Virginity has taken on a very strange role in America these days. Abstinence advocates and purity rings notwithstanding, virginity is increasingly seen in the secular West as a troublesome burden, an embarrassment, to be cast off asap.
Brooke Shields revealed that she too views it that way in a recent Q&A she did with Health magazine. The interviewer asked, "What's your biggest health regret?"
Her biggest health regret, the former child actress and supermodel said, was staying a virgin too long.
Until age 22, to be precise. Um -- that's a health issue?
To Shields it is. She told the reporter that the reason she held off as long as she did was that she found herself unattractive. As happens with so many people, this kind of self-loathing can keep one from wanting others to see one undressed. It's a remarkable revelation from someone who appeared in her first film at age eleven, was a household world thanks to a Calvin Klein jeans commercial at age 15, and spent her teen years as one of the world's most envied females. (It's also interesting coming from a woman who proudly stated, in an autobiography published when she was twenty, that she was still a virgin because "Love is what I want to wait for. I don't need to experiment.") But because she didn't like her body -- a dislike that apparently hindered her intimate experiences -- Shields says she sought shelter in weight gain during her years at Princeton.
