Frat-house comedies and late-night sketch shows have long used men drooling over nubile virgins as a standard comedic feature. And the appeal of the female virgin makes a certain kind of evolutionary sense: A man who sleeps with a virgin can be assured her children are his own.

But by the crude logic of biology — in which men are naturally dominating and promiscuous, while women are acquiescent and loyal — the male virgin offers no advantages. He can offer no proof of loyalty, and he is not a proven conqueror. But a recent spate of fictional inexperienced males prompts the question: At long last, is the male virgin desirable?

If he is, then “The Daily Show” may be largely responsible for it. Alumnus Steve Carell co-wrote and starred in the 2005 film “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which established several characteristics of the 21st-century virginal man. The film’s hero is Andy Stitzer, a sensitive, funny, clean-cut hobbyist who is insecure enough that a few early awkward experiences prompted him to give up on sex. Instead, he devotes himself to his friends, neighbors, and action figures. In the end, however, he is also appealing enough to lose his long-held chastity to Catherine Keener. Call it the not-quite-masculine mystique.

Another “Daily Show” graduate, Rob Corddry, plays the titular role in “The Winner,” a new Fox sitcom about a 32-year-old virgin. Glen Abbott lives at home with his parents and works at a video store. (Mr. Carell’s character works at an electronics store.) He is best friends with the 14-year-old son of the only woman he has ever kissed. Glen, too, is genuinely likable, in the same late-bloomer mold as Andy. He’s a little goofy, sure, and he doesn’t always pick up on social cues — but that is part of his nerdish appeal.

“The Winner” is set in 1994, a flashback story told by Glen, who is now “the richest man in Buffalo.” This virgin eventually makes good — and presumably makes it, too.

In her just-published book “Virgin: The Untouched History” (Bloomsbury, 290 pages, $24.95), Hanne Blank writes that for men, the loss of virginity is a semipublic act, to be shared — via “lockerroom braggadocio,” bachelor parties, and the like — with other men. “Men are mutually complicit in each other’s sexual upbringing,” she writes. “Men have sex. It is something they do and something they acquire.” The book doesn’t spend much time on male virgins, who have a much less rich cultural and clinical history than their female counterparts. The index lists just one entry under “men, loss of virginity in.” The essential point is clear, though: The loss of virginity is “a rite of passage that marks the borderland of adulthood.” Traditionally, males on the near side of that border are not men.

Reality television could be considered America’s locker room, and accordingly, the form loves talk of men and virginity — mainly for the old-fashioned reasons of pity and ridicule. On the other end of the tastefulness spectrum from “The Winner” is “Virgin Territory,” a show now being cast in which the winning guy’s prize is a tryst — off-camera, presumably — with a celebrity. (No network has agreed to air the show, and no woman, famous or not, has agreed to do the deed.) The men will likely be of the same caliber as the stereotypical geeks on reality shows such as “Beauty and the Geek,” whose current season features a 24-year-old virgin medical student.

Painfully nerdy men have long been a part of entertainment offerings — and not as objects of affection. Now, however, they may be starting to get some action: So many female viewers responded positively to Adam Mesh, the rejected “average” guy on the 2003 show “Average Joe,” that he eventually starred in his own show in which he got to choose the winning woman.

The presumption of all these depictions in popular culture is that no man chooses to remain a virgin, priests being the obvious exception. But of course, America is a relatively abstinent country. Among conservative Protestants, millions of teenage boys have signed “True Love Waits” pledges, in which they promise to remain abstinent until marriage. “Purity Balls” for preteen girls to pledge their chastity are popular, but even that custom is spreading to boys: A South Dakota town held an “Integrity Ball” for boys to do the same earlier this year.

Not all abstainers are religious. At Harvard, the new “True Love Revolution” club aims “to develop a greater campus awareness of premarital sexual abstinence as the lifestyle choice of many Harvard students.” Its co-president is a male from the senior class. Princeton and M.I.T. boast chapters of the secular, pro-abstinence Anscombe Society, whose position statements include: “Outside of the context of marriage, then, sex ultimately reduces the participants to mere instruments serving an incomplete end.”

If, as the old women’s studies line has it, women are depicted as either virgins or vamps, then perhaps the newly prominent male virgin suggests a new masculine divide. Patrick Fagan wrote on National Review Online last month that men who marry as virgins are more likely to act as protectors, as opposed to predators. Perhaps 21st-century women have finally moved beyond their lizard brains. Could it be that the spell of the conqueror — make that “predator” — is loosening?

Meanwhile, the prey isn’t doing too well, either. The perennially desired female virgin has fallen out of favor. Jane magazine recently made a project out of deflowering a willing young woman who had reached her 29th birthday without finding a sexual partner. The project failed: Sarah is now 30, still a virgin — and now she’s a blogger, too, which shouldn’t help her chances.

In the other big comedy of 2005, “The Wedding Crashers,” the lady-killer played by Vince Vaughn recoils in horror when a woman he has been flirting with tells him she’s a virgin. (As it turns out, she was joking, and they consummate their relationship in short order.) As women become more comfortable with emotionally open, even needy, men, perhaps men are losing patience with women who have similar expectations. As George Costanza put it in “The Virgin,” a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld,” “They always remember the first time. I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be forgotten.”

Even as meek men turn triumphant, however, they take on the worries shared by sexually powerful men throughout history. This summer, the director and cowriter of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” Judd Apatow, offers a comedy about a schlubby guy who has a one-night stand with a beautiful woman. The very title could be read as a warning in favor of chastity: “Knocked Up.”