An Anthropological Study of Girl's Encounter with the Concept of Virginity: A Case Study of Single Girls Aged 18 to 30 Years Old

In this research, we have studied the perception and encountering of the new generation of girls with the concept of virginity. The research focuses on the life experience of girls who have had free sexual intercourse. Each of them makes different decisions about their body and destiny in the face of virginity and non-virginity concepts.  In the theoretical part, we have used the purity and danger theory of Mary Douglas because of the overlap with the issue of virginity in Iran and the relationship between purity and impurity of the body in the concept of virginity. In the methodological section, the focus of the research has been on ethnography and fieldwork. In this study, 50 participants were interviewed. The age group of the participants is 18 to 30 years old, single, with university education, and economically and socially in the middle and upper-middle level. Young girls' perceptions and encounters with virginity are vague and complex. The young generation, with conflicts and contradictions between individual desires in sex and social pressures related to the value of girls' virginity, despite the initial violation of the norm, but eventually girls are forced to follow and accept the prevailing norms, and in order to be accepted in society they must provide physical virginity and they have to perform virginity restoration surgeries.