Part of what confuses the issue – for me, anyways – is mixing the literal and metaphorical meanings of the word “gift”. Literal gifts can be given and taken; they can be owned. Metaphorical gifts – usually actions or thoughts – can be “given”, but they can’t be taken, and they can’t be owned.

The other confusing issue is the nature of the concept of virginity which is a fairly complicated thing ( I can hear the howls of derisive laughter, but bear with me for a second here). For you to “give” someone your virginity two conditions have to be fulfilled: you have to have not had sex with someone before; and you need to have sex with the person you’re “giving” your virginity to. More simply put, you’re saying “no” to one or more people, and then saying “yes” to one person. Which is nice, I guess, if what you’re giving is in limited supply and there isn’t enough to go around, or if the value of what you’re giving is diminished by having given it before. I don’t think the first condition applies to having sex – it’s not like a cake, or a bar of chocolate, which can only be divided into so many pieces. But the second condition? The second condition, that the value of the act of sex is diminished by having had sex with someone else before, that I suspect is the real issue behind this concept of giving someone the “gift” of virginity.

But how could that be? How could what I did with someone else take away from what I do with you?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Exclusivity, monogamy, chastity, sex only within marriage – none of those values adequately explains why being the first is special enough to be considered a “gift”.

But accept the premise for the sake of argument (as many do). Does the rule then apply equally to men and women? What do we think when a man brings his bride the “gift” of virginity? Is it a gift women want? Is it a gift men are proud of giving?

Do the words “double standard” come to mind?

Gwen, maybe part of our problem here is that I see “gift” as a free thing, irrelevant to “sexual economy” (which is a concept completely foreign to my ideas.) In the case of Harry and Ginny, I would suggest that between two people who love each other self-effacingly, there is no sexual economy. There is only gift.

Mrs. Figg, thanks! Not being keen on separating sexuality out from the rest of the person, I agree with you.

We give gifts involving our bodies all the time–labor, time, personal care, mentoring, errands.

Well, as far as labor and errands go, if they are “gifts” of our bodies I’d certainly like to take mine back and use it elsewhere!

I think the examples you’ve provided Arabella are more about time than bodies, and they’re in very different and less volatile contexts than sex itself. As this discussion shows, sex is a highly charged arena no matter where one comes from.

Kissing the person you love before they go off on a dangerous mission (cliche as it is) isn’t commodifying your sexuality. But the fact that Ginny does so while saying “I couldn’t think what to get you…I didn’t know what would be useful…I’d like you to have something to remember me by, you know, if you meet some veela” objectifies her sexual expression in this moment. At this point, with this context, the kiss isn’t about showing Harry how much she loves him for the sake of the love itself; rather, it turns into an exchange within the sexual economy.

I don’t want to get into Hermione’s kiss, I’ll just quote Rowling and let everyone decide for themselves how much of a reward the kiss is: “Ron had finally got S.P.E.W. and earned himself a snog!”

By looking at the kiss through a commodity viewfinder, Hermione’s kissing Ron could be construed as sexual reward for politically correct thinking, and I don’t want to go there.

We can debate over terminology elsewhere, this probably not being the place. I’ll even break my own fast from controversial topics and offer my blog for that, if you would like. But you are talking to at least one person here for whom the whole human person and its commodities, including the body and the sexual act and the virtue of virginity, are gifts that can be given. I can’t go denying my deeply-held beliefs (backed up by regret-free personal experience) to say that because some societies have wildly misused the concept, the idea itself is evil.

Having sex for the first time with someone you love is an important experience, but there’s a difference between two people giving themselves to one another and one person “giving it” to their partner. On the one hand we’re talking about the whole person, both physical and emotional aspects, participating in an act equally with another to express love. On the other, when we talk about just the giving of virginity, we discuss only a nebulous physical marker that only one partner gives as an act of her devotion (or subjugation, depending on the context). In common parlance, who talks about male virginity in the same terms as female? Boys and men fret over losing it ASAFP, whereas girls must hold on to theirs as if their lives depended on it, which in many cases it does. I highly recommend Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History for more on historical and cultural concepts of virginity.

Speaking for myself, I think it’s absolutely a good thing to consider virginity as a gift–though I would wholeheartedly agree that a man’s virginity should be thought of in the same terms. His is just a little harder to prove. Nature stuck us with that one.

Whether virginity is in question in the text … that’s rather vague. It’s never said openly in the books when and where anyone gave that up. As a big fan of chastity I like to think of the characters as having lived with virtue, but seriously: if one of the Harry/Ginny pair came into their relationship with previous experience, it was certainly Ginny. And Harry, as far as we know, never even asks. I think it’s safe to say he accepted her and loved her either way.

Ginny’s “gift of herself” seems relevant to an important aspect of love, one backed up by Rowling’s text. What is love, really, without giving oneself? Harry gives himself for the Wizarding World. I believe that eventually he and Ginny very mutually gave themselves to each other. Taking that in the sexual sense, I just hope they got married first.