T.I.’s Comments About His Daughter’s Hymen Deserve The Twitter Uproar

When it comes sex broaching the topic of sex with xex kids, no one is perfect. A hymen might be different depending on the person sex not every person with a vagina is born with a hymen, anyway. The hymen, or vaginal corona, can be damaged or stretched in sex number of ways that have nothing to do sex penetrative sex. It could happen using a tampon, doing gymnastics, falling particularly hard, riding a bike or horse, sex, or any number of other things.

The obsession with it by a parent, though — and how they choose to respond to their kid being sexually active — esx volumes about their priorities.

Behavior like T. After all, the way a parent approaches sex will undoubtedly leave a mark on their kids and affect the kind of sexual being they become. Instead, sex open-ended questions or offer to research it together. So, have conversations early and often. First of all: ew. And, second of all: nope. In short, virginity sxe are bullshit. So, how can parents do right by their kids when we tu about sex?

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Danielle Campoamor is an editor at Romper and a columnist for Bustle. She received an award from Planned Parenthood for media excellence. The views expressed here are solely hers. View more opinions on CNN. CNN Earlier this month, rapper T. Join us on Twitter sex Facebook. Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.

Rapper T. Yes, I go with her I will say, as of her 18th birthday, her hymen is still intact. Danielle Campoamor. His comments were met with swift condemnation. On Twitter, some described them as "loudly grotesque" and "disgusting," while others labeled T.

But what the rapper and father of six described to his interviewers -- and what the World Health Organization condemns as "painful, humiliating, and traumatic" -- is much more than just an atrocious, stomach-turning practice.

And that sex wildly successful rapper -- a man with millions of fans who pay attention to what he says -- proudly touts this retrograde nonsense as fatherly love, apparently without a second thought, should alarm us all.

Such parental intrusion on young women's bodily autonomy is not as uncommon as you might hope, but always and everywhere it needs an emphatic response if we are to build a society where women are equal, not owned.

More Videos Egypt subjected women to virginity tests My own first gynecological visit -- a healthy step that should be taken for any girl entering pubertysays the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology -- was done in secret, as I was not only forbidden to procure birth control, but to meet with someone who could possibly prescribe it to me without parental consent.

I didn't need to see a doctor, I was told, because I wasn't going to have sex until I was given permission to have sex. This was, of course, not only a controlling and delusional approach, but it rested on the notion that my worth sex rooted in my "virginity. I do not know the intricacies of T. But he and his fans needs to understand that the idea of virginity -- of sexual "purity" -- is a tool of oppression, and physically examining the body parts of a young girl to ensure that purity is "intact" is a human rights violation, even when undertaken by a doctor.

The WHO agrees. To say nothing of the fact that, as doctors will tell you, the absence of an intact hymen is simply not an adequate indicator that a person has had vaginal intercourse. And even T. Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my sex expeditiously. Was the status of his daughter's hymen as important as his ability to learn about it when he wanted and how he wanted, regardless of whether sex that status could provide him with sex and private information?

Was it the results, or the control being wielded over his daughter, that was and is most important? Putting a price on her virginity Our culture has a difficult time calling abuse by its name, and this miscarriage of duty paves the way for "lesser" forms of injustice -- like virginity tests -- to exist under the banner of "protection. In this way of thinking, a father who, say, poses for sex picture with two handguns and a shotgun while his newborn daughter sleeps in the foreground isn't using the promise of violence to assert what he believes to be his God-given right to control his daughter's body.

He's just being a "caring, defensive parent. A father dressing his baby in an "I'm never allowed to date It's just a proud father safeguarding his child. Indeed, in a culture that still too readily accepts male dominion over women's bodies, these fatherly "protections" saturate our gender politics, playing a significant part in the ongoing erosionfor example, of a woman's constitutionally protected right to access abortion care, often characterized as just a "difference in political opinion.

Along this continuum exists also the long-enduring tolerance for sexual harassment, wherever it may occur. Follow CNN Opinion. Meanwhile, convenient euphemisms and our collective inability to discuss the spectrum of abuse and control with nuance keeps unwilling women and victims in the dark about what they are experiencing.

Young women learn -- absurdly -- that their value as human beings is tied to outdated ideas of sex and the charade of virginity. Too often they are forced to hide -- not understand -- their sexuality, and accept the excuse of "fatherly love" that still, in the year sex, may position daughters as property to, eventually, be handed to the men deemed worthy.

We cannot look away when sex is convenient or easy or choose to describe this perversion of paternal responsibility as anything other than what it is: abuse, which must be called by its name if we are to distinguish it from "love" or "protection" or "normal.