And you think virginity is not worth anything these days!

In 2002, 24-year old Kylie Aston from Great Britain tried to auction her virginity for €10,000. However, it was canceled following accusations that the girl is no longer a virgin.

In 2003, 19-year-old Sandy from Chile tried to auction her virginity for a modest amount of $5,000 to help pay her schooling. A woman from the UK, however, took pity of her situation and sent her £1,700 to help pay for her school. The girl took the money and promised to pay it back someday. She canceled the auction and was happy to announce that she could “save herself for someone she loved”.

In 2004, 18-year-old Rosie Reid from London sold her body to a bidder (a divorced man) who paid a reported £8,400. It was the girl’s first time with a man. However, she already had a lesbian lover who reportedly waited outside the door while Rosie was “obliged” to please her customer. It was also reported that the lesbian lovers “just cried and cried” the next morning.

In 2004, 18-year-old Lucy Hartley from Essex UK sold her virginity for €20,000 ($29,000). It was said that one of her more expensive auctions rose to a price of nearly $30,000. It was later found out that the girl is not a virgin but a prostitute who sells her “first time” over and over again. Not much has been heard from her since then.

In 2004, 24-year-old Cathy Cobblerson from Texas broke virginity auction records when she placed the ad for $100,000 on eBay. The auction was taken down and it was not clear whether or not another auction from the same girl took place elsewhere.

In 2005, 18-year-old Graciela Yataco, a model from Peru, auctioned her virginity for $1,300,000 to pay for her sick mother’s medical treatment and to alleviate her family from poverty. She canceled the auction, however. It was not clear if it was all a publicity stunt or the girl really raised awareness on the poverty issue in South America.

In 2007, 18-year-old Carys Copestake sold her virginity for £10,000 so she could pay her tuition to study physics at Salford University. A reporter who posed as an interested customer came to know that the girl wanted to auction her virginity for two self-serving reasons — she needed the money to pay for her education and she did not want to go to college a virgin.

In 2008, 22-year-old Natalie Dylan received a bid of $3.7 million after auctioning her virginity through Moonlite Bunny Ranch to fund her master’s degree. She publicized her auction on The Howard Stern Show. However, later reports suggested that the transaction did not push through. The auction may have been a hoax and was never consummated.

In 2009, 18-year-old Alina Percea from Romania auctioned her virginity for €50,000 but got only the highest bid of €5,000 from an Italian man. She went on, however, to complete the transaction. The 45-year-old man paid her trip to Venice. She even went through two medical exams to prove that she’s still a virgin before the big event.

In 2009, Raffaella Fico, 20-year-old Italian model and star of 2008 Big Brother Italy, put her virginity up for auction at €1 million to buy a house in Rome and pay for acting classes. It was not clear if the Italian girl went through with the transaction.

In 2010, a poor New Zealand student who was only known by her pseudonym Unigirl successfully auctioned her virginity for NZ$46,000 to help pay for her university fees. Closing the auction, she said she accepted an offer in excess of $NZ45,000 that was already beyond what she dreamed. She was also grateful for the many bidders who took interest in the ad.

In August 2011, (and this is no joke!) Mexican teenage girls auctioned their virginity for Justin Bieber tickets. The offer was made through black market and was published by the portal sdpnoticias.com.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR PLANET?!

Virginity auction is also a form of prostitution. Although auctioning one’s virginity provides opportunity for a woman to get money higher than in traditional sex trade, it remains the stigmatized act of providing sexual service in exchange for payment.

Virginity auction can even be connected to sex trafficking. The archaic problems of prostitution and sex trafficking have become structured these days. What if the one who is selling the girl’s virginity is not really the girl, but an organized crime syndicate who kidnapped young girls and sold their virginity to rich (and definitely perverted) people all over the world?

On second thought, this radical act of auctioning virginity puts tremendous value on womanhood. The hype surrounding the act is just proof that even in today’s “very liberated” society, people have remained equating virginity with purity.

Now that virginity auction is popular, we are surprisingly reminded that most people (especially men) still look up to a sexually inexperienced woman as a fascinating rarity and are willing to pay large amount of money to have sex with her. However we assert that virginity is “not that important anymore” and it does not define our whole womanhood, men look at it as a hidden treasure worth finding.

A woman’s value does not end in the breaking of her hymen and the losing of her virginity, nor after her first sexual encounter with a man. But what this virginity auction tells us is that we, women, have the power to make our womanhood work for us. So we might as well take good care of it, just like how supermodels invest in their good looks and flawless skin.

It is important for us to recognize the immense value of our womanhood. In this crazy and treacherous world where everything could be ephemeral and sham, our womanhood will be all we have. It will define us to the very end.

Let’s make our womanhood work for us, not against us.