Virgin: The Untouched History (11 page)

This is all of a piece with the ideology that holds that virginity is a sort of placeholder, something that exists until such time as it is removed or destroyed by a man. Presumably the "right man," to be sure, but nonetheless, virginity exists for him and for his use: many people over the centuries have described virginity as a gift that a woman is given by God for the purpose of giving it to her husband. The fact that the man is then entitled and even expected to assess the quality and existence of the virginity he has been given—particularly in regard to whether he happens to perceive the woman's vagina as being adequately "tight"—merely emphasizes that virginity has fundamentally little to do with actual women and a great deal to do with men's fantasies.

Ironically, such standards of "proof" make virginity relatively simple to counterfeit. Unlike with penises, where what you see is pretty much what you get, female genitals are conveniently amenable to being rigged, treated, toned, and primped. The subject of artificially narrowing or tightening the vagina is, in fact, taken up in many premodern medical treatises. The practice no doubt handily predates the second- and third-century writings of Galen and Soranus, who recommend, in a tone that suggests the practice was well known, the insertion of perfumed pessaries made with oils and fats to "rejuvenate" the vagina and its appearance. These and other ancient recipes that would assist in the manufacture of the signs of virginity—a practice known as "sophistication" to later European writers—make it clear that women have for millennia been doing vaginal renovations for the purpose of placating men.

Some of the best-known early recipes "for the violated woman/that this be kept secret," as Theodoris Priscianus put it, come from the lineage of what are known as the Trotula texts. These tenth- and eleventh-century writings were by a woman or women whose real name(s) we do not know, and they exist in many different forms and formats. At the time they were written, however, the recipes might not have been used only as sophistications but as a genuine medical therapy. It was believed for many centuries that a narrow, tight vagina was necessary for successful conception, because a too-wide or too-loose vagina would allow the male seed to pour right back out of the woman's body so that pregnancy could not occur. Helping a woman to tighten her vagina to improve her chances of conceiving was quite legitimate. If such a recipe had an alternate use, so be it:
honi soit qui malypense.

Most of the recipes for tightening and narrowing the opening of the vagina and the tissues of the vulva are astringents, applied topically as baths or poultices and more rarely internally as douches or pessaries. A thirteenth-century recipe tells the "girl who has been induced to open her legs and lose her virginity by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises" that when it is time for her to get married, she should keep her husband from knowing the truth by taking ground sugar and egg white and mixing them in a decoction made from alum, fleabane, the dry wood of a grapevine, and other. astringent and drying plants, then bathing her private parts with the resulting mixture.

The highly caustic compound alum, otherwise known as aluminum sulfate or potassium aluminum sulfate, was a frequent star in these recipes. A common household and culinary chemical until reasonably recently, it is still used in pickling and as an ingredient in baking powders. It generally represents the strongest active ingredient in vagina-tightening mixtures.
*
The herbs in these mixtures, however, were also active components. The seeds of fleabane
(Inula
dysentericd)
were a well-known and popular astringent, shrinking and tightening the tissues to which they were applied. Numerous recipes call for members of the mint family. Mint oil is an irritant that would cause a certain amount of puffiness and swelling and thus help give the appearance of a plump and youthful vulva and vagina. Many recipes require pennyroyal
(Mentha pulegium),
a mint long known to women around the world as an emmenagogue, abortifacient, and contraceptive, and thus one with a long-standing association with women's reproductive concerns. Another popular ingredient in these recipes was bearfoot or lady's mantle
(Alchemilla vulgaris),
likewise a popular astringent and styptic plant of well-established medical utility.

Doctors and midwives, in essence "double agents" when it came to virginity, have always been aware that sophistications were available and have, in many cases, helped women to employ them. But they were also well aware that the men who paid their fees as virginity testers would expect the doctors to be able to uncover a fake. Sensibly enough, they developed sophistications with which to counter sophistications, or put another way, tests to foil women's attempts to foil virginity tests. Nicholas Venette, the French author of the eighteenth-century sexual self-help blockbuster
L 'amour conjugal
(The Mysteries of Married Love), describes one of these in considerable detail. Venette's countertest is given just prior to his instructions on how to go about counterfeiting virginity—he is nothing if not comprehensive.

We ought to examine the means, by which a counterfeited Maiden-head may be discover'd . . . make a Bath of a Decoction of Leaves of mallows, Groundsel, with some handfuls of Line Seed and Fleabane Seed, Orach, Brank Ursin or bearfoot. Let them sit in this Bath an hour, after which, let them be wiped, and examin'd 2 or 3 hours after Bathing, observing them narrowly in the mean while. If a Woman is a Maid, all her amorous parts are compress'd and joyn'd close to one another; but if not, they are flaggy, loose, and flouting, instead of being wrinkled and close as they were before when she had a mind to choose us.

Fleabane and bearfoot, astringents both, were common ingredients in recipes for tightening the vagina. Orach
(Atriplax hortensis),
on the other hand, is another name for a variety of purslane, a plant that was used for various purposes, often as a means of bringing down swelling and reducing lesions. Mallow
(Althaea officinalis)
and groundsel
(Senecio viscosus)
are similar in effect. They are demulcents, emollients, and topical anti-inflammatories, and would have helped to bring down any inflammation that had been artificially induced in the name of plumping up the genital tissues.

One wonders just how consciously Venette was pandering to his public by offering such a countertest to begin with. Venette, after all, was neither an unsophisticated observer nor unsympathetic regarding the various reasons that women might choose to feign virginity. He understood quite plainly that the appearance and dimensions of a woman's genital anatomy didn't necessarily prove anything at all about her virginity, and in fact says flatly that he realizes that some women's genitals simply don't give the impression of being small, narrow, or tight: he offers advice on how to pass oneself off as a virgin on the behalf of women who are "naturally too wide."

Furthermore, he believed that a woman might have legitimate, defensible, and ethical reasons for wanting to falsify her virginity in order to "secure her Husband's good Opinion the Wedding night." "May it not be allowable," Venette asks, "for the Preservation of Peace in her Family, to take all the pains imaginable to be thought a discreet Woman by her Husband." Indeed, as Venette pointed out, it might be what made it possible for even a prostitute to become an honest married woman, and thus but a small evil that could help to erase a far larger sin. Venette's generosity is all the more striking, and his candor all the more remarkable, given his status as a medical authority: writ large, it is nothing less than an admission that if one is sincere and well meaning, virginity need not matter at all.

Blood Simple?

Probably the oldest and foremost belief about female virginity is the notion that when a woman loses her virginity, she bleeds. Many women do bleed, in quantities ranging from the common light spotting to extremely unusual and medically dangerous hemorrhaging requiring emergency treatment. But not every woman bleeds.

While it is by now fairly well established that not all women bleed on the occasion of their first sexual penetration (indeed, many older sources, too, mention that there may not be any bleeding, although bleeding is assumed as the norm), little research has been done on just how many people bleed, how many don't, and
why
some do and some don't. One of the only articles in the medical literature on the subject is an anecdotal study of fewer than a hundred women. The women in this study were the colleagues of English doctor Sara Paterson-Brown, who, when she was unable to find any good statistics on the subject of bleeding at virginity loss, began sensibly enough to ask her colleagues about their experiences. While it is perhaps unreasonable to assume that Paterson-Brown's sample is truly representative of the population of women as a whole, it is noteworthy that fully 63 percent of her respondents—and possibly more, since some of the women she asked could not remember—had not experienced any bleeding when they lost their virginity.

The responses in Paterson-Brown's study shed an interesting light on part of the Gitano ritual defloration described at the beginning of this chapter. When readers reared in the mainstream of Western sexual ideology hear about Gitano defloration rituals and discover that the appearance of blood during the defloration ritual stops the proceedings cold, they are often surprised, even shocked, to discover that the bleeding they had presumed was universally recognized as a sign of virginity simply isn't always recognized that way. As both Paterson-Brown's study and Gitano deflorations prove, not only is coitarche (first intercourse) bleeding not universally recognized as meaningful in terms of virginity, it isn't universal, either.

This is a valuable corrective. For literally thousands of years, Western culture has presumed that first sexual intercourse creates a wound in a woman's body. Blood is evidence that this is an injury, a thing that is inflicted upon women by men, with all that implies. From Avicenna to Freud, the "primal wound" inflicted by the simple insertion of a penis into a vagina has been painted as one of the major events in the life of any woman, a milestone marked in pain and blood. Historically, many physicians, expecting that intercourse was going to prove both violent and forceful (if not forcible), have provided advice for treating the injuries of defloration. These include soothing baths and styptic waters to stop bleeding and reduce inflammation: Avicenna recommends rose and myrtle infusions. Seventeenth-century French doctor Francois Ranchin, writing in 1627, described a class of disorders associated with defloration that included not only soreness and bleeding but hemorrhage.

We have no reason to believe that bleeding was any more inevitable a part of virginity loss for our foremothers than it is for us now. But it was, probably due in part to the cumulative weight of received wisdom and written authority, more inevitably expected and even required. Bloody bedclothes or personal linens have, for centuries, been the standard of proof by which a bride's honor was judged in many communities, and some still expect to examine and display them today. The "tokens of virginity" described in Deuteronomy almost undoubtedly consisted of blood on a cloth or garment. Certainly blood was given primary consideration by Soranus and Galen, Gilbertus Anglicus, Albertus Magnus, Nicholas Venette, Jane Sharp, and legions of juries assigned by canon and secular judges to assess evidence in courts of law. In some parts of the world, including certain communities in the West, the absence of blood on a woman's wedding night might still mean repudiation or even murder.

We still share a fantasy of blood when it comes to women's bodies and women's virginity, and the stakes that ride on the realization of that fantasy can be enormous. When the stakes are high, so is the incentive to counterfeit. As with vaginal narrowness and the appearance of the inner labia and vaginal opening, blood is a fairly simple thing to fake.

The mechanisms are simple. A modern-day woman might resort to methods not too dissimilar from the recommendations of the ninth-century Persian physician Rhazes, who said that women who wished to feign virginity should combine the application of substances to constrict and tighten the vagina and vulva with the insertion into the vagina of a section of dove's intestine filled with blood. The bladders of fish and the innards of songbirds, the blood of chickens and ducks and doves, and sponges soaked in pigs' blood have been pressed into service, as have modern-day expedients such as gelatin capsules and surgical sponges. True, we are no longer likely to heed the advice of an eleventh-century Trotula manuscript that tells us that "best of all is this deception: the day before her wedding, let her put a leech very cautiously on the labia, taking care lest it slip inside by mistake, then the blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man." But that is merely modern squeamishness.

Even today, women sometimes try to time the wedding night with the onset of their menstrual periods on the theory that blood is blood, and no one will look too closely. Every once in a while stories surface of a woman employing some form of self-mutilation—inserting ground glass into the vagina, for instance, or nicking the entrance with a razor blade so that the cuts will later be rubbed open and bleed during sex, for example. As these sorts of things are typically done very much in secret, however, they are difficult to verify. Some people even find such stories difficult to believe, but it seems fairly clear, given the popularity of things like hymen reconstruction, that even in the supposedly "postfeminist" West some women do indeed continue to undertake these kinds of efforts to ensure that their blood flows at the right time. Around the world and right here at home, women silently cut into their own genitals in the name of an expectation that may be far from fair and is definitely far from biologically realistic, but is nonetheless still widely viewed as utter and absolute proof.