just an overhaul of a fashion brand, it was a signifier. It was once a brand you turned to when you wanted to look sexy in a figure-hugging mini dress on a wild night out. But today, bodycon has been replaced by blazers and the bright colours are now beige. Of course, if you want to dress more modestly and you like the style, that’s individual choice, but some began to view the rebranding as something more significant: a vibe shift that signalled purity culture’s grip on the mainstream.
Purity culture derives from Christianity, emphasising the importance of not having sex before marriage. It encourages women to dress modestly, and reinforces traditional gender roles. In a variety of ways, it shames those who stray from it, sending the message that a woman who is not virginal is sullied, and “not good” relationship material. (Not true; studies show that the number of sexual partners you’ve had does not impact happiness in relationships.)
One of its messages teaches the idea of “soul ties” – which says that every single time a woman has sex, a part of her is taken away or damaged. Open up social media and, depending on your algorithm, you’ll see the many ways that purity culture has begun to work its way into today’s psyche. You might be hit with tradwife influencers, such as Estee Williams, who believe that women “should submit to their husbands” or viral street interviews, with men ranting about how they wouldn’t marry a girl with a high body count.
The concept of “soul ties” have also shifted, online, into “spiritual” videos aimed at those who aren’t religious. They say that every time we sleep with someone we’re tied to them somehow and should be “careful” about who we share a bed with. This all ties in with our current political swing to the right, something we have seen before. George W Bush came into power in the early 2000s, around the same time Britney was being pushed, she later alleged, by her management to pretend that she was a virgin. It can feel like whenever women (and those within the LGBTQ+ community) make strides towards owning our sexualities, and feeling free within them (whether we choose to have sex or not), there’s a pushback, where we’re shamed – in varying ways – for doing so.
The virginity myth makes us believe we have something to lose. That our value is built around it. It makes us judge each other – and ourselves. It makes women with sexual experience whores, and those with none virtuous. It means that when we “give it away” we’re broken and the men who take it are powerful. It makes men see us as objects to be bid on. We need to change how we use the word virgin. The language is so loaded. ‘We have to exit systems that don’t want to serve us and create our own,’ says Paris Smith. When we have sex for the first time, we gain an experience. And in that sense, we have nothing to lose.
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK’s multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She’s often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
