Post About Sexual Assault Among the Gods: Continue At Own Risk

Question: Why are there so many more virgin goddesses than virgin gods, and what obstacles could a PC face when choosing to pursue either path?

This is actually a serious historical sociology question. Buckle down with me.

The reason why there are way more virgin goddesses than gods is very simple: for most ancient cultures (and even most cultures today, sadly), sex was seen as a sign of masculinity and power in men, but as a sign of pollution and immorality in women. Conversely, virginity was seen as a sign of virtue and goodness in women, whereas it was seen as a sign of immaturity and timidity in men.

Entire Gender Studies textbooks can't cover all the reasons this has been going on, where it came from or what it still means today, but I'll give you the snapshot version. Deities are conglomerate creatures; they're made up of humanity's needs, stitched together from symbolism and drawn in broad strokes as representatives of mankind's best and worst qualities and the realities of the world and cosmos in which people live. Many gods are idealized versions of humans - they may still have occasional lapses or moments of bad judgment or behavior, but on the whole they are more admirable and perfect than humans, because they represent power and control over the universe that humans can never have. And the fact that they are idealized means that, for better or worse, they reflect the specific ideals of the cultures that created them, including (often especially) their attitudes toward sex.

The question of what "virginity" even is is something that's been around for millennia, and that has constantly changed, been regarded differently by various cultures, and meant more than one thing at one time. It's a social construct, meaning that "virginity" isn't really a thing that exists, but rather a concept that various people or cultures may choose to assign varying levels of importance to. In some cultures, to be a virgin implies that a person has had no sexual contact whatsoever in their lifetime; in others, it might mean that they could have had sex, but only with a certain gender of person; in others, it might mean that they might have had sex but have never been married; in yet others it might mean that they have sex but not in any formal relationships; and in others it might simply mean that they're not sexually mature yet (for most cultures, this means that a woman hasn't begun menstruating or a man's voice hasn't yet changed). In some cultures, the word is just a descriptor, a way of saying, "Oh, that person hasn't had sex yet." In others, it's a badge of honor, a curse of childhood, or a way of assigning worth to a person based on their sexual experience or lack thereof.

For the most part, virgin goddesses appear in cultures that value virginity in some way. The most common examples are the virgin goddesses of the Greeks - Artemis, Athena and Hestia - which should come as no surprise, because virginity was considered a laudable trait in a woman in ancient Greece. The people of that culture believed that a woman who was a virgin possessed fortitude of spirit and virtuous power, which is why it's used as a positive quality that those goddesses possess; and conversely, they believed that a woman who had sex with lots of people was of weak moral character and unadmirable selfishness, which is why figures like Aphrodite are often referred to pejoratively or in comic anecdotes despite the fact that she was also an important and widely worshiped deity. Like a lot of European cultures that strongly valued sons as heirs and carriers of the family line, the Greeks wanted to encourage virginity in women so that, if they ever married, there would never be any question of whose children they gave birth to, and likewise because they considered women in large part to be the property of their fathers and husbands, so if they'd had sex with other men they would be "giving away" something that belonged to their male caretaker without permission.

This is also why virginity is almost always only important in goddesses who aren't married. Goddesses who are married and who have sex within appropriate culture-allowed lines - Persephone, for example - are not stigmatized for being sexually active, because it's expected of them as wives and allowed as long as they follow the rules. But goddesses like Athena, who are unmarried, must therefore be virgins; if they aren't going to be wives, the thinking goes, then they can't have sex without being bad people. Ancient sexual politics are bullshit that way, sometimes.

But, on the flip side of all this, none of this stuff applies to male gods, which is why it's very rare to find one who is considered a virgin (and even rarer to find one in which that virginity is considered a positive thing). Most ancient cultures considered men having sex to be not only natural, but something to be admired, an indication that they were strong, manly and virile. The more sex men had in many of these cultures, the more strong and impressive they were considered, especially if a large percentage of that sex also produced children, who were physical proof of their virility. "Virginity", as a concept, barely applied to males at all, and it certainly wasn't something they were encouraged to aspire to or that anyone considered an example of them being more "virtuous" the way it was when applied to women. With the exception of chastity undertaken for religious purposes - some priests, for example, might abstain from sex or even castrate themselves for specific religious reasons - sex was something that most societies encouraged for men, and that marked their passage from childhood into adulthood. In fact, men who didn't have sex would be more likely to be ridiculed or pitied - after all, if sex makes you powerful and virile, then the guys who don't have any are clearly less those things than the ones who do, and there's an underlying question of whether or not they ever really become adults attached in many cases as well.

(Incidentally, this dichotomy is one of the major problems in sociology across time. If you tell women they can't have sex, and then tell men they should have sex all the time, who do they have sex with? Unfortunately, often the answer is rape, which has the further ugly consequence of leaving a woman who is now "tainted" through no fault of her own and a man who is praised for asserting his masculinity. This is one of the reasons Greek mythology is so rape-heavy, and why the women who are raped in it so often commit suicide immediately afterward.)

So, we are left with a lot of virgin goddesses because virginity is "good" for women, and almost no virgin gods becaues virginity is "bad" for men. And centuries upon centuries of really icky sociological context.

Not every culture does this, of course; some pantheons - the Anunna and Deva come to mind - don't bother with virginity as an idea that matters too much to anyone one way or the other and even often celebrate female sexuality. In those pantheons, there are no virgin deities of any kind, because the cultures and religions in the time period they came from didn't assign the same importance (or kind of importance) to the idea or else decided it was something that applied only to humans, never to gods. It's different for every culture - indeed, often even for different time periods within the same culture - which means that in some it is an ultimately important idea that affects all deities (especially female ones), and in others it's a total non-issue.

But the more important part of this question is what all this means for you, the new young Scion coming up through the ranks. If you choose to make virginity part of your divine image, why those in the pantheon before you did so isn't necessarily relevant; what matters is why you want to do it, and what it means to your character. Maybe she wants to be a virgin goddess because it prevents any of the male gods from being able to claim they "own" or have any control over her actions. Maybe he wants to be a virgin god because he wants to represent rising above the physical plane and being associated with pure unbodied spirit. Maybe she wants to be a virgin goddess because she doesn't like or enjoy sex, or because she wants to exist as a being that has transcended the idea of physical reproduction altogether. Maybe he wants to be a virgin god because he wants to be a representative of eternal childhood. All these reasons and more are perfectly valid, and what's more, you don't necessarily need to be a "virgin" by the standards of the mortal culture you come from to be a virgin deity, either. You can decide to be a god of virginity or a virgin goddess even if you used to have a lot of sex, or you were assaulted, or you have been married but now aren't, or anything else. The only people who are going to tell you you can't be a virgin god because you had sex one time when you were a sixteen-year-old mortal are haters, and you don't have to listen to haters. Remember that you're the one building your deity's Legend, so you're in charge of what their image and representation is as a god, not random other people who want to label you. "Virginity" has had a ton of meanings across history, so you can choose to use any of them or even invent your own new definition and try to make it stick.

But there will be challenges, no matter who you are or how you choose to appear as a virgin deity, and unfortunately many of them are going to be pretty horrible ones. Virgin goddesses almost all, sooner or later, have to deal with rape attempts; especially in pantheons with an established culture that values masculine conquest or views women as challenges to be overcome rather than people who would rather you not touch them without permission, a virgin goddess may be viewed as a "temptation" too great for gods to resist trying to take advantage of. Some will do so because they think it reinforces their superiority or power over her, or because it gives them bragging rights, or just because she's there, as if she were Mount Everest or something. Even if you're not in a pantheon that's prone to that kind of behavior, you may encounter a few bad apples or just have to sometimes interact with other pantheons who are, so it's something you'll have to deal with. And while this is probably going to happen to female deities a lot more than male ones, there's no guarantee that male virgin gods will be safe from sexual assault, either; they are likely to suffer from their pantheon-mates trying to "fix" them or make them more "mature", foisting potential sex partners on them whether they want them or not, or even attacking them themselves, especially if they happen to be very attractive. And don't think this is limited to the Ishtars of the universe; plenty of male gods are happy to go in for a little guy-on-guy action sometimes, too, and may use the fact that you don't have sex with women as an excuse to claim that clearly that's what you're into and you're just protesting too much.

That doesn't necessarily mean you're doomed or that your character is unavoidably in for inescapable physical trauma, so don't feel like you need to immediately throw the idea away, but it is a perennial problem for virgin deities - if you look at the goddesses famous for being virgins, most of them have stories of men trying to get one over on them without permission, such as Hephaestus attempting to rape Athena or Orion attempting to rape Artemis, or else the looming danger of it is implied when they need to have protectors (such as Sraosha so carefully protecting his sister Ard, which is also a metaphor for justice protecting virtue). If you know you want virginity to be a major part of your story, you may want to consider how to safeguard yourself as you gain Legend; maybe you want to stack powers so you can get a mad DV, or buy a lot of Justice boons so you can smite the face off anyone who tries to lay a finger on you without permission, or keep your Appearance as low as possible so it's easier for you to go unnoticed, or whatever else you can think of. You might also want to start working toward trying to change those old, awful ideas about sex and sexuality and find ways to drag your pantheon into the modern day, which could mean building up Charisma for convincing speeches and lawmaking or working toward Justice and Guardian to help safeguard yourself and others during this culture shift.

If you're lucky or hardy or scrappy enough to escape attempts on your virginity, the other major issues you will have to deal with will be primarily social ones. Male virgin gods may have to handle a certain amount of disdain; other gods may think they're immature, or weak, or pathetic, and there will probably be a lot of mockery and shaming going on, although whether or not it happens to your face will depend on how much they like you and what your position is within the pantheon. Female virgin goddesses may have to field resentment or even anger thrown in their direction by male gods who characterize them as "ice queens" or take their refusal to have sex as a personal insult to their entire gender. Some gods may be on a neverending mission to play matchmaker for virgin gods of either sex whether they like it or not, forcing you to jump through political hoops just to avoid ending up attached to someone before you know it and subject to the sexual expectations of marriages among ancient gods.

And again, some of these issues may not happen to you at all. Maybe you'll get lucky, and you'll be in a pantheon that is totally cool with letting you be yourself and respecting that, or you just happen to hang out with deities who aren't raging assholes about it. Maybe you'll just be so awesome that you manage to shut all this kind of shit down before it really gets going. If you want to take on virginity as one of your divine qualities, you shouldn't back off just because it might have scary ramifications; but you should always be aware that there will probably be major challenges.

A lot depends on why you want to be a virgin deity; what does that mean to you? Is it something that represents another concept or idea you're god of, or just part of your personality? Do you want it known far and wide as part of your Legend, or is it a personal conviction you don't care to share? These are all concerns that will affect what you want to do as a virgin god or goddess and how things play out for you.

But whatever it is, if you want to go for it, go for it all the way. We salute you.

(As always, it goes without saying that if your game - either Storyteller or players - isn't comfortable dealing with issues of sex and sexuality, or with potential triggers like sexual assault, then don't bring those ideas in. They are certainly present in mythology, often as major themes, but the game is meant to be fun, and it's never going to be fun if people at the table are uncomfortable or unhappy. As with all potential problem themes in Scion, take your group's temperature on what they are and aren't okay dealing with before you launch a storyline or let in an NPC that might seriously upset someone. Know your Storyteller and fellow players.)