Talking points for June 12

Our virginity debate is still simmering away on the blog.

It was triggered by two news stories involving Muslim attitudes to virginity – but of course it’s not only Muslims who see virginity until marriage as important. In the US and some other countries, the Silver Ring Thing is a programme that encourages young people to save sex for marriage.

And I’ve also read reviews of a new book by Anke Bernau that looks at the cult of virginity, past and present.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of keeping chaste until marriage? Does keeping your virginity make you more likely to be faithful to your spouse? Or do you just risk discovering that you are sexually incompatible after marriage? Is insistence on virginity just used to keep women under the control of men – and do all cultures fetishise female virginity, or is male virginity also an issue? With people marrying later in life, can they really be expected to postpone sexual relations? And given that sex can involved plenty else besides penetration, does an intact hymen really mean that much?

At yesterday’s meeting we also talked about President Bush’s newspaper interview, in which he said he regretted using bellicose language but insisted that the US was a force for good in the world. Will Bush leave the world a better place?

There’s a grand conference in Paris today on aid for Afghanistan – which begs the questions of what is being achieved there in the fight to keep the Taleban at bay. Should the outside world continue pouring money into the war-torn country?

And it’s exactly a month since the Chinese province of Sichuan was devastated by the worst earthquake in a generation: 87,000 people were killed or remain missing. How are those who survived the earthquake faring? And perhaps it’s time to begin asking how the disaster may have changed Chinese society. The official media responded with an unprecedented openness (perhaps after seeing the catastrophic effects of the Burmese authorities’ secretive reaction to Cyclone Nargis) – but there’ve since been reports that protests by parents who lost their children have been stifled. And will the government manage to avoid corruption when it comes to distributing relief and reconstruction funds?