Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Iranian Women’s View of First Sex Outside of Marriage
Maryam Rahmani Tehrani
ABSTRACT:
Marriage has a high status in Iranian culture and is one of the concerns of families about their children. In Iranian society, the only accepted framework for satisfying the sexual instinct is marriage. In recent years, because of social changes as well as the growth of gender awareness among women, we have seen the formation of other methods besides marriage to satisfy the sexual instinct among women. This research is qualitative and exploratory and has no hypotheses. A semi-structured, in-depth interview was used for data collection, and the sampling method in this study was a snowball. In this research, 10 women aged 28–38 who had sex outside of marriage were interviewed to find out how they view virginity, love, and sex. The findings of this research show that virginity until marriage is not considered a value for these women, and they consider virginity to be more of a physiological issue than a moral value. Although two of them have kept their virginity while having sex, Also, except for two women, the rest of the respondents do not distinguish between love and their first sex, and their preference is to experience their first sex with a man whom they loved and considered committed. These women suffered stress and anxiety due to taboo-breaking. These women are worried about their futures because they are breaking the norms of society, and most families do not know about their extramarital relationships.
keywords: Extramarital sexual relationship; Love; Marriage, Patriarchy; Romantic relationships