Technical Virgin

Captain Cragen: Since when is oral sex not sex?
Olivia Benson: Since Bill Clinton said so.

— Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

A "technical virgin" is a person who has never had genital–genital sex, but who has engaged in one or more sexually satisfying acts with one or more other people.

Yes, this is Truth in Television. Via Loophole Abuse and Exact Words, people from conservative settings (cultural or familial) can maintain their virginity, while still engaging in "harmless exploration" or sexual bonding, by simply doing everything but penis-in-vagina intercourse. This of course can lead to some terrible decisions, such as engaging in some unprotected oral or anal sex in an attempt to retain one's purity, even though this still carries a risk of STD transmission. This can be justified in settings where a character needs to retain their Virgin Power but still wants some kind of sex life, but not really anywhere else, and people who claim to be technical virgins are often seen as ignorant and/or hypocrites, especially if they're prone to judging others.

Note that in many patriarchal societies, both on earth and on paper, a woman who has been raped is "technically not a virgin" and suffers the related disadvantages. Such societies may vary in their stand on whether non-coital incidents that rupture the hymen relieve a woman of technical virginity (this is quite relevant in societies where, for whatever reason, women ride on horseback a lot). There is also much debate as to how this concept applies (or, indeed, if it applies) to non-heterosexual sex.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ghost Talker's Daydream: Despite Misaki's work as a dominatrix, the furthest she's ever gone with any of her clients was one who performed oral sex on her.^note iIt was involuntary, since Misaki was protesting and trying to get Shimamura to stop. In a separate incident, she wakes up on a park bench and can't fully remember what she'd done, due to being hungover. But she assures Kadotake that no one took advantage of her, having already checked to make certain of it.
• Koe de Oshigoto!: One of the eroge scenarios Nagatoshi wrote (shown in chapter 26) has this as a theme, due to an industry standard about miko generally being virgins, but Hadzuki shed a bit of light that makes the premise suspect... Anyway, this trope's the reason that new H-game is going to be all about anal sex.
• The Miko game was also, scene-for-scene and word-for-word, based on a former Hentai manga by Konno Azure named Puberty Crazies, with the sole exeception being that in said work, the characters were normal high schoolers, not Mikos, thus making its characters Technical Virgins as well.
• Pfil of the H-Manga Bondage Fairies. She retains her Virgin Power even though a male fairy is apparently the only thing she hasn't had sex with.
• Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Main character Misora is a gravure model and very intent on saving her first time for a committed relationship. By implication, given the amount of sexual situations she ends up in due to her agency's shenanigans to turn her into a porn actress, only penetrative sex with a male "counts". Later she strikes up a Friends with Benefits relationship with another female sex worker, and initially still insists that it doesn't count, but when it grows more serious she decides that the woman is her girlfriend and took her virginity.

Comic Books

• Delatriz Betancourt from the 2009 Dominic Fortune mini:
  Dominic: Last time we were on the verge of getting frisky... you told me you were a virgin.
  Delatriz: And I am... Why do you think God gave me an ass?
• In the "Brief Lives" arc of The Sandman (1989), one character mentions a cultural religious ceremony involving sex that wasn't considered to affect a woman's virginity — saying something like "if you lost your cherry on the goddess' altar, you still got to keep your cherry" referring the practice of a love goddess's clergy including sacred prostitutes, who would not be considered "spoiled goods" after losing their virginity in service of the goddess. The love goddess and the character who mentions this are one and the same.
• Requiem Vampire Knight has a variation: in the world of Resurrécion, a "virgin" refers to any victim not yet bitten by a vampire. The main protagonist's love interest Rebecca is repeatedly referred to as a virgin, even though she had sex relations with him beforehand which doesn't prevent Dracula's enforcers from taking her to his harem so that he can claim his right of the "first bite".
• A variation in one of Phil Foglio's porn comics: an angel and a demon watch over the couple hooking up, who are destined to conceive The Antichrist. The angel seems remarkably unfazed by it all, despite the demon gloatingly pointing out the exotic and morally-disapproved-of positions the couple is performing as proof of sin's imminent triumph. Finally the sun rises and the couple part ways, but the angel still seems entirely unworried, and the demon realizes that for all the acrobatic combinations of orifices they went through, not one of them could ever result in a baby.

Fan Works

• A Crown of Stars: Asuka was Winthrop and Jinnai’s “voluntary” sex toy for three years. Daniel did not want her bearing that burden, so that he replaced her with a dummy every time they were going to ravage her. Hence, she has got sex hundreds of times and she is still a virgin. However, she still feels defiled.
• Advice and Trust, by the same author, alludes to Asuka and Shinji having "done just about everything two teenagers could do without risking a surprise nine months later" after their Relationship Upgrade. And it was bloody fantastic.
• Code Geass: The Prepared Rebellion: Exaggerated. C.C. has had many female lovers during her 700-year life but still considers herself a virgin until she sleeps with Lelouch.
• The Discworld Tarot: Played with in The Ace of Swords. Miss Alice Band is able to tame a rogue unicorn despite her sexual experience. As she was never sexually involved with men, but instead with other women, Alice is technically still a maiden and thus able to subdue the unicorn without much trouble — although, strictly speaking, this is because it is too confused by this to mount any resistance.
• Doing It Right This Time, which owes much to the above example, uses the trope word-for-word with Hikari and Toji. And their technical virginity only lasted until they could procure birth control.
• Of Lies and Deceit and Hidden Personas: Theo believes that his betrothal contract, which requires purity on his part, hasn't been violated because he hasn't had sex with girls.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Wing had an interview with the creators where fans could ask them about anything related to the series. One fangirl wrote in, asking if the five Gundam pilots had any sexual experience, in degrees from kissing all the way up to actual intercourse. The response was that Heero and Quatre had none, while Duo, Trowa, and Wufei had some. (Though given that Wufei was in an Arranged Marriage, his was kind of a Foregone Conclusion.) However, the creators never specified what, exactly, that meant for Duo and Trowa. (i.e. Where and when it happened, with whom, whether or not it was consensual, or "how far" they had gone.) To say that the fandom went wild speculating about the implications of this piece of information (especially where reserved and introverted Trowa was concerned) is an understatement. So there are, accordingly, fanfictions where one or both of them have gone all the way in the past, and fanfics where they've done "everything but," and everything in between.
• The Power of Seven features Demelza Robbins as a variation of this; while she had sex before becoming part of Harry's harem, she is also the girl who had to wait the longest to actually have sex with Harry. Their initial encounters consisted of the two stripping down and Harry caressing her body or eating her out, the two only engaging in actual penetrative sex after Harry had such encounters with five of the other girls (Ginny, Hermione, Luna, Susan Bones and Katie Bell; the final harem had seven girls but Fleur wasn't chosen as the seventh until the subsequent holidays).
• The Second Try: Shinji and Asuka lived together for several years after Third Impact, and even had a daughter. Due to Mental Time Travel, they wind up back in their fourteen-year-old bodies during the events of the series. She even mentions that she wants a better "first time" this time around.
• Two Broken People: Akira — having had several sexual encounters with Seiji that didn't involve actual penetration — thinks to himself that he'll "be the only virgin he'd ever meet who could say he had fucked between his partner's legs in public while his partner was cross-dressing."
• Your servant, Mistress: Diaval becomes Maleficent's submissive partner, and his virginity increasingly technical. His initial hangups quickly become irrelevant as he enjoys the not-sex they're having very much.
• There is a The Hobbit fanfic where Tauriel has sex with Kili. Anal sex, as that is not sex in the technical sense, which would permanently bond elves to one another. Oh, and the woman is "on top", so to speak.
• There are a lot of erotic Doctor Who fanfics based around the Fanon that Time Lords consider themselves virgins again after they've regenerated.
• In this Wonder Woman fancomic, Cheetah describes how, when she drank from a holy chalice, she was told that she would become a goddess if she was a virgin or a beast if she was not. Since she was never interested in "P in V" but "did a lot of other stuff'', the chalice split the different by turning her into a Beast Woman.

Films — Live-Action

• The View Askewniverse:
  • There is a long discussion in Chasing Amy over what constitutes 'virginity' and whether an active lesbian who has never had intercourse with a man should be considered a 'virgin'.
  • In Clerks, Veronica chastises Dante for having slept with about twelve girls, while she had only been with three guys. However, soon afterwards she reveals she performed oral sex on thirty-seven different guys. Apparently, she considered it just "fooling around".
  Dante: Wait a minute, what is that anyway, something like 36?! Does that include me?!
  Veronica: Ummm, 37.
  Dante: I'm 37?!
  Veronica: I'm going to class.
  [Customer comes up to counter]
  Dante: Oh, my God. [To Customer] 37! My girlfriend sucked 37 dicks!
  Customer: In a row?
• In American Pie, Kevin and Vicky both go down on each other to the point of orgasm (it's a plot point both times), but a huge deal is made about the first time they actually do it.
• Although they're hardly virgins, this is a line from one of the Band Aids from Almost Famous:
  Estrella: "We. Are not. Groupies. She (Penny Lane) was the first one to say, 'No more Sex.' No more exploiting our bodies and our hearts. Just blow jobs, and that's it."
• In Mean Girls, Regina says of her boyfriend, who's just broken up with her, "I gave him everything. I was half a virgin when I met him!" Whatever that means.
• In Clueless, Dionne's virginity "went from technical to non-existent."
• A deleted line in Saved! has Asian Airhead Veronica pray, "Forgive me for using anal sex to preserve my virginity."
• In What's New Pussycat?, Paula Prentiss's neurotic character owns up to being a "semi-virgin".
  Michael: What... in the name... of all that's gracious, is a "semi-virgin"?
  The Girl: Here [in Paris] I'm a virgin; in America I'm not.
  Michael: What, is it stamped on your passport?
  The Girl: Yes.
• Blockers: Chad and Sam get as far as getting naked and Sam touching Chad's penis to see how she feels about it, but she realises she's definitely gay and they don't go any further. That's still enough for Chad to get a bit too excited, and he says that he feels different after the experience. Kayla, who was the most excited to have casual sex, realises that she does want her first time to be a bit special after all, so gets her date to give her oral sex instead.
• In Lesbian Vampire Killers, lesbians are considered to be virgins regardless of how active their social life is because they haven't had penetrative (penis-in-vagina) sex.
• In Something Wicked Christine has vowed not to have sex until her wedding day, but her boyfriend is still shown going down on her in one scene.
• A matter of dispute in The Final Girls. The characters are trapped in a slasher movie, and final girls have slayer-like powers for the sake of fighting the slasher. Only virgins are eligible, and while one girl admits that she's no longer qualified, another tries to argue that she's still in the running despite...whatever she did with her ex-boyfriend (he's too polite to say). To no one's surprise, the honor falls instead to the protagonist, who is a non-technical virgin.
• Dope: Will says a lot of girls were only willing to have oral or anal sex with him to stay virgins in their minds. He admits it's the only sex that he's had, so by that standard he's also a technical virgin (or technically gay, in his view).
• In The Monster Squad, Patrick's sister tries to invoke this while the others are trying to figure out why the virgin-powered magic ritual didn't work. Turns out it DID count:
  Patrick: You're not a virgin, are you?
  Patrick's Sister: [shakes her head]
  Patrick: No? What do you mean "No"?
  Patrick's Sister: Well, Steve... but he doesn't count!
  Patrick: "DOESN'T COUNT"!?
• In My Sister's Keeper, Kate says that she and Taylor did it, and when her mother gets angry, she backtracks and says they just did "some stuff".

Jokes

• An old joke concerns three nuns who die in a car crash and are waiting in line for heaven. When they reach St. Peter, he informs the first nun in line that he knows that she has broken her vow of abstinence with her hands, but she can be forgiven if she cleanses her hands in a basin of holy water. The third nun in line whispers to the second, "Can I cut in front of you? I REALLY don't want to gargle that stuff after you've already dipped your ass in it."

Literature

• "The Silken-Swift", a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, portrays a unicorn who is not only silken-swift but also gloriously fair in this regard.
• In Stephen King's The Stand, Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross are "technical virgins," having done everything but vaginal intercourse. Nadine actually ponders this at one point, wondering at the kind of man (she's promised to the Big Bad) who wouldn't consider oral or anal sex to be defilement. Of course, Flagg only wants an heir.
• In one of the later The Dresden Files books, Dresden agrees to take Molly Carpenter (who has started developing magic) as an apprentice, and asks if she is sexually active. She replies that she is "technically" a virgin, and has "explored most of the bases" (Harry: "Well, Magellan..."). Dresden tells her that there is to be no more "exploring" (and that she is not to start any "solo expeditions") until she develops better mental discipline. This is partly because Molly tries to clumsily seduce Harry at one point, despite Harry knowing her since she was eight. Harry is no less vulnerable to Squick than the reader.
• Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse includes a woman who both admitted to having bribed a demon with sexual favors and offered herself as a Virgin Sacrifice, with the cultist magically determining that she was qualified for it. The trope is applied a little differently in this case: the demon never took physical form and the sex was a purely mental defilement, while the sacrifice was being fed to a dragon, which only cared about the purely physical. (There was a practical reason: after one case where an STD crossed species lines and severely affected the dragons' population, they want to make damn sure near-extinction doesn't happen that way again.)
• The Older Than Print Trope Maker here is Boccaccio's Decameron, or, more precisely, the very first novella of the book. One of the reasons why Ser Ciappelletto is hailed as a saint after he dies is his reputation of lifelong chastity. In reality, the reason why he never slept with women is... that he was into men.
• Another old variant, only four lines long: "A True Maid" by Matthew Prior (1664–1721)
  "No, no; for my virginity,
  When I lose that," says Rose, "I’ll die."
  "Behind the elms, last night," cried Dick,
  "Rose, were you not extremely sick?"
• Jerin in A Brother's Price was seduced by a princess. She didn't "mount him", there was Questionable Consent and they did something, but she let him go when he outright said no. Virginity in anyone unwed is important, so he worries about this.
  Certainly if she had let him go when he first asked, he would have fled back to his bed, remaining chaste in his lips, his hands, and his memories. Now only parts of him were virgin. [..] Maybe being a virgin was like planting a garden — you could turn the earth and rake down the soil all you wanted, but until you pushed a seed into the dirt, you hadn't created a garden. Or was being a virgin like a frosted cake, where once someone stole a slice, you couldn't proudly serve it to visitors?
• Harry Turtledove's short story "Honeymouth": The foul-mouthed and very lecherous mercenary, ironically dubbed Honeymouth, is somehow able to ride a unicorn without any problem. When asked how he can do it, usually while the unicorn is parked outside a brothel, he sarcastically replies that he's a virgin. He is, technically. The nickname "Honeymouth" has nothing to do with scatological verbiage.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Elizabethan series, Princess Elizabeth thinks at one point that should she be forced into an alliance marriage, "human to human she would be a virgin still". (She's sexually active through half the series, but with the elven lord Denoriel.)
• In Ladylord, tradition requires that people wanting to be Third Lord keep their virginity until then. The two main candidates (both women, since the old lord has no sons) have technically done so, but have different approaches. One, the protagonist, upholds the spirit, avoiding all sex even after she marries. The other is widely (and correctly) rumoured to do just about everything except the thing which would disqualify her.
• Subverted in The Outstretched Shadow. Idalia Tavadon's Mageprice for casting a Wild Magic spell to turn herself into an eagle to escape the Outlaw Hunt was for her to find a mate and raise a clutch of chicks before she would be allowed to resume human form. Later on her brother Kellen thinks that his unicorn friend Shalkan avoids touching her because she's secretly evil, but this sets Idalia and Shalkan into gales of laughter. Idalia explains it's because she's not a virgin, and yes, brother dearest, having sex as an eagle counts.
• In Penryn And The End Of Days, ever since some angels got banished to hell for messing around with human women and making the Nephilim, sex between humans and angels has been forbidden. However, since All Men Are Perverts a lot of angels are getting around this rule by doing everything but the one thing that can make a baby.
• Super Powereds:
  • An interesting case Julia, whose power is Me's a Crowd. It turns out that, despite all the Twin Threesome Fantasy sex she's been having with Roy, she still considers herself a virgin (being a devout Christian), since her original body has never been penetrated. Still, she has experienced all sex has to offer through her copies (all of them share a mind). Whether or not this counts as still being a virgin isn't certain, but, then again, religion in general has been hit hard by the reveal of the existence of Supers.
  • There's also Hershel, a geeky, overweight guy, who has never had sex. That said, he frequently shifts into his alter-ego/brother Roy, who picks up a different girl every night. Hershel's girlfriend Mary does her best not to think about Hershel having memories of sleeping with dozens of girls. After all, it's not his fault.
• The shadowthurges in the Amazon ebook Lockhart And Teague The Empty Chest are all this, due to having sworn never to have intercourse, or else lose their powers.
• Beu Ribe in Aztec. She explains that she was raped by a former priest, who forced her to wear the robes of a temple priestess because he wanted to defile the holy. However, due to his over-zealous self-flagellation, his genitals had been so mangled he was only able to penetrate as far as the head of his penis, so she still considered herself a virgin.
• Jackie Collins in Chances has several scenes in which the runaway teenagers Lucky and Olympia play a game of almost with their European boyfriends, a game they thought they invented.
• Eliza of Qwghlm in The Baroque Cycle starts out the saga as a virgin, even though she was forced into a Royal Harem in her backstory and admits having substantial experience with other harem girls due to the lack of men around the place and being well-versed in the techniques of the Kama Sutra.
• In Everybody Loves Large Chests, a nun of the goddess of truth is shown as having enthusiastic anal sex with a man she sort-of introduced as her cousin. The narrator explains that many nuns take vows of chastity and use this as a Loophole Abuse to still have sex. Given that they don't get a special debuff from breaking their vows to their gods, the gods accept this. This particular nun and her "cousin" end up paying for that with their lives when Boxxy sneaks up on them (they are facing the same direction, after all) and uses its assassination skill to kill them both. Later on, the God of Chaos takes a special pleasure in showing a recording of the act to the Goddess of Truth herself and watching her outraged reaction.
• In The Witcher series, the character of Ciri is this. She's had a lesbian relationship but was never depicted going farther than second base with a man.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: As in mythology, the goddess Athena is an eternal virgin. Unlike in mythology, she has children, most notably Annabeth. Apparently Athena, as the goddess of wisdom, conceives children by having an intellectual relationship with a man, and pops the kids out of her head, just as she was born from the head of Zeus. Annabeth's Love Interest, Percy, is kind of weirded out when he learns this.
• Girls Don't Hit: Madison tells Joss she's “technically a virgin” due to only giving her boyfriend blowjobs and handjobs.
• A possible case for Will and Lyra from His Dark Materials. There every human being is born with a daemon that takes the form of various animals as long as the human being is a child. With the onset of puberty, the daemon permanently settles into an animal form. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, Will and Lyra become physically closer. The chapter is suggestive and open-ended. However, it is canon that both daemons take their permanent forms when Will touches Lyra's daemon and she touches his daemon. However, touching another human's demon is accompanied by a strong sexual element, as shown in the seduction scene with Mrs. Coulter and Lord Boreal in The Subtle Knife. It is even implicitly described as both being clearly sexually aroused as they touch each other's daemon. However, there is also a theory that Will and Lyra engaged in sexual intercourse. Exactly what they do to each other is never revealed. If they've just touched each other's daemon, they're technical virgins. But if they have had sexual intercourse with each other, they are not virgins anyway.
• The Mortal Instruments has Simon and Isabelle. The two begin a relationship with each other after a short time. Isabelle is no longer a virgin, unlike Simon. Later in their relationship, Simon and Isabelle sleep in a bed together, sharing physical touches. However, Simon is canonically still a virgin at the end of the book series. Exactly what the two do with each other, whether it's that trope or just innocent cuddling, is up to the reader to decide.
  • In The Dark Artifices Mark and Cristina are shown. Both teenagers start a relationship with each other. While Cristina is still a virgin, Mark is unknown as he previously had a relationship with a boy named Kieran (Mark is bisexual). When Cristina approaches Mark sexually, he refuses to go all the way with her, and they both use their hands to pleasure each other. Exactly how far they go is unknown, but when Cristina sees Mark naked the next day, she's a little upset about it and he doesn't understand her excitement, saying she doesn't see anything on his body that she doesn't already know. However, it is implied that both will have sexual intercourse in the usual way by the end of the book series, and neither will be a virgin after that.
• The Testament of Sister New Devil: In the light novels, due to the conditions of the Master-Servant Pact, Basara's harem can't have sex with him without risking permanent loss of their powers (this is left out of the manga and anime adaptations). However, this evidently applies only to intercourse, as they level up their powers mainly by having him bring them to orgasm in other ways. The conditions later change so that Basara is required to have vaginal sex with them.
• Discussed in High School D×D. Irina, a Brave Saint who would really like to bang her childhood friend Issei, shoots down anything physical being over the line. Sex is fine, Lust is the sin, to the point where she can't even think about it too hard without being at risk of falling. She even lays out that they could have sex safely if they were doing it for a practical reason like consummation and kept their thoughts pure, but even she admits that wouldn't be any fun.
• Kushiel's Legacy: There's a tradition among nobles of Terre d'Ange for their friends to hire them a prostitute from the capital's brothels (a celebrated profession in this country) to take their virginity when they reach the age of majority. Imriel, main character of the second trilogy, has no friends his own age, and is a rape survivor from when he was sold to a Sorcerous Overlord's harem as a child. Instead, his foster mother Phèdre pays for him to have a night with a courtesan of a House that specializes in Intimate Healing.
• Averted in Judge Dee, where Ma Joong makes the off-color comment that the Tatars (and by extension the plains nomads) don't insist on brides being virgins due to all the horseback riding they do.
• Magic University: Magical students often don't engage in intercourse, as being a virgin has magical potency. However, other sex acts don't "count" apparently and so they can do those.
• Earth's Children:
  • In The Valley of Horses, Jondalar seems to view Ayla as such, due to the fact that her only sexual encounters up to that point involved rape; she had never experienced consensual sex and had no knowledge of sexual pleasure. As a considerate, experienced lover who is frequently asked to 'initiate' true virgins, he's only too happy to give her an enjoyable 'first time.'
  • In The Plains of Passage, Losaduna performs a ritual to drive out the evil of Madenia's rapists and declares that spiritually she is as she was before. Socially, she's still considered a virgin because she hadn't had her First Rites when the assault occurred (rape doesn't count to her people). The issue is that Madenia is now extremely apprehensive about having consensual sex given her first experience was so horrific.

Live-Action TV

• Lissa on Awkward. has taken a vow of chastity but is perfectly willing to give her boyfriend hand jobs and even offer him anal sex.
• In one episode ("And Then There Was Shawn") of Boy Meets World (as part of a discussion of the Sex Equals Death trope), Shawn reveals that he is one of these, noting "I'll get as sick as you can possibly get without actually dying".
• In Downton Abbey, when Kemal Pamuk "seduces" Mary (with shades of Rape as Drama), he promises her she'll still be a virgin for her husband. God only knows exactly what happens before he keels over and dies in her bed. Averted in that she and everyone else (who knows) treats it as if she were Defiled Forever.
• Subverted. An episode of the The Drew Carey Show featured a man who claimed to be the devil (and might well have been, judging by his skill at pool) wanting to take Kate for his bride. Except he thinks she'll be a virgin bride. When Drew and his friends reveal Kate is not a virgin, the Devil insists that there's some wiggle room, and whispers a question in Kate's ear.
  Kate: ...yeah, but just once.
  Satan: Oh, you people are sick!
  Lewis: Hey, you wanna find a virgin, get out of Cleveland.
• Shoshanna on Girls. She manages to get to third base with the guy before killing the moment.
• Discussed in How I Met Your Mother, in the episode "First Time In New York". Robin says during her first time she only "barely" had sex, but Lily insists it didn't count. She admits to having messed around with her high school boyfriend but insists she didn't cross a certain (unspecified) line that would count as loss of virginity since for years Lily's been saying she and Marshall have only had sex with each other. Some debate sparks over whether or not Lily lost her virginity to Marshall, and eventually Marshall concedes that Lily was a Technical Virgin because it doesn't count as "going to the Empire State Building" if you've only been in the lobby.
  Marshall: It's a big deal because it rewrites our history.
  Lily: No it doesn't! Look, have you been to the Empire State Building? No, you've only been in the lobby. People don't buy tickets to get in the lobby! They buy tickets to get to the top. Scooter only got in the lobby, and the lobby doesn't count.
• Each of The Inbetweeners in different ways. Will got Charlotte into bed and only stumbled at the last hurdle when he didn't know what he was doing. Simon received two (unfinished) handjobs in different episodes and was all set to have sex with Tara had it not been for Jay's "Tactical Wank" advice. Jay once received a handjob "outside the trousers" in the first series finale (though this could be Blatant Lies as he originally said it was a blowjob) and a blowjob in The Movie. Neil has fingered several girls (possibly including Charlotte) and by the end of the third series has had sex. Though, thanks to the movie's ending, it's likely that this has been remedied for all four of the lads, except for Will, who is still a virgin by the end of the second film.
• Noah in Jury Duty attempts to get around his "no sex before marriage" rule by putting his penis into his partner and having a third party (James Marsden) jump on the bed.
• An episode of Las Vegas has Mike get interested in a woman who, it turns out, had taken an "adult abstinence pledge". He thinks it over and decides that he's fine dating her even if they don't have sex. When he goes to visit her, it turns out that she's been "breaking her oath" left and right, but considers herself a virgin every time she re-takes her oath.
• In the Season 4 premiere of Legends of Tomorrow, 'The Virgin Gary', the Legends need to capture a homicidal unicorn slaughtering hippies at Woodstock, and resident warlock John Constantine prepares a spell to banish it to Hell. However, the trap requires a specific type of bait: a virgin. Since the Legends figure that none of the nearby free-lovin' hippies will meet the standard, they bring in the titular virgin, Gary. Gary asks if he even counts as a virgin, after "that thing [he and Constantine] did". Constantine says yes.
• In one episode of Lexx, a virus causes everyone aboard to change genitalia. The resulting hormone imbalance causes Stan and Xev to yield to temptation. When the Lexx's immune system generates a cure, changing everyone back, Kai (who was not affected, being dead) explains that "technically", because their genitalia were in a state of flux, Xev is still a virgin. But Stan isn't.
• Supernatural:
  • In Season 4, Dean, fresh out of Hell, concludes that because all the scars he's accumulated over the years have healed after he was brought back to life, so, too, has his virginity.
    Dean: I have been re-hymenated!
  • The Season 6 episode "Like a Virgin" involves humanoid Dragons who snatch up virgin girls so they can use one as a Virgin Sacrifice to free Eve, the "Mother of All" monsters, from Purgatory. One of the leads is found in a hospital and not taken away because her standard for what "counts" is a bit different than what the dragons had in mind...
• Hilary, the daughter on the sitcom The War at Home refers to herself as this in one of the show's fourth-wall segments, adding that villagers probably wouldn't be sacrificing her to any volcanoes.
• In Season 3 of The Big C, Adam's new Christian girlfriend is saving herself (read: her vagina) for her future husband, but positively gleefully allows him the backdoor entrance.
• Inverted on Asfour: Katsar has had sex before, but has never reached orgasm, as it’s sinful. He doesn’t understand what the difference is, until Mazal Okhayun gives him a ‘mouth hug’ to show him just what the difference is.
• Fresh Meat:
  • Howard technically lost his virginity, but the actual method was not standard genital-genital sex (he can only explain using graph paper and a medical encyclopedia). He eventually does have intercourse with his roommate Sabine after she picks him as a substitute fuck-buddy.
  • Upper-Class Twit JP used to engage in mutual masturbation in the showers at his public school, but writes it off as "dorm rules", while his first time was with a prostitute his uncle hired for his 18th.
• On Misfits, Simon is still considered a virgin his first time with Alisha after having been fellated by Lucy the shapeshifter. Similarly, being fellated by his stepmother does not count toward Finn's tally of sexual partners.
• On Some Girls, Holli is a justified version. While she's open to sexual experimentation, she refuses to do anything that could result in pregnancy because she doesn't want to become a teen mother like her own.
• A Saturday Night Live skit featuring a talk show profiling three young women who had vowed to stay virgins until they married—and their miserable boyfriends. A viewer calls into the show, insisting that one of the girls isn't a virgin, as he's slept with her. She rattles off about six different names before getting the right one, then cheerfully denies sleeping with any of them, as "it was in the butt".
• Played for Laughs in The George Lopez Show; Max is suspected to have caught a urinary tract infection from his girlfriend after sexual intercourse. He denies that he had actual sex with her, but later admits that they did "upstairs outsidies"^note Because someone's inevitably going to ask, it basically means that he touched/fondled his girlfriend's breasts (hence "upstairs") with his hands outside of her shirt (hence "outsidies").
  George: See, Angie? He's still upstairs! He's nowhere near the floors where the bad stuff happens!
• On Good Girls Revolt the girls have a discussion about virginity, with Cindy and Patti asking Jane, who’s saving herself for marriage, whether she does ‘other stuff’. Cindy states that she was a virgin when she got married, but that she 'did other stuff' before anyway.
• General Hospital's Elizabeth Webber laments the fact that she was a virgin before she was raped. Laura tells her, "And you still are. You haven't made love yet."
• The Bisexual: Leila, on the rebound after breaking up with her partner, goes home with the male coat-check clerk at the lesbian bar she and her friends hang out at, and admits to him when she has trouble opening the condom that she's never done this before. At his surprised response, she clarifies that she isn't a virgin, she's just only ever had sex with women.
• Yellowjackets: Jackies remains this with her boyfriend, Jeff. They engage in sex acts other than full intercourse.
• Twenties: Nia claims she's saving herself for marriage, but only considers intercourse as “counting”, so that other sexual stuff is fine.
• In the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow remarks in one episode that she and Oz pull a wild whiplash act every night. Buffy and Xander aren't very fond of this description. However, canonically, Willow only loses her virginity to Oz in the penultimate episode of Season 3. One can speculate that Willow was a technical virgin for several episodes, but it could also be that she was just joking.

Manhua

• Xiaxi in Goddess Creation System is pointed out as an obvious virgin based on her nervousness at one point. It's technically true in that her current body probably hasn't had sex, but at the very start of the story, we see her waking up unclothed in a hotel room to see pictures of herself posted online. She just happens to have killed herself and reincarnated after that.

Music

• "The Loophole" by Garfunkel and Oates is about this, with the memorable lyric "Fuck me in the ass 'cause I love Jesus."

Religion and Mythology

• The Bible: The Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, became pregnant through a miracle. There's a bit of a debate whether she had sex after he was born, however: most Protestants think she did, since she was married and Jesus is described as having "brothers and sisters," while Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe that she never had sex and that "siblings" should be read as "kinsmen."
• The Mahabharata:
  • Kunti has a spell that she can use up to 5 times to make one of the gods come to her, and she is still honored as a holy virgin.
  • Similarly, her daughter-in-law Draupadi has 5 husbands and has sex with each of them (and produces a son by each of them), and she too is honored as a holy virgin. (Shiva also lets her know that her virginity is renewed each time she bathes.) In fact, when the Kauravas start Slut-Shaming her for having five husbands (and refusing to sleep with Duryodhana in front of his court), the Brahmins in the area refuse to do any work because of her honor being dragged through the mud.
• In Classical Mythology, the goddess Hera had a special bath that would renew her virginity.

Video Games

• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Ciri, who is extremely sexually experienced with (going by the books) at least one other woman and absolutely zero men, goes to the blind mystic Thecla to asks for an audience with the Ladies.
  Thecla: [Ciri enters her tent] And who is this?
  Assistant: Narrow hips, sparkly eyes — a strikin' feisty lass.
  Techla: Ever been with a man? [sniffs Ciri, tuts] Never mind, got my answer. Tonight you shall meet with the Ladies.

Visual Novels

• The title character of Melody is this until her first time with the protagonist. She had one (or more, depending on player choice) lesbian experience with Sophia beforehand, but both Melody herself and the game give her the “virgin” label until she goes all the way with the protagonist.
• At the end of Mia's route in Summertime Saga she insists on sticking to anal sex because she's saving her maidenhood for marriage. No matter how much you get her to loosen up, she's still a devout Catholic. However, with a high enough Charisma, the Player Character can persuade her to try "Just the tip" because "It doesn't even count if it's just the tip..." and then she asks him to "Go in a little deeper..." negating any "technical" aspect of it.

Web Animation

• Brittnay from The Most Popular Girls in School Really Gets Around but is saving her vaginal virginity for someone special.
• In the Collegehumor series, Dating: It's Complicated, one guy talks about how he was partying with his girlfriend, and they woke up in one of his friends' bedrooms. They started making out, and she said she wanted to have sex. He was excited because even though he'd done "other things" with her, he'd never actually had PIV intercourse. Great, except he didn't have any condoms with him. She said she had one in her purse, and the rest of the sketch consists of him attempting to retrieve said purse from a locked bedroom. When that proves to be a bust, they just go with the classic "Everything But," only to find a box of condoms right there on the bedside table. They don't get to use them because the owner of the bedroom walks in and tells them off, and then the girlfriend starts her period.

Web Comics

• In The Order of the Stick, after Roy's resurrection, Celia points out that since the body is brand new, he is technically a virgin. Or, rather, was since she says that after just having had sex with him (a matter of hours after his resurrection), although she's pretty much joking anyway.
• Jamie of Girls with Slingshots insists that she's a virgin, even though she's "slept with like eight thousand people" (what, precisely, she does instead of coitus isn't specified). These strips detail it.
• Ginny from Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell is a huge draw down at the off-leash unicorn park. The unicorns make somewhat obscene comments between themselves about exactly how pure she is. For whatever supernatural metric the unicorns use to rate her, being an active lesbian doesn't apparently count. It turns out she isn't a lesbian, but has heterosexual sex with angels. Which apparently also doesn't count.
• Mentioned in Filthy Lies: "Joseph just needed good aim on his money shot."
• In Oglaf, neither fellatio nor anal appears to count ("Immaculate City" and "Potion of Girlfriend" respectively). In this case, there's a specific measure — the magical city of Vanorva is invisible and inaccessible except to virgins. The first print collection included, as a bonus, "Ivan and Navaan's 'Doesn't Count' Kama Sutra".
  • Weirdly subverted by Oglaf and Goat Girl: according to the latter, penis-in-vagina does not constitute "real" sex. We don't see what does, but it causes explosions.
• Karin-dou 4koma: Elza Sleeps With Everyone But Mifi because of Mifi's Virgin Power—but anything short of penetration (Elza's a hermaphrodite) is fair game.
• Implied in Sandra and Woo when a cultist asks Sandra if she's qualified to be a Virgin Sacrifice and she gives a vague answer. It's incredibly unlikely that she and Cloud had actual sex since in a previous strip Cloud's mother threatened to decapitate him if he got Sandra pregnant before she finished High School (and knowing Ye Thuza, it wasn't an idle threat).
• El Goonish Shive: Ellen is Elliot's female duplicate with all his memories. While Elliot was definitely a virgin before Ellen was created, Ellen then received eighteen years of memories of a second life. In this second life, she had sex with a childhood friend while in high school and probably continued having a healthy sex life after. Ellen doesn't quite consider this her life, however, so it's arguable whether this counts as actually losing her virginity. Of course, soon after she received these memories she started dating Nanase, so she might have lost her virginity in a more normal way. The story doesn't say.
• Grrl Power: Harem is a weird case; she has Me's a Crowd as a superpower, and is enthusiastically bisexually active, but is keeping one of her duplicates intact because she intends to have a traditional wedding night. Even though the duplicate will, of course, be far more experienced than any blushing virgin.
  Hypothetical Future Husband: This seems... advanced.
• Parodied in Mage & Demon Queen with Velverosa, who believes that since she was the dominant member of every sexual encounter she's had, that means she's still "pure". The narration helpfully informs the reader that's not how it works.
• BOO! It's Sex: Once the girls realize that virginity is a social construct and the exact definition varies across cultures, Christine determines that she is a virgin despite one of her previous boyfriends briefly inserting "it" into her since he withdrew it almost immediately. Christine later engages in alternate forms of sex with her boyfriend Ansh, which aligns more closely with this trope.

Web Original

• The Shortest Story: Discussed in "The Questions of Magic" in association to Virgin Sacrifice.
  Why is virgin blood so powerful? Can I use my own blood? Does butt stuff count?
• The now-defunct website TechnicalVirgin.com used to host a series of PSAs spoofing abstinence PSAs by endorsing anal sex and vibrator use to prevent pregnancy. The site was taken down after the woman who appeared in the PSAs, Melanie Martinez, lost her job as a host on PBS Kids Sprout over the videos.
• Tina Marie, diary of an ex-prostitute, is a blog in Spanish -very nsfw- where its author tells in great detail about her sexual life, including how she lost her virginity at the age of 16/17, despite the fact that she had already been several years practicing oral sex. She points out that for someone of her generation -she is a woman who currently must not be more than 35 years old- her virginity was lost only with penetration.

Western Animation

• The Critic:
  Dressmaker: Here's the skinny. We dressmakers have a very strict code, so I need to know, do you deserve to wear virginal white? Because if you don't, you'll have to wear an off-white, what we call a hussy white. So which will it be, WHITE-white?
  Margo: Yes. Um... except for the gloves.
• The Family Guy episode about religious abstinence makes it clear that sex is not okay. Which some of the more sexual but faithful population solves by sticking the stick into the ear. Yes, the ear.
  Tom Tucker: "Prompting the new slogan: 'Once you go black, you go deaf'"
• The basic premise of "The Most Offensive Song Ever" from South Park. "You can suck all the dick you want / And still be a virgin, Mary."
• When the creator of Gargoyles was asked if Brooklyn was a virgin by the third season, his reply was a cryptic "Yes. Technically."
  • A possible explanation for that: as seen in the comic continuation, Brooklyn gets sent back in time, and already has a wife and children before arriving back in the present. So yes, Brooklyn is a virgin by season three but has also had sex before then.
• The Simpsons: In "Lisa's Wedding," it's implied that Lisa had sex with Milhouse when they were in high school. This briefly makes her question if she should wear a white dress for her wedding before she and Marge decide that doesn't count solely because it was Milhouse.

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