Planned Parenthood: Virginity is a "Social Construct"

facepalm

Ok look. Basically anyone who uses the term "social construct" unironically has no idea what he's talking about. It's a term so deeply and hilariously confused that using it is like dropping an incoherence bomb on any conversation. The term is used so chaotically and indiscriminately that it's hard to know whether to say that it means a lot of different things...or that it barely means anything at all.

   I could go on and on about this.

   Look, suppose we take the closest thing there is to a canonical definition of x is a social construct. According to that (quasi-)definition, it means: x would not exist if humans didn't exist. 

   Actually they really mean: if humans had never existed.

   Now, that's not what it means...and not just because it doesn't really mean anything... But I'm not going to go down that rabbit-hole right now.

   If that were the definition--which, again, it isn't--that would mean that everything human would be a "social construct." So: human femurs are "social constructs." Human teeth, brains, appendices, toes, eyeballs, neurons...everything about us would be a "social construct" on that definition. After all, if humans had never existed. Herpes zoster is a "social construct," as is any other virus or disease specific to humans. Do any other animals get Alzheimer's? If no: "social construct." And so on.

   So...uh...yeah, virginity would, on that--and let me again stress: absurd--definition be a "social construct"...but only because everything about humans would be. So, even granting them everything on this, it's highly misleading. But, then, that's what the term "social construct" is--a mechanism for equivocation. If you assert that "virginity is a social construct" in the way that Planned Parenthood did, you clearly mean to convey the idea that most other things about humans aren't. 

   In fact, virginity is a factual matter, like e.g. parenthood. It's a matter of degree, there can be certain fairly limited disagreements about who falls under the predicate and who doesn't. Does oral sex count? blah blah blah. Typical popomo lefty bullshit. There's some vagueness in almost every ordinary human idea. Is a pregnant woman a parent? Is the man who impregnated her one? Is he a father? What of a zygote immediately after fertilization? One can reasonably answer no to any of these questions, though yes would probably be the more common answer. If I snuck into one of Quine's lectures once, was I a Quine student? If I audited his class? If I audited but dropped after one class? Two?

   This is how the left reasons: we don't like the idea of virginity. So it's politically incorrect. So it doesn't exist. Because [incoherent pseudo-philosophical bullshit].

   Anyway.

   Is virginity is a social constructed?

   I dunno. Is the Jabberwock slithy?