VBB 282 Virgin Body

March 15 2024

Intro [00:00:01]:

Virgin Beauty Nitch Podcast: inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique life experiences without fear of being defiantly different. Your hosts, Christopher and Heather.

Let's talk, Shall we?

Christopher [00:00:21]:

Do words define us, or do we define words? This podcast is built on the belief that people determine how words define them. Putting that belief into action is why we chose the name of this podcast using words that have terrorized and demonized women for centuries. Virgin is such a word. It has been used to regulate female sexual expression by dividing women into Madonnas or Whores. It's a tragic binary definition to live under and a devastating stigma to overcome. But over the next four weeks, we intend to do just that, to give women the agency to redefine what virgin means to them. For many women, virgin is an emotional word with profound expectations that often determine self-worth and social value. But where do these expectations come from, and why do they mean so much to women? To uncover some of these mysteries, we welcome Reverend Stephanie Clark.

Christopher [00:01:28]:

She's a metaphysical minister, speaker, sacred ceremony facilitator, law of attraction, life coach, and author of three stimulating books: down Dirty and Divine, the Misadventures of an irreverent reverend, and the sex goddess. Stephanie. Welcome back to Virgin Beauty, bitch.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:01:50]:

Thank you so much, Chris, and thank you, Heather. It's lovely to see you again.

Christopher [00:01:53]:

Also with us is a woman whose commitment is to break the taboo about virginity by empowering women to discuss their experiences. You can find those words written on the back cover of her book, Goodbye Virginity, which features raw and authentic stories of 15 remarkable women who share their most intimate experiences, often as a form of healing. We welcome our new friend, Talia Gray, to Virgin Beauty Bitch.

Talia Grey [00:02:21]:

Thank you for such a beautiful presentation.

Christopher [00:02:24]:

Thank you for being here, both of you. Now, Heather and I have been looking forward to this conversation for months, and our hope is to take women on a journey from conditioned virginity as a physical outcome to virginity as a spiritual expression, regardless of what a woman does or does not do with her body. I guess a good place to start, maybe, is to ask, what is your traditional definition of a virgin? I'll start with you, Talia, but before you go, I want to say this. I want to preference and acknowledge that our conversations are concerned primarily with heterosexual cisgender definitions based on female-male procreation. But we are not insensitive to alternate sex and gender realities. I think it's important to put that out there. So, Talia, let's back to the question. What would you say your traditional definition of a virgin is?

Talia Grey [00:03:20]:

I'm not going to tell about traditional definition I just want to tell about my personal definition. What am I thinking about? Virginity. And I think it's not about your body. Not about just your body. It's about your mindset. It's about your experience in sexual life. And you are the only person who can define yourself, virgin or not. And you are the only person who can tell somebody I am not a virgin anymore.

Talia Grey [00:04:00]:

Nobody can look at your organs or look at some past events and say you are not a virgin anymore. How about women who've been raped for the first time in their lives? Actually, I have two stories in my book where women were being raped for the first time, and it's a disaster in their life and in many religions. In many sources. I've read that people don't count, that the woman is not a virgin anymore if she has been raped. And yes, this is the truth. And women told me, shared their thoughts about this event, and they said that they didn't count, that they had sex for the first time. One woman told me that it was so hard to keep all this pain and all this trauma inside of them because they couldn't share. They'd been scared to share with somebody, and it's been like a real rape.

Talia Grey [00:05:18]:

After some time, she meets a boy or her new boyfriend, and they fall in love and decide to make love. And this was the first time she had sex or made love. And when she lost her virginity, this was her decision. So, I think there is no definition of what virginity is because all women are different. Every woman has different mindset, every woman has a different background, different families, so they can decide by themselves if they're virgin or not.

Christopher [00:06:03]:

Do you find that that is the norm, though? I mean, I understand that that is what we are aiming to do, especially with this conversation. But do you think that that is the starting point for most women that you've spoken to, that they have this freedom of what they can define their own virginity, or is it defined for them? And what has that looked like?

Talia Grey [00:06:28]:

For the most women I've interviewed, there've been 15 of them. The most important thing was the influence of society. So some of them weren't ready to be in an intimate relationship with the men, but they did that because everybody asked them, are you ready? Did that or not? Are you a virgin or not? And it's very pushy.

Christopher [00:07:00]:

Yeah. We're just exploring what a lot of women grow up with as conditioning, like how their family, their society, their religion, whatever it might be, conditions them to believe about virginity. Absolutely. They can transform that belief later on in life. But a lot of women start, and men start with a traditional understanding of what virginity is.

Talia Grey [00:07:28]:

Yeah. Almost all of them were pressured by religion, their families, their friends, society, movies, and TV. They watched, and everybody made love. So they were thinking, maybe I have to do that already. But they weren't ready. So, yeah, this is a big influence of what we see, what we hear.

Heather [00:07:57]:

And certainly what we've seen, whether I do think that our society is getting to a different place, but there's still these very strong underpinnings of a woman's worthiness or purity tied to chastity, tied to almost like, the less your body count is, the more desirable you are or, the more untouched you are. And that is tied to being a more esteemed woman. I'm so glad that that is changing because I don't believe that at all. And I do think that it's been a lie that we've been sold for a very long time to keep us from truly appreciating one of our biggest access centers to self, to self-preservation, to self-love, that very deep tie to that piece of yourself has been eroded or broken or cut. So, I'm so glad to see things are shifting. But like those underpinnings that are based sometimes in religion, sometimes based in culture, I know that, Reverend. Stephanie, you've looked quite a bit into this, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on those deep-seated underpinnings.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:09:17]:

Thanks for asking, Heather. Yeah. So, for me, a traditional definition of a virgin would be very traditional. That the hymen has not been broken. The hymen being the thin skin within the vagina. So a virgin is someone who hasn't been penetrated by a male penis. Now, what about butt? So I saw a fabulous song on YouTube about girls in school uniforms and all of them having anal sex. But they were good catholic schoolgirls, and they were still virgins. Crazy.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:09:58]:

Anyway, that was pretty good. The whole business of busting the hymen was okay until tampons were invented. But even before tampons were invented, women who went riding on a horse or a mule or a camel could easily have had that hymen broken just from the physical exercise. I lived with a family in Egypt for a while, and the young man in the family who was trying to marry me explained that in his rural village in Egypt, up till about 50 years ago, on the wedding night, the male members of the bride's family would stand outside the door and of course, the bride had to be a virgin on the wedding night. The leader of the family, the father, would have a gun in his hand, so the couple would have sex, and they would have a white linen cloth that they would have sex on to capture the blood that the girl had to bleed in order to prove she was a virgin. If there were blood, all great, the father would fire a shot in the air to celebrate. If there was no blood, and that meant she was not a virgin in this limited framework, then the girl would be shot.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:11:21]:

Now, that's really unfortunate. If her hymen had broken through any other means apart from sex, and even if her hymen had broken through sex to experience death as a result of the shame that she ostensibly brought upon the family, it's really not fair. So, I don't think that goes on anymore. I know female genital mutilation still does go on in that rural village in Egypt where I was living, that people, Muslim families, bring their daughters from Australia and from developed countries, and they go back to Egypt, where the doctors are willing to take a payoff to do the genital mutilation on the young girls. So, where does all this come from? So that's what I love to talk about. Well, in the days before, we had the patriarchal religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; we had goddess religions. And in the goddess religions, it was fine for women to take lovers. There was no Christian or religious expectation that a woman would be a virgin when she was married.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:12:28]:

So, in the pagan religions, they celebrated sexuality. There was no religious or moral stigma around it. And then we had Eve, Adam and Eve, of the Adam and Eve story. I suspect that Eve was a sex goddess, meaning that she had most likely been a member of a goddess temple where she had practiced the art of sacred sex. This myth of Adam and Eve was borrowed from other religions that were prevalent in the Middle East at the time. And then Eve was considered to be a sinner because she, in the Christian version, tempted Adam into sex. And Augustine, St. Augustine in the fifth century, decided that sex was the original sin, and he was able to perpetrate that belief throughout the Christian teaching.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:13:22]:

So because Eve was such a sinner, when Mary came along and gave birth to Jesus, she had to compensate for Eve's sin. So if Mary had given birth to a messiah and this messiah had been conceived through the sexual act, then he would be filled with sin. And how could he be the savior of the people if he was essentially a sinful being just because he'd been produced by an act of sex? So this is where the shift came in with regard to insisting that women are virgins. And it's all about women today. Compensating for Eve's sin, which seemingly brought sin brought sin, Eve's sexual sin brought mortality to the human race. That's a pretty heavy burden to bear as a woman. So by being virgins, we're appeasing God and saying, well, I'm really sorry about my foremother, Eve, and all the sins she committed, but I'm a good, pure virgin girl.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:14:24]:

I will not bring death upon the human race because I'll keep my virginity intact until I'm entered on the night of my wedding. And the reason for being a virgin in culture. So, this was going on long before Christianity came along. The reason for being a virgin was that the man needed to know that the progeny of his wife's womb was going to be his progeny. So God forbid that his wife would get pregnant and it would be from another man because then the guy who was married to her would mean that his inheritance that he should give to his sons could be the son of another male. I mean, how shameful and how very embarrassing. That would know. The guy's already dead, of course, because his property has been passed on.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:15:15]:

But it must be very belittling for him to know that his wife had had sex with another man. Another time when I was living in Egypt, this time I was living with my Egyptian boyfriend. And he knows I talked about how women were so trapped in that third-world culture, and he said, no, they're not trapped. The men look after them. All they have to do is stay home and look after the house and look after the children. Isn't that a nice life to have? Pretty boring as far as I'm concerned. But when we were talking about virginity, genital mutilation, and the fact that men get so jealous, then he was actually able to admit that men are not only afraid that their property might be inherited by someone that's not of their seed, but they're really, really afraid that a woman might find more sexual pleasure with another man. And that would be embarrassing as well.

Christopher [00:16:12]:

Isn't that the bottom line? Men can recognize power, and if it's not their power, they need to usurp that in some way. They need to compensate to be the ones in power. So it comes down to sex is power.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:16:36]:

Nailed it.

Christopher [00:16:37]:

Men know sex is power, and they know women's sex is most powerful. How do you compensate for that? Right. I remember telling you one of the stories in your book you talk about. There's a woman who had an experience where they didn't have intercourse. He just happened to ejaculate on her leg, and she became pregnant. The morning after their wedding, her father came into the room to inspect the bedding to make sure. And he was happy because there was blood. Yes.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:17:14]:

Yeah.

Talia Grey [00:17:14]:

He was happy because there was.

Christopher [00:17:18]:

Yeah. But she was pregnant at the time. All this is going on. He just didn't know that that's in modern times. This is not biblical times. What do you think about talking with these women? Is there a specific impression that was made upon you in collective with all these women's stories?

Talia Grey [00:17:44]:

It's a good question. I think the most specific thing is that no woman wants to talk about it. When I asked my friends, my relatives, or just acquaintances if they wanted to share their stories, they said no. What are you talking about? Of course not. All these stories that I collected were from women I don't know personally. Maybe just one or two girls shared their stories because they've been very important to share because they've been very educational for younger women. And, yeah, nobody wants to talk about it. And they think if they close it and put the newspaper on top and nobody can see it, everything is good.

Talia Grey [00:18:41]:

But they are carrying this trauma. Sometimes, they carry this bad experience and do not share it with any other woman or other people. But why? I usually encourage my readers and the girls I'm working with to share whatever happened with you. Share with people who you trust. Share your pain, share your trauma, share your thoughts, share your fears. And it's going to be easier, and it's going to be over when you will rethink about it. If you discuss it, you have to talk about it, not keep this thing inside. Yeah.

Talia Grey [00:19:32]:

And this is probably the most important thing I understood. We have to talk about it. We have to bring this topic and just discuss it.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:19:42]:

Wow, that's so wonderful, Tanya. I just want to just bounce off what you said just now because what I heard you say is that women, which I agree with you, women are afraid to talk about the experience of so-called releasing, I say releasing their virginity. We're afraid to talk about sex, period. Because as women, if we talk about sex, that means we know something about it that's true, or we're at least curious about it. And that in itself is considered sinful. The fact that we even have a sexuality is a sinful thing.

Christopher [00:20:19]:

It's not that you have a sexuality and choose it for yourself.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:20:26]:

That's what it is because that's where the power is. Yeah. That I'm choosing to be sexual, and I'm choosing to speak about my sexuality regardless of all of the cultural and religious bans that have been placed on that.

Christopher [00:20:40]:

Exactly.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:20:40]:

Yeah. It's about using my voice and out, and that's also terrifying for the patriarchy.

Talia Grey [00:20:46]:

Yeah. I wanted to add that many women who I interviewed, after we finished the interview, they said, oh, my God, thank you so much. I've never ever shared whole story about my sexual life with anyone, even my boyfriend or even my husband, even my mom doesn't know about even half of what I just told you. Some of them said that they felt a therapeutic effect after they just talked about it and shared it. And yeah, I think this is a very taboo topic. Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to listen to it. Probably, some people don't want to hear about these dirty things about different people.

Talia Grey [00:21:44]:

And I encourage women. Please contact me. I can listen to your story. We can make it a beautiful novel or more beautiful books like this. Actually, this is my book, Goodbye Virginity. You can find it on Kindle or Barnes and Noble as well. And it has some illustrations there inside. I can show you something.

Heather [00:22:14]:

I do feel that when it comes to these deeply seated underpinnings of what virgin means, even when we're talking to people for the first time about this podcast and they hear the virgin, the beauty and the bitch, the first thing that hits them in the face is the virgin and what that has meant to them over the, you know, all genders have different experiences with what, as you've said, talia, is their first time that they truly feel was their decision and not something that was acted upon them, but that they were an active participant in, which is a completely different story than, I think, what a lot of us have experienced, whether it's society saying don't do it, or I think in the younger and younger generations, society saying, if you don't lose it at a certain age, you're behind the times and what's wrong with you? It's kind of a thing that is, again, an expectation to do or to not do the way that we want you to, not because it was your agency, but because it was asked of. And, like, what we're uncovering in this series with Christopher is, and I'd love to hear both of your thoughts on this, is we have this concept of releasing your virginity. I love that, by the way. I think that's great terminology.

Talia Grey [00:23:47]:

Or sharing.

Heather [00:23:49]:

Sharing.

Talia Grey [00:23:49]:

I like the word sharing as well.

Heather [00:23:51]:

I love that. Sharing.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:23:53]:

Yes.

Heather [00:23:53]:

That's great. Sharing your virginity, that it's kind of a one-time thing. But these thoughts around sexuality, a woman's sexuality, permeate into her relationships and sexual life. If she hasn't dived into it, I would think almost indefinitely. So I'm wondering what you've seen in your book and your stories, Talia, like, how has this concept of the virgin affected women's relationship to their sexuality over the course of their life?

Talia Grey [00:24:26]:

Of course. It is a very important step in their life. And this moment should be based on your inner feelings, not upon society's rules, religious taboos, or anything. My book, Goodbye Virginity, is about losing virginity and sharing. But the girls couldn't stop. They started from the beginning when they just began dating someone, and then they became boyfriend and girlfriend, and they had first sex, and then they continued. It continued until the very end, until the very last man in their life.

Talia Grey [00:25:20]:

I didn't have any lesbian or gay stories in my book, but maybe in future editions, I will.

Christopher [00:25:30]:

I noticed that a lot of the participants in your book talk about what comes after and how they have been unfortunately damaged in relationships that they were happy in.

Talia Grey [00:25:49]:

I would say this influences all their future lives. The first man they pick, their first boyfriend or husband, would change all their destinies. So this is a very highly important moment when you take the right man for you and when you feel you're ready. Some of them were in a rush, and some of them wanted to escape from their parents. They weren't happy living with their parents, so they were jumping on the first men who felt attracted to them. And yeah, some of them married them, then they divorced them. And this is all in a rush. And girls don't take it seriously for some reason.

Talia Grey [00:26:54]:

Nobody tells them what the right man could be for them, what the right attitude in a relationship is, or how they should treat them. Nobody tells you that you can just watch movies, read books, and follow your parents' example.

Christopher [00:27:15]:

I think that a lot of that goes back to no one telling women that they are first and most important and that their lives are what matters, not necessarily those outside of them. I think that's where the problems begin. We don't allow women to value themselves.

Talia Grey [00:27:34]:

And most of them wanted to please your men, and they didn't feel any pleasure, actually, they told me that I was trying not to lose this guy because he wants me. I have to sleep with him, which is like a disaster. You don't have to sleep with anyone if you will lose a guy. This is not your type of guy. Make sure you are not doing this for somebody. Do it for yourself.

Christopher [00:28:08]:

Reverend Steph, I wanted to ask you, so we talk about the virgin, and we see the disparaging parts of how know is enacted in our society and on women specifically. But there have been times in history where the virgin had a lot of power, where their commitment to their own chastity gave them social. The Vestal Virgins, for instance, had a lot of power. They could own businesses; they could have money, blah, blah, blah, and they had power. Are there any other examples of that?

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:28:47]:

I'm thinking of Inanna, one of the goddesses of the Middle East, and she declared herself a perpetual virgin, not in the way that Mary was labeled a perpetual virgin, but because she had the right to determine whether she was a virgin or not. She had the right to determine how many lovers she had. All of that was fine and good. She was a goddess, and she was self-determining. So it's what you said earlier, Chris, about the power to choose and the power to decide if I'm a virgin or not? Yeah. The Vestal Virgins also came to mind when you were introducing the topic of having women having such respect in society and having religious, spiritual, and political power. Both those things went hand in hand for women during the goddess religions.

Heather [00:29:38]:

I also think of Artemis. Artemis is someone that you've brought up in the, you know, as forever in her own right, in her own.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:29:49]:

The. The goddesses of the ancient religions were sexually free. They weren't bound by the ethics of Christianity. That's what's so beautiful, that their beauty and their sexuality were something that was prized, and it's definitely not the same now. So if our beauty and our sexuality are prized, it's for male consumption rather than because we're seen as beautiful, spiritual, powerful beings in our own right. And because it's now about male consumption, then whatever the male values are, whatever the male decides is valuable to consume. So that's an unplanted field. The virgin body that's not been entered by any other man.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:30:46]:

That's what's considered valuable in the male culture. So, beauty has lost its essential or intrinsic power because it's all about how it appeals to the male model or the male values around what beauty looks like and what beauty is. So we've lost, getting back to the issue of the women being powerful because they were virgins, not because it was required of them. It's this capacity to self-determine. I'm just questioning, does it make me a virgin, or does it give me the right, or does it grant me the right to just determine that? Okay, this is it, that my sexuality is defined by me and has nothing to do with anybody else, so whatever a virgin state or a non-virgin state is, I determine that. And I may not even be interested in determining whether I'm a virgin or not a virgin. That may not be interesting to me if I'm defining my own sexuality.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:31:54]:

That's the real freedom, isn't it?

Christopher [00:31:56]:

Yeah. I think the point where we get caught is that we've attached virginity to a physical expression where it initially was a spiritual expression. We've attached it to a physical expression, and we have now placed it in the responsibility of women primarily to live within the boundaries of this physical entity we've created.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:32:25]:

Yeah. And I really, in this interview, it's wanting to move past all of those outmoded definitions of virginity in relationship to physicality and explore what is virginity beyond the physical status. And that's a really interesting question.

Christopher [00:32:45]:

Yeah. And that's why we've broken these four episodes down to the body, which is what we're talking about today. The mind, which we've covered a little bit, is this guilt and shame that is introduced into what the body does or does not do. Right. Then, the heart is basically the sexual element. It's poisoned because of this word and this action that we've placed on women. And then, hopefully, the next level is going back to the beginning, where virginity was a spiritual experience. Right.

Christopher [00:33:22]:

It's doing the full circle. So that's how we're breaking down these four episodes, to walk through step by step what we have been conditioned to believe, or how we live with those beliefs and what it is we can actually achieve if we have a different mindset to it.

Talia Grey [00:33:40]:

Beautiful.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:33:41]:

Yeah. Also thought about when I was a girl growing up and my mom was in a horrific marriage with my father, who was an alcoholic and a wife beater, and she felt like a slave and a domestic slave, and she was. And she said to me things like, one day, you're going to meet a man who's going to take care of you and give you the confidence that you lack. Now, even though she was with a man, I loved my dad, but yeah. He's an alky, and he was an alky.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:34:28]:

So even though she was with a man who gave her none of that, she was trying to pass a fantasy on to me that there would be a prince charming and he would be the magical instrument in my life that would completely change my personality around from shy and self-effacing and no self-worth to someone who trusted in herself, believed in herself and knew she was beautiful. Well, to date, that has not happened.

Christopher [00:35:01]:

Yeah, because she had been sold the same goods, right?

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:35:05]:

Yeah, she sold the same BS. So she was trying to pass it on to me. And then, ironically, or maybe not ironically, because it was a really strong intention of hers, she emigrated to South Africa. She divorced my father, emigrated to South Africa, and met a millionaire, and they had the most wonderful, joyful honeymoon for 25 years. Soulmate relationship. So deep in her subconscious, she knew that this was possible, obviously, and she went about manifesting it. So she did a very good job in that regard. But the issue with the fantasy that the sexual experience with the right man; what I've realized is that there is no education about sex in relationships.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:35:50]:

There may be sex education in school these days, but actually relationship skills, we learn the relationship skills from our parents, and then unless my belief is that we're on a spiritual path and growing consciously, we're duty-bound to just repeat those old patterns because there's no other input. And we could look at Hollywood and the movies, but that's not real. What we lived with was our parent's relationship or whoever was around us when we were kids. So this fantasy about the right man is going to be the savior and the perfect lover and the perfect therapist and the perfect breadwinner and just this male model of the gallant knight in shining armor that's going to rescue the poor fear, damsel in distress. That whole thing is still running in the culture as well. And the only way through, as far as I'm concerned, is education and waking up and becoming conscious. And I really wish.

Christopher [00:36:50]:

Pardon me, and conversations like these.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:36:53]:

Conversations like these, exactly. Yeah. Just to question those old beliefs because they don't serve. They don't serve, but until they're questioned until they're brought into the light of conscious awareness, they can't be questioned. So, yeah, this is what we're doing here, and it's really a blessing. And what I know is that it's not too late. I believe this is the incarnation I chose. And with the background of the violence and the alcoholism and the really difficult male-female role models that I got, I believe I chose it so that I could clean it up in my life and help others clean it up as well.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:37:32]:

So I can see the power and the beauty in choosing that difficult start in my life because it sent me on a quest to find out more and to explore and a sexual quest among everything else. I really believe that there was more to life than what my parents had presented to me. And for some reason, and I don't know why, maybe because it's my mission, but I felt like I got through that sexual, really painful, or let's say unconscious sexual upbringing, I got through fairly unscathed as if there's a part of myself that knew it was not true. And that's the part of myself that I'm constantly wanting to access and live from. And every woman has that. As I'm speaking, I'm realizing that's our pure, virgin self. It doesn't matter whether we've been penetrated or not penetrated. It's that pure, authentic essence that is unscathed by the human condition or anything that might happen in the human experience, and that's the purity and the perfection that dwells within.

Christopher [00:38:40]:

Amen.

Heather [00:38:41]:

When I hear you say that, Stephanie, it also reminds me to look at some of the parallels that we like to draw on this show. And if anybody's just tuning in for the first time, one of the questions that we love to ask our guests is, what does feminine mean to you? Because for so long, the word feminine has been degraded or been made to be lesser than or weak or soft-spoken. And when I think about the parallels between the pedestal that a virgin is put on, if we're thinking about the virgin body profile in a physical human woman, I would say things like sweet, beautiful, naive, passive, wholesome. We'll put that in quotes. And there's, I think, a racial element to this as well, around the Virgin Mary being white and that other races have been looked at as more provocative or more sexual or more almost accessible.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:39:44]:

Yes.

Heather [00:39:45]:

Less deserving of having their worth tied to purity. Know, as you said, christopher, more sexually available. And it just, to me, there's so many underpinnings in how we look at the word feminine. Tied to know, placed upon values of the virgin. And so to like this is a realization I'm having right now, is how closely tied these concepts have been over time. I would just love to hear either of anybody's thoughts on that.

Talia Grey [00:40:22]:

It's a good question. You make me think. Yeah, I would say nowadays, these definitions, man and woman, a little bit. Okay, so they are very different from, for example, the age of my mom and dad. So, just one generation. And all these definitions are very different. For example, I lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and we had lots of gays there. There've been a gay parade, trades, and all these lesbian movements and everything.

Talia Grey [00:41:09]:

And women try to look like men. Men try to appear in women's clothes with women's hair, nails, and everything else. So I think in the past, I would say 10 or 15 years ago, this femininity and masculinity have changed. And it's a pity. I really love watching women, like, impeccably dressed with a beautiful hairstyle, with beautiful makeup on. And this is what feminine was meaning for me. So women doesn't have to work hard, women has to pay attention more to your kids. Women have to spend more time in the kitchen, maybe doing something or decorating their houses.

Talia Grey [00:42:25]:

In general, I don't say about men who are very good at interior design. So, this was my definition of feminine. So women are not for earning money, not for surviving, not for doing some really hard business. And I think all this stuff taking off femininity from women. So that's why I think women have to work and have to do whatever they love to do. They have to go gardening, they have to sing songs that they have together with another. Women share their stories; they have to dance. Sometimes they have to go shopping, buy new dresses for themselves.

Talia Grey [00:43:19]:

So I think this is all that makes women feminine.

Christopher [00:43:24]:

So that is a long and very involved conversation we can have because we talk about this word, and It's the core word of our podcast is feminine. And I think Heather and I both have evolved over talking about this word for the last seven or eight years between us. And I think that what you portray, Talia, is very traditionally entrenched as to what feminine is, and it's not wrong. I think that in modern times, it can be extended because we are learning that feminine is not just a woman. It's beyond just a sex, that it includes men as well. So, how do men express feminine? We have to take that into consideration as well. So that is a very long and involved conversation we would love to have at any time because any definition of it is not wrong.

Christopher [00:44:38]:

It's just that sometimes there are building blocks that haven't been added to it, that not everyone is welcome to or is ready to welcome or integrate into that word. So that's a very tantalizing conversation that we love to have.

Heather [00:44:56]:

I think that the beauty of the show, Christopher, is that we have kind of gone into so many different people's experiences of what feminine has meant to them growing up, what makes them feel connected to that part of themselves. And sometimes, what you feel connected to isn't necessarily something that makes you feel good. Sometimes, the things that you feel connected to because you've been told that it's feminine are parts of yourself that you hate. So I feel like it's a very challenging conversation when, at least for me, so much of my original concepts of feminine have been aspects of self that are forever fleeting. Like your beauty, like your chastity, like your willingness to be polite or something pleasing to look at, to experience, to feel, to touch, to f. If we're going to bring it back to the virgin, you know, as you said, Christopher, the evolution in what my understanding is of feminine almost kind of breaking away. I know that what we've talked about today as the virgin body, which makes me feel closer to the essence of feminine than I ever have, isn't about so many of these things that I've been accustomed to believing build up my you know, as you said, bigger conversation.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:46:33]:

Can I say something here about feminine thinking about the work of David Data, whom I love. He talks about spirituality and sexuality, and when he talks about the third stage feminine woman. So, like the most spiritually evolved feminine being, it's her luminous essence that is what determines her femininity, or what lets people know that this is a feminine presence and her open heart. So loving, even if she's not loved in return, and the willingness to just give and serve and empathize and care, that's the feminine essence. So that definitely expresses itself in and through so-called male forms as well. And when I heard that definition of feminine, it really freaked me up because I'd had more of a traditional concept of it in my own head, and it had something to do with how I presented myself in the physical realm. And that definition of my presentation being the thing that determines my femininity, the lack of it or the power of it, really, that was really dogged me in my childhood because I could see that the image that I had, the body that I had, the face that I had, the hair, all of that did not match up to what was considered feminine beauty in the culture that I was raised in. So, Talia, you're just a prime example of what's considered feminine beauty.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:48:12]:

I mean, you have a beautiful face, beautiful features, lovely long hair. That's the classic. So that's you. Someone like you is what I compared myself to as a child, and I didn't match up. And so then I considered, well, okay, yeah. So then I thought, well, then, I'm not. Not. I'm not feminine.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:48:31]:

I'm not pretty. I was athletic. That was kind of a masculine thing to do, to have. And what I learned from David Data, too, is that women who have a strong feminine essence don't live in a culture where it's safe to express that either. So we're taught that if you want to be safe, don't show that you're interested in sex and that you're a sexual sensual. Don't show that. Keep the lid on that. The other piece is, if you want to survive as a woman in a culture where you might not be married or attached to a man for your provision and your financial care, then you have to be a male in the marketplace to make sure that you survive on the material plane.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:49:19]:

So, those two things I know really messed with my awareness of myself as feminine. And it's taken me a long time to even get in touch with the feminine essence that I am. I don't know that I have yet. And probably that's why I write the books that I write. But as I said earlier, just starting to take the covers off, literally take the covers off and take down all of the overlays that I've subjected myself to or been subjected to that have had me suppress my femininity and discount it, discard it, minimize it, and not let it be seen in order that I might stay safe in the physical realm. And that's quite a sad loss.

Talia Grey [00:50:13]:

Stephanie, you are beautiful. I love your makeup today. I love your hairstyle. Your hair color is just fantastic. And, Heather, I cannot take my eyes from your beautiful smile, from your beautiful hair. Oh, my God, girls, they are beautiful no matter what.

Heather [00:50:36]:

I totally agree. Talia, thank you.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:50:42]:

And Chris. Chris, I'm giving you. That's right.

Heather [00:50:48]:

Christopher, too.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:50:53]:

Yeah. So your willingness to engage women and not be scared. I love that about you. And I love about Chris. Are you listening?

Christopher [00:51:02]:

Thank you, Chris. I'm listening. I'm listening. I'm privileged to have been given the capacity to open myself up to both sides of myself, the masculine and the feminine. I know that a lot of men don't get the opportunity or aren't encouraged to do that, and they fear doing that. I've been fortunate not to have that fear, and I think I am extensively blessed because I can absorb both sides of what we all are, masculine and feminine. But I think that Stephanie, I think you really put it in quotation marks, is that these words have been used to confine is a. It's like an iceberg.

Christopher [00:52:04]:

You see the word, but you don't necessarily see what's underneath the surface and how it affects us, how powerful it is, how damaging it can be. I think that's the part that, unfortunately, we miss and that no one tells us about. But we suffer these things our whole lives. As you have chronicled in your book, Talia, these women have suffered through these aftereffects of this one word, a word they can't even talk about their whole lives. That is tragic. That is very tragic. But that's the power of words, and that's why we use words. The way we do is to bring them into the light so we can talk about them.

Christopher [00:52:56]:

We can examine them and see the effects of these words on our lives, not just on paper, on our lives. Right? And Heather and I cannot thank you both enough for having the courage and the chutzpah to come and talk about this topic because it's not easy to talk about or understand if you're not willing to listen. We can't appreciate you two enough.

Rev. Stephanie Clarke [00:53:31]:

Thank you, Chris.

Talia Grey [00:53:31]:

Thank you so much. Thank you, Christopher. And I wanted to say thank you to you because you are a man and you are involved in this topic, which shouldn't bother you so much because you cannot feel what we feel right in this moment. Today, I've been listening to your podcast. It was the Origin of the Man-Made Woman. It was the story of your book, and I've been amazed. You are such a great man. Thank you so much for your attention to women's world, to desire, and for helping all the women who need help.

Talia Grey [00:54:23]:

And thank you for this podcast. I think it will be very educational, maybe for someone who just likes entertaining, but for those who need the information, for those who want to get some help, it will be priceless. Thank you so much for this idea. Thank you for this project. You're great, guys. Thank you, Heather, too.

Heather [00:54:55]:

You know, I think it's going to be a little bit of a love fest for Christopher because I couldn't agree more, Talia. Having the blessing of knowing this man for these past seven years has meant so much to me in my journey with this work. But when I also talk to guy friends who have listened to our show, to hear a man's perspective makes them feel safer to go into these conversations and make it more of something that they feel in their manhood to want to understand that it is a masculine action to understand women, to understand the masculine and feminine within you. And Christopher, you create that space for men to want to enter into. So just a huge shout out to my co host.

Christopher [00:55:53]:

Well, thank you. Thank you all. Like I said, it's my absolute blessing to be able to sit here and be part of this conversation, not be opposed to it, and add to it, not distract from it. I think it's very important. When Heather and I got together, our goal was to encourage these conversations with women like both of you and to share your experiences that help others determine themselves. To understand the power they have, the freedom they have to speak, and to believe what they truly believe, not just what they're told to believe. So, thank you both for being part of this conversation. And I want to remind you that next week, we're going to delve into this conversation about the virgin and talk about the mindset.  We sort of touched on it here in this conversation, but get deeper into the mindset that is wrapped up in that one word and how it impacts and infects women through their lives, not just on that one night.

Christopher [00:57:18]:

So come on back. We'll continue this conversation and look forward to having you join us. You've been listening to the virgin, the beauty, the bitch. Find us like us. Share us. Come on back and drop in your thoughts. We want you part of this conversation. Well, so please join in.

Christopher [00:57:39]:

Find us on virginbeautybitch.com and comment. Let us know what you think on YouTube or social media.

Talia Grey [00:57:49]:

Welcome and ask us questions.

Christopher [00:57:51]:

Absolutely. We would love to have questions that we can answer for individuals as well, but thank you, Reverend Steph; we absolutely adore you. And Talia, you are a brilliant light.

Talia Grey [00:58:07]:

Thank you guys.

Christopher [00:58:07]:

We're so happy to have you. Thank you so much.

Heather [00:58:09]:

Thank you both.

Christopher [00:58:11]:

To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to find us@virginbeautybitch.com. Like us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Share us with people who are Defiantly Different like you.

Until next time, thanks for listening.