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In many past and some present cultures, minors (particularly females) are expected to abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage and to remain faithful to their spouse thereafter. Thus, being "chaste" in these cultures means sexual abstinence for unmarried persons or those separated from their spouses. In western societies, abstinence in relationships has been idealized more consistently for women than for men. Some theorize this derives from the risk of pregnancy, which poses a threat to patrilineal inheritance. In some cultures, proof of virginity, often in the form of a bloodied sheet from the conjugal bed, is demanded as part of the marriage contract.
Anthropologists and social historians have noted that many cultures such as Victorian Britain or the rural areas in the modern United States, which formally place a high value on abstinence until marriage, actually have a large amount of pre-marital sexual activity in which there is no actual sexual intercourse and which preserve a state known as technical virginity.
The concept has not always been used in the same way for males and females, women often being more deeply conditioned than men — also due to factors of anatomical evidence, sometimes subject to formal, and even public, examination in the imminence of the marriage.
In some cultures, those who infringe the rules regarding chastity may be ostracized. Social reacceptance can sometimes be regained by marriage between the two. In the West, even as late as the mid-20th century, there was a stigma attached to being a 'one-parent family' and an illegitimate child could be legitimized by the marriage of the parents. (This latter is still the case in many Western countries, though the lifting of legal penalties and social stigma regarding illegitimacy has rendered this irrelevant to social acceptance.) Some cultures take the infringement of rules of chastity so literally that ostracism may result from cases of rape.
Historically, there has been a swing from the sexually free end of the Industrial Revolution to the often degenerate values of the early Victorian period. This was then followed by a new puritanism from the late Victorian era to the early 1900s. This important transformation often colours discussion of sexual behaviour in the later 20th century period. The First World War began a return to sexual freedom and indulgence, but more often than not the appearance of conforming to the earlier moral values of abstinence before marriage was retained. With the conclusion of the Second World War, the importance of abstinence declined swiftly. The advent of the oral contraceptive pill and widely available antibiotics removed the consequences of wide and free sexual behaviour, while social mores were also changing. By the 1960s, such restrictions were no longer expected in the majority of western societies; perhaps even the reverse: that members of both sexes would have experienced a number of sexual partners before marriage. Some cultural groups continued to place a value on the moral purity of an abstainer, but abstinence was caught up in a wider re-evaluation of moral values .
While there have been cultures which achieved total sexual abstinence, such as castration cults, it is unlikely that any of them survived for a substantial period of time due to their lack of reproduction. Regardless, the arrival of technology like in vitro fertilisation allows reproduction without sexual intercourse.