Political language, George Orwell wrote in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That has never been a more apt description than with the sophistry of today’s Left. Their woke lexicon takes the political corruption of language to a whole new level of mendacity and windiness.
The Left insists, for example, on substituting such euphemisms as “birthing parent” for “mother”; “gender-affirming care” for the surgical mutilation of confused, manipulated children; “reproductive rights” for infanticide; “anti-racism” for anti-white racism; “anti-fascist” for fascist; “undocumented immigrant” for illegal alien; “justice-involved person” for convicted felon, to name a few. Such terminology is carefully crafted to dilute if not pervert the truth, and then given a coordinated push via all the Left’s media outlets to dominate our political and cultural discourse. Too often, conservatives end up embracing such language instead of always pushing back with the truth.
Sometimes the Left’s subversive language constitutes nothing less than a full-frontal assault on reality itself. In the latest example, Breitbart News reports that the dark, satanic mill of abortion, Planned Parenthood, has gotten behind an idea that is gaining legitimacy among young people, especially Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Last Thursday the organization claimed on Twitter that virginity is nothing more than a meaningless “social construct.”
“The idea of virginity comes from outdated — let’s be real, patriarchal— ways of thinking that hurts everyone,” Planned Parenthood tweeted over a picture of a billboard that stated, “Virginity is a social construct.”
Whenever the Left wants to deny a commonly-accepted reality that inconveniences their agenda, they dismiss it as a mere “social construct,” because in our society, which they believe to be built on oppression, exploitation, and bigotry, commonly-accepted realities – e.g., heterosexuality, traditional masculinity, the nuclear family – are in their view complete fictions imposed upon the powerless by the powerful. And if something has been socially constructed, it can and must be deconstructed in order to throw off the enslavement of social conventions and liberate the oppressed in the name of social justice.
Hence, in the Left’s view, traditional binary sex roles are mere social constructions that serve the “hetero-normative” patriarchal power structure and that oppress purportedly marginalized groups like the LGBT community (which of course is anything but marginalized).
And so Planned Parenthood has begun promoting the propaganda that “virginity” – the state or condition of sexual innocence – is an outmoded “concept” that no longer has relevance in our sexually sophisticated (read: jaded and degraded) society. This is another of the Left’s attempts to redefine words to push the postmodern world view that reality is malleable and relative. If we deconstruct definitions and unmoor words from the reality they describe, then we can jettison inconvenient truths and replace them with convenient lies.
Let’s unpack, as the current lingo goes, the idiocy behind PP’s desperate assertion. First, virginity is not an “idea.” It is a word that, for at least 700 years in English (the Oxford English Dictionary cites Chaucer as one of the word’s earliest users), has described a very real state of sexual innocence. Everyone knows that a virgin is someone who has not had sexual intercourse (or in a metaphorical sense, someone who is new and inexperienced at something).
Second, it’s unclear how the term “virginity” “hurts everyone,” as Planned Parenthood put it. In fact, it doesn’t hurt anyone; it simply describes a state of chastity. Perhaps PP means that people in our decadent modern era are embarrassed to be labeled a virgin. That is a sad commentary on our sexually jaded society, because there was a time when virginity was valued, not something to be mocked or shed of like a humiliating skin condition. Since the Sexual Revolution, though, women have been encouraged to hurry to leave innocence behind and embrace the “liberation” of promiscuity (in truth, though, who has benefited most from the so-called sexual liberation of women? Hint: not women).
This wasn’t the first time Planned Parenthood has argued that virginity isn’t a real thing. Breitbart News notes that PP previously conceded the existence of virginity but considered it a “concept” for years. Then, in 2019, PP tweeted, “Idk [I don’t know] who needs to hear this but virginity is a made-up social construct, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your hymen” – ignoring the fact that males can be virgins too. The next tweet in that thread proceeds to acknowledge the definition of virginity but then subverts it by claiming that different people define the word differently or dismiss it altogether as meaningless:
A virgin is someone who’s never had sex. But “sex” means different things to different people, so “virginity” does too. Many don’t care what it means or think it matters. Whatever you believe, the fact is you can’t tell if someone’s had sex by checking their hymen.
Fact check: virginity does not mean different things to different people. There has never been any confusion about its meaning. It always, to everyone, has meant the state of not having had sexual intercourse. But Planned Parenthood and its ideological comrades want to gaslight gullible youth into believing that the word, like every word the Left reframes, means whatever one wants it to mean at any given moment, or nothing at all. To quote Orwell again, “language can corrupt thought.” Words can liberate and empower as truth, or be weaponized to confuse and enslave as lies.
Social media lit up in response to Planned Parenthood’s tweet, with Twitter users overwhelmingly and righteously slamming PP for its claim that virginity is a meaningless fiction.
“Groomers,” one commenter accurately responded.
“Either you’ve had sex or you haven’t. How is that a ‘social construct?’” another user observed.
“Me thinks someone must be losing business or why the hell would they be tweeting something like this?!” yet another commenter wrote.
Tragically, they’re not losing business, except in states where abortion restrictions have been implemented, denying the infanticidal Left its precious freedom to discard an unborn child up to the moment of birth, if not beyond. According to the organization’s annual report released last April, Planned Parenthood performed the second-highest number of abortions (374,155) in its history and saw record-high revenue during its 2021-2022 fiscal year (the previous year saw the highest number of abortions in PP’s history: 383,460).
Planned Parenthood tweeted that message about virginity because family-annihilating gender ideology is the tip of the spear of the Left’s assault on normality – indeed, its war on reality. Because that’s what this ultimately comes down to: not simply the dismantling of our culture’s every norm, institution, and tradition, but the dismantling of reality itself and its replacement with political language that conforms not to reality but to ideology.
The Left wants to render the word virginity meaningless because they want to remove every barrier to a thoroughly sexualized culture. They want young people to believe chastity itself is not only passé and pointless, but that there is literally no such thing, that it was made up to keep young girls and women under the boot heel of an archaic, patriarchal, bourgeois social structure that devalued women and sought to suppress their sexual pleasure and expression. How can the Left insist that sexuality is at the core of one’s unique personal identity if a culture prizes virginity in both men and women prior to marriage?
The Left’s political manipulation of the language – especially the language of gender ideology – is a subversive campaign to replace reality with a fantasy universe of our own making, without any limits on our transgressive desires. It promises to make us gods. Instead, it will make us slaves to our own worship of the self.