{"id":91,"date":"2008-08-14T19:39:39","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T00:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=91"},"modified":"2025-08-01T02:31:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T07:31:25","slug":"the-37-year-old-virgin-heroine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/the-37-year-old-virgin-heroine\/","title":{"rendered":"The 37-year-old virgin heroine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Virgin Heroine has always been (and remains, IMO) a staple of genre romance.  It\u2019s getting not so much that way anymore, but as time goes on and society gets freer with its sexcapades, it\u2019s harder for a writer to justify the Virgin Heroine, especially beyond, say, college age.  On the other hand, we still have historical writers who are perfectly capable of pulling off the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com\/index.php\/weblog\/comments\/a-rakes-guide-to-pleasure-by-victoria-dahl\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">wicked virgin widow trope<\/a>,\u201d which I have to admit is cracktastic and I never ever get tired of it. (Kind of like \u201cI had to do it to fulfill the will\u201d plots, but that\u2019s another post.)<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t believe I\u2019ve ever read a contemporary romance (other than an inspirational or sweet) that used religious beliefs as a solid, if not defiant, reason for the heroine\u2019s virginity.  And in any case, religious or not, if the heroine does lose her virginity before she marries the hero, she still marries (or commits to) the hero, so it\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n<p><!\u2014more\u2014><\/p>\n<p>For Mormons, the matter of celibacy until marriage is an expectation, a requirement.  You don\u2019t have sex with your one and only twu wuv before the vows are said no matter the commitment level. This also means you can\u2019t have sex with yourself since, well, you aren\u2019t married to yourself.  Masturbation\u2019s a no-no, folks.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yes, I just now heard all 4 of you non-Mormon readers gasp in shock and dismay.  I know.  Me, too.  Think about being 29, 37, 46 and still a virgin.  It\u2019s a bitch. You think I\u2019m kidding or talking about a very small minority of single women in the church who had no plans for default nunnery?  I assure you, I am not.  There\u2019s a lot of \u2019em.  I will never find a non-Mormon romance with a Virgin Heroine who\u2019s 29, 37, 46 without some trauma or serious psychological issues that requires therapy.  Nobody\u2019d believe it.<\/p>\n<p>So.  For the more adventurous of LDS women who read genre romance of the steamier variety, I have written the unapologetic 37-year-old Virgin Heroine as a tribute to you (and when she finds her one and only twu wuv, she takes one for the team so you don\u2019t have to); if you\u2019re older than that and still can\u2019t relate to Giselle\u2019s celibate angst, I apologize from the bottom of my heart (although if you disagree with her choices, well, not apologizing for that).<\/p>\n<p>For the non-LDS women who can\u2019t relate to such a thing at all, I hope I\u2019ve written for you a decent reason she is the way she is and a realistic picture of the way she deals with it.  If you still can\u2019t believe it, my only defense is that I know these women\u2014a lot of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Virgin Heroine has always been (and remains, IMO) a staple of genre romance. It\u2019s getting not so much that way anymore, but as time goes on and society gets freer with its sexcapades, it\u2019s harder for a writer to justify the Virgin Heroine, especially beyond, say, college age. On the other hand, we still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[549,94,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon","category-religion","category-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17112,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/17112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}