Virgin: The Untouched History
Read Virgin: The Untouched History Online
Authors: Hanne Blank
VIRGIN
The Untouched History
HANNE BLANK
Copyright © 2007 by Hanne Blank
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Distributed to the trade by Macmillan
All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Blank, Hanne.
Virgin : the untouched history / Hanne Blank.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-719-4
1. Virginity—Social aspects. 2. Virginity—History. I. Title.
GN484.47B53 2007
306.4 dc22
2006017172
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007
This paperback edition published in 2008
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
For my mother Shanna Spalding,
my mother's mother Ruth West Spalding,
Eliiabeth Tamny, Heather Corinna, Leigh Ann Craig,
and for each and every virgin, everywhere.
CONTENTS
EXTRA VIRGIN: A NOTE TO READERS
A
s I WORKED ON THIS BOOK, I joked with friends that I was going to give it the subtitle Everything You Think You Know About Virginity Is Wrong. Like many people, and perhaps like you yourself, I blithely believed when I began this work that I already knew what there was to know about what I then considered to be a trivial topic. Surely, I thought, my academic and professional work in women's and gender studies and in the field of human sexuality had already told me everything one might need to know about virginity.
How very wrong I was. From the day that I first wandered into Harvard's Countway Medical Library—spurred by the questions of some adolescents with whom I was working as a sex educator—to look up medical definitions of virginity, my assumptions have been repeatedly uprooted, my expectations confounded, and my prejudices smashed to smithereens. I was vexed to discover that most of the medical textbooks I was looking through didn't even bother to discuss virginity, and those that did rarely seemed to define it. I was also astonished and utterly enthralled by the idea that I had stumbled across a subject clearly related to the human body, one whose existence and importance has been asserted for thousands of years, and yet it appeared, somehow, to have left virtually no trace in the modern medical literature.
I continued to search. A few months later, I conjectured that it was possible there simply was not much to be known about virginity and virgins. I was finding little enough that was relevant, and nothing at all remotely like the comprehensive overview of the subject I was hoping to find. Even though my interests were limited to virginity and virgins in the Western world, it was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if I wanted to read a comprehensive survey of virginity, I was going to have to write it. Given the slim pickings on the library shelves in my initial research, I figured the job wouldn't be too difficult.
On this score, too, I was proven laughably wrong. I began to read the work of a lonely handful of scholars, primarily literary and religious historians, who had looked at questions of virginity during the medieval and Renaissance eras. Their books and articles, without which this book could never have come to be, instantly became my beacons and touchstones. But every time I turned a page of this slender pile of scholarship, I seemed to have several dozen new questions. I rapidly realized that the reason the book I wanted didn't exist wasn't that there wasn't enough information to fill it, but rather that the topic has long been neglected. The information is scattered across numerous fields and disciplines, completely disorganized, and often tricky to find. Virginity's very nature—socially, religiously, physically, and otherwise—means that it has often been a taboo, uncertain, and sometimes deliberately obscured subject.
Answering my questions about the history and nature of virginity became a task that occupied the better part of four years of my life. It led me on a wildly interdisciplinary scavenger hunt that encompassed specialty libraries in law, medicine, and art; humanities research collections; archives; interviews; museum collections; Internet Web sites; and mountainous piles of government documents from several different countries. I found myself visiting "adult" bookstores to scrutinize their virginity porn offerings and standing in grimy inner-city parking lots taking pictures of pro-virginity billboards. In hot pursuit of information I couldn't find elsewhere, I learned to negotiate (sometimes torturously) sources written not only in foreign languages that I knew how to read, but also in others—Greek, Portuguese, Swedish—that I did not. Swiftly I learned that regardless of the source or when it was written, information relating to virginity is rarely presented in such a way that it is free of bias, superstition, or simply the kind of inaccuracies that often sneak into even academic books under the guise of "things everybody knows." Separating the data from the digressions added its own complications to my work.
My problem, in the end, was not that there was too little information available on virgins and virginity, but too much. To make navigating these sometimes overwhelmingly dense waters a little easier for the reader, I have divided this book into two parts. The first, Virginology, centers on the medical and scientific sides of virginity, while Virgin Culture, the second part, deals with virginity in society and culture. Although I have worked hard to make
Virgin: The
Untouched History
as inclusive as possible, no single book on the subject can provide a completely comprehensive treatment of this vast subject. Each chapter of this book could easily be a complete book on its own . . . and, in some cases, several books. If a favorite bit of virginity trivia fails to appear in these pages, or if specific questions about virgins and virginity are not answered here, it's likely not because I haven't encountered said trivia or looked into the same questions myself, but rather because neither I nor my hardworking editors could find a way to make everything fit. Exponentially more information on virginity and virgins exists than I have been able to detail, and much more remains to be found. For the reader who would like to expand his or her experience of this book, however, some of the excerpted material is available on the Internet at VirginBook.org.
What you read there, and between these covers as well, may confuse, distress, and surprise you. Indeed, I hope that it does. Numerous times during my research I found myself cackling at some ridiculous bit of virginity trivia or other, but I was just as likely to end up recoiling in horror, weeping with sorrow and sympathy, or outraged at yet another example of misogynist cruelty justified in the name of virginity. Even more frequently than that, however, I found myself surprised: at the things that hadn't changed in millennia; at the things that had only changed during my own lifetime; at the unsubstantiated projection that often passes for truth where virginity is concerned; and most of all at the things that I'd been told were true that turned out to be demonstrably false. As I mentioned at the beginning of this preface, the subtitle really should, in many ways, have been Everything You Thought You Knew About Virginity Is Wrong.
This book is about much more than cocktail party virginity trivia. It is about something that is ancient and abstract at the same time as it is absolutely contemporary and utterly intimate. Virginity has been, and continues to be, a matter of life and death around the world, very much including within the first world. Virginity is the butt of innumerable jokes, the subject of timeless art, the center of spiritual mysteries, a locus of teenage angst, a popular genre for pornography, and the nucleus around which one of the world's most powerful governments has created unprecedented policy. For all these reasons, and many more, I am honored to be at the helm for this maiden voyage into a fascinating untouched history.
This idol which you term virginity
Is neither essence subject to the eye,
No, nor to any one exterior sense,
Nor hath it any place of residence,
Nor is't of earth or mould celestial,
Or capable of any form at all.
Of that which hath no being, do not boast;
Things that are not at all, are never lost.
—Christopher Marlowe,
Hero and Leander
(1598)
It is easy enough to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
B
Y ANY MATERIAL RECKONING, virginity does not exist. It can't be weighed on a scale, sniffed out like a truffle or a smuggled bundle of cocaine, retrieved from the lost-and-found, or photographed for posterity. Like justice or mercy, we can only determine that it exists at all because of the presence of its effects—or its side effects. Unlike many of our habits and practices, virginity reflects no known biological imperative and grants no demonstrable evolutionary advantage, nor has being able to recognize it in others been shown to increase anyone's chances of reproduction or survival. Perhaps this is why even our nearest animal relatives, whose sexual behavior and social structures are often startlingly similar to our own in other respects, show no signs at all of knowing what virginity is.
Virginity is as distinctively human a notion as philanthropy. We invented it. We developed it. We disseminated the idea throughout our cultures, religions, legal systems, bodies of art, and works of scientific knowledge. We have fixed it as an integral part of how we experience our own bodies and selves. And we have done all this without actually being able to define it consistently, identify it accurately, or explain how or why it works.
How
do
we define virginity? How have we defined it in the past? How do we tell who is and isn't a virgin? How do we know what virginity is and does and means? These questions, so basic to a book like this one, tempt even the most thoughtful of us in the direction of snap judgments and pat answers. We live in a culture that does not appreciate ambiguity when it comes to either sexuality or morality, after all, and virginity is inextricably twined with both.
As adolescents, we learn that there is a right answer and a wrong answer to the question, "are you a virgin?" What the right answer
is
might well depend on who asks us and under what circumstances. The reputations we want to achieve for ourselves often trump literal truth when we talk about sex, and the realm of virginity is no exception. No matter the circumstances, though, we never really conceive of there being more than two possible answers to the virginity question. It is, we are taught, a solid-state thing, on or off, yes or no. We operate under the assumption that those two options are not only adequate to the task of identifying this particular status, but that everyone who uses them means the same thing. But as many of us have discovered, this is far from the case. Real life is too full of messy and confusing variables. Exceptions are inevitable: What if he only put it in a little bit? What if she didn't bleed? The gray area is vast, yet when the question is
are you a virgin?
"maybe" isn't usually an option. Any uncertainty is your own private problem and frequently your own private hell. After all, as virtually all of us learn growing up, "everyone knows" what virginity is.
In truth, however, everyone most assuredly does not know what makes one person a virgin and another person not one. Virtually no one does, as a matter of fact. And this state of affairs is nothing new.
For as long as we have had a notion of virginity at all, its parameters have been controversial and, as often as not, vague. Even in pre-Christian Greek writings, there is already a tendency to talk about virginity metaphorically and in imprecise, gestural terms. Depending on the context and the writer, Greek virginity might have been described as an object that is subject to seizure
(lam-baneiri),
a value that must be respected
(terein),
or a covered or wrapped thing that must be unwrapped or unbound
(lyein).
Depending on circumstances and on what an author had to say about it, virginity could be metaphorical, abstract, or physical, imposed from without or inspired from within, guarded or stolen, covered or unbound.
Christianity, despite what people often assume, failed to provide much in the way of clarification. Even the most august of the Doctors of the Church have not quite agreed on just how virginity should be defined or how virgins should be treated, and their virginity debates have smoldered for millennia. For thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for example, virginity was a particular quality of the virtue of temperance and a subset of the class of behaviors that bore the label of "chastity." But Aquinas also said that chastity had both a specific and a metaphorical meaning, one relating specifically to the pleasures of sex and the other much broader, a
spiritualis castitas,
or spiritual chastity, that dealt with the refusal to enjoy things that were judged to be against God's design. It hardly seems a realm in which yes-or-no answers would suffice.
Neither have literature or medicine simplified things. Three hundred years after Aquinas, sixteenth-century writer Thomas Bentley's
The Monument of
Matrones, conteining seven severall Laumps of Virginitie
defined virginity with a laundry list of behaviors, including "sobernes, silence, shamefastnes, and chasti-tie, both of bodie & mind." And although physician Helkiah Crooke, writing less than fifty years after Bentley, argued vehemently that "the only sure note of unsteyned virginity" was the newly discovered vaginal hymen, even he was unsure. In almost the same breath as he lauds the diagnostic value of the hymen, he offers an alternate test for virginity that involves measuring the head with a piece of string.
Things haven't gotten any simpler since then. In 1992 legendary syndicated advice column "Dear Abby" was asked to pass judgment on the virginity of a young woman who gave birth, as a host mother, to a baby conceived through in vitro fertilization. (Abby's verdict: since the host mother had never experienced intercourse, she was entitled to call herself a virgin.) Recently, several studies completed in the 1990s and early 2000s indicated that young people are deeply divided over whether oral sex or anal intercourse constitute "having sex," calling into question just who might be qualified to call himself or herself a virgin.
Virginity has a long and distinguished heritage in Western culture, but it has no single hallowed and unassailable standard. "Everybody" most certainly does
not
know what it is and how it works. No one ever truly has. Anyone who claims otherwise simply hasn't done enough reading.
What we mean when we say "virginity" is as ephemeral, as relative, and as socially determined as what we mean when we say "freedom." Like love or misery, virginity has its trappings. We associate particular physical phenomena with it, we have a set of conditions and sensations that we expect from it, both in others and in ourselves. We tend to feel gratified when these things happen and confused, even betrayed, when they don't. As with piety and sensuality, we often believe that virginity tells us something about a person's morality, character, and spirituality. We claim that virginity is tangible, part of the physical body, just like a beautiful face or a powerful muscle, but just as we acknowledge inner strength and beauty that cannot be seen with the eye, we also accept that virginity transcends mere flesh.
The broadest and most general way to define virginity—since a book on the topic does raise the question—would be to say that virginity is a human sexual status that is characterized by a lack of any current or prior sexual interaction with others. But this raises its own questions in turn. What counts as "sexual interaction"? Whose standards do we apply, and do we apply them identically to every person and in every circumstance? Do we judge women's virginity by the same standards as men's, children's by the same standards as adults', a Christian's by the same standards as an atheist's, a Jew's, a modern-day Pagan's, a Muslim's, a Buddhist's?
Those of us who consider ourselves to be nonvirgins can usually explain why. Those of us who consider ourselves still-virgin can typically articulate what would have to happen to change that status. We usually know what criteria we would employ if asked to determine whether someone else's virginal status had changed. But the criteria we might apply to someone else are not necessarily identical to the ones we apply to ourselves. Moreover, we do not necessarily know that our next-door neighbors' criteria, or even those of our partners or parents, would be identical to our own.
This isn't to say that virginity is relative and therefore irrelevant. To the contrary, we have more than two and a half millennia of written history that make it abundantly clear that virginity is relative and therefore
immensely
relevant. It is precisely its relativity that makes virginity so troublesome and so fascinating.
Virginity has not always served the same purposes in society, been experienced in the same ways, or been predicated on the same understandings of sexuality, sexual activity, or sexual identity. It hasn't even always had to do with the same body parts: the hymen, which we often think of as synonymous with virginity today and assume must have been so for our ancestors, too, wasn't even confirmed to exist until the sixteenth century. From law to religion to medicine to art and beyond, the variety of ways we have understood, defined, and used virginity over the course of Western history reflects the shapes and motions of the giant, constantly changing entity that is our common culture.
This helps explain why we're so bad at defining it. As one of the large-scale background conditions of human life and human sexuality, our ideals in regard to virginity, like those in regard to gender and class and race, have always depended on historical circumstance. As cultural circumstances have shifted, our thinking about virginity has shifted, too, changing slowly and often subtly over time to reflect changes in demographics, economics, technologies, religious dogmas, political philosophies, scientific discoveries, and attitudes about the roles of women, children, and the family. Because these things tend to change so slowly, it is common for people to see them as unchanging, monolithic givens, things that existed before they were born and which will continue to exist, substantially unchanged, long after their deaths. Frequently this is even true, since large-scale cultural change tends to happen at a pace that, by comparison to human life spans, seems downright glacial. But even the largest and slowest-moving glacier cuts grooves into the earth as it goes, leaving a trail behind it.
To trace the changing ideologies and operations of virginity, then, we follow the tracks of cultural glaciers. The secrets of virginity are not coded into our DNA or even etched in stone. Insofar as they exist at all, they exist in novels and plays, religious writings and works of art, medical texts and philosophical tomes, courtship patterns, wedding traditions, the oral literature of old wives' tales and barroom ballads, and even the syndicated columns of daily newspapers. It is an enormous, dazzling, confusing array.
Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this is to take a historical overview of a few of virginity's many varieties. In everyday early-twenty-first-century conversation we tend to think of virginity in one way only: a matter of sexual activity. Either one has "done it" or not. While the nature of that critical "it" may come under considerable debate, it is not controversial to view virginity and its loss as being a matter of having done "it" or not, whatever "it" is construed to be. But this is only one way to think about virginity.
In his fourth-century
De civitate Dei (The City of God),
Saint Augustine argued that being raped did not constitute a loss of virginity, providing one had resisted with all one's heart and soul. Augustine's reasoning? If virginity could be said to be irrevocably lost by forcible physical action, then it could hardly be claimed to be an attribute of the soul. Augustine's solution was to define virginity as existing in two valid forms, a physical virginity based in the body and a spiritual one based in the soul. Depending on circumstances, these two forms might coexist or not. As for Thomas Aquinas later on, there was not a single virginity for Augustine, but more than one.
The idea of multiple virginities has been quite popular. Thirteenth-century philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus, who wrote a treatise on chastity around 1240, discussed four distinct types of virginity. Infants who had not yet reached the age of reason possessed innate virginity. Once a person was old enough to know what they were doing, however, a virgin had to choose virginity. One could choose virginity as part of a religious vow, or a less formal virginity that was not vowed. Finally, Albertus noted with disapproval, there were virgins who didn't look or act like virgins. Virgins might, he wrote, even act like prostitutes. For Albertus, then, virginity
might
be an inborn quality, or it could be a rather wide range of other things. It certainly wasn't something one could tell at a glance.
Far from being a monolithic, universal, ahistorical given of the human condition, virginity is a profoundly changeable and malleable cultural idea with an enormous, vital, and mostly hidden history. If we are to attempt to understand virginity, we have to understand not only what it seems to be to us today, but what it has been to our ancestors. We have to understand not just the meanings we might want it to have for our children but the meanings it has had for us, for our grandparents, and for their great-great-great-grandparents. Most of all, we have to understand that these meanings have not always been the same. With virginity as with so much else that pertains to the human condition, the only real constant is change.
Lines in the Sand
We have long recognized that virginities and virgins come in a range of modes and types. We distinguish between them not only by what they've done or haven't in sexual terms, but also on the basis of age, developmental stage, sex, motivations, prior behavior, religious affiliation, and even physical appearance. But not all of these aspects matter equally, and not all of them matter in the same way or to the same degree at any given time in history, place in the world, or subculture within the vast and complicated framework of what we loosely call the West.