Read Virgin: The Untouched History Online
Authors: Hanne Blank
Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the News
Many people are willing to believe that our forefathers couldn't diagnose virginity, but are unwilling to believe that modern doctors cannot do the same. After all, as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put it in a 1995 technical bulletin, "The physician should be able to differentiate a normal and an altered hymen." But can they? And if they can, does this mean that they can tell us for certain whether or not any woman or girl is a virgin?
The answer, in both cases, is no. This is due partly to the fact that despite what we fantasize, sexual activity simply does not necessarily leave distinctive marks on or in the body. This is true not only for adult women but also for girls. "Only a few vulvar or hymenal findings are reliable indicators of abuse among prepubertal girls," Dr. Abby Berenson writes in the
American Journal
of Obstetric Gynecology.
"Furthermore, these findings are infrequently observed among children who are examined at a sexual assault center. In fact, findings strongly suggestive of sexual abuse were observed in< 5% [less than five per cent] of abused children." As the title of another medical journal article on hymenal evidence of sexual assault put it, "it's normal to be normal."
Expecting the genitals to provide definitive evidence, however, is really putting the cart before the horse for the simple reason that the results of any genital examination are dependent upon the practitioner who conducts it. Many, probably most, doctors are honestly and simply ignorant when it comes to hymens, and unfamiliar with the literature that has shown them to be all but useless as a basis for virginity diagnosis.
In the doctors' defense, it must be said that since hymens so rarely present medical problems, there is no particularly good reason for most doctors to know anything about them, or for hymens to be taught in depth in medical schools. Additionally, since only a subset of practitioners will ever practice in branches of medicine in which they would likely be encountering hymens at all, most doctors really have no need to know.
The trouble is that there is some research to suggest that even those who really ought to know what they're talking about when it comes to the human hymen, namely gynecological specialists, do not always pay attention to the hymen, and when they do, they may not know enough to usefully interpret what they see. In 1999 Emma Curtis and Camille San Lazaro of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, published, in the
British
Medical Journal,
the results of a survey they took of 126 of their pediatric, obstetric/ gynecological, and genitourinary medical colleagues. Only 28 out of a subgroup of 75 of those surveyed regularly examined the hymen as part of a genital examination on an adolescent at all, and of that 75, fewer than half were certain of how to interpret what they saw when they looked at hymens. Asked whether they believed that frequent sexual activity resulted in ongoing loss or damage to the hymen, 44 of the 75 said they simply didn't know.
An astonishing lack of informed agreement among specialists in regard to the diagnosis of sexual history has been borne out by other studies as well. In 1997 and again in 1999 the
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine
and the journal
Pediatrics
featured the results of a pair of studies that revealed just how difficult and unlikely it can be to obtain an accurate and objective diagnosis of sexual history. In the first study, a team of researchers headed by Boston University School of Medicine's Dr. Jan E. Paradise mailed out questionnaires that included seven simulated case histories to members of four physician organizations concerned with issues of child abuse or pediatric gynecology. Each case history contained a relevant clinical photograph to be used in making diagnostic assessments, along with questions about what the doctors believed they saw in the images or read in the written histories, as well as what they interpreted as being medically true of the individuals depicted in those images and case histories.
When the responses came back, Paradise's team correlated them with standard "textbook" interpretations for the types of evidence with which the doctors had been presented. Startlingly, only about half of these physicians' descriptions of what evidence was mentioned in the written histories or visible in the photographs conformed to those interpretations. Fewer than three-quarters of the doctors' interpretations of what that evidence meant conformed with standard versions. Last but not least, as many as 21 percent of the doctors reported phenomena that were not in fact shown or indicated in either the case histories or the photographs they were given.
In the second of these two studies, 604 physicians evaluated a set of clinical photographs of the external genitalia of seven girls, presented with brief case histories. Four months later, they were asked to evaluate the same photographs, with the difference being that the second time, six of the seven written case histories that were distributed along with the photos were altered in terms of the extent to which they suggested that the subject of the photograph was the victim of sexual abuse. Both times, the physicians were asked to identify whether they interpreted the photographs they were given as indicating "no [sexual] abuse" or "probable [sexual] abuse."
When the returns were in, the two sets of responses were compared. The degree to which physicians were likely to revise their opinions of the physical evidence visible in a photograph based on a written case history varied dramatically. The least experienced doctors' interpretations changed nearly one-third of the time. More experienced physicians were a harder sell, more likely to rely on their own impressions of the physical signs they could see in the photographs than on the information they gleaned from the written case histories, but even they revised their opinions as often as 6 percent of the time. This is a substantial margin of error.
This is in no way intended to denigrate the abilities of intelligent and ethical physicians, but rather to bring to light three vital truths about medical diagnosis. First, diagnosis is a matter of interpretation, and thus always, and inevitably, a matter of opinion. This is one of the reasons why, when a particularly disquieting diagnosis is made, we often seek out a second opinion before starting a course of treatment. Second, the discrepancies Dr. Paradise and his coauthors discovered give us pause to recall that medical diagnosis is not always as simple as we laypeople want to imagine. No single physical sign can tell a physician all the things he or she might wish it would. Making educated guesses is part of any doctor's job. Last, these studies remind us that observer bias is an objective reality: even the best-trained and most high-minded of us will sometimes see precisely what we look for.
What are we to do, then, if we want to know whether a woman is or is not a virgin? Where can we turn for an answer, if the doctors cannot tell us? The only honest answer is that there is in fact nowhere to turn, and nothing that can give us anything more ironclad than a maybe. In truth, if for some reason we care whether someone is or was a virgin, it would seem that the best solution is simply to ask.
The Blank Page
In Isak Dinesen's 1957 short-story collection
Last Tales,
there is a story that beautifully encapsulates the dynamics of virginity testing. A story within a story, the narrator of "The Blank Page" is a toothless old crone, a professional storyteller. Describing an isolated Carmelite convent high in the hills of Portugal where ceremonial white linens that will later be used on the wedding nights of the aristocracy are made, Dinesen deftly outlines the anxiety, pomp, and circumstance of producing a proof of virginity.
"Virginem earn tenemus, "
Dinesen has an aristocratic chamberlain pronounce, publicly displaying a princess's bridal sheet from the palace balcony with the formulaic Latin "we declare her to have been a virgin."
These sheets, the story continues, are never washed or used again. Rather, their stained centers are scissored out and delivered back to the convent in whose fields the flax was grown and there hung in ornate gilt frames on the walls of the convent's gallery, a small golden nameplate beneath each one. "In the midst of the long row," however, "there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page."
In Dinesen's tale, this blank page is the object of great and grave curiosity, an arresting memento . . . but of what? No speculations are given, no projections made. Dinesen does not tell us what to make of this unsullied cloth, nor does she hint at what the royal ladies who make the pilgrimage to the convent might think as they stand before it, lost in thought.
There is no single virginal body, no single virginal experience, no single virginal vagina, not even a single virginal hymen. There is only the question, how do we know whether this woman is a virgin? The answer has been written innumerable times, with alum and doves' blood and urine and decoctions of mint and lady's mantle, with charts and graphs and clinical photography. But no matter how many times someone attempts to inscribe it, no matter how firmly they press the pen to the paper, we are left forever with the same blank page.
* Women's magazines of the mid—twentieth century advised readers to assess the pertness of their breasts by seeing whether the breast sagged sufficiently to hold a pencil in place against the rib cage. Only those whose breasts could not keep the pencil from falling "passed" this test.
'Indeed, it still is. On the shelves of many an adult bookshop one can find vaginal creams called things like China Shrink Cream and Tighten Up. Though touted as containing "secret herbs" and various oriental essences, the active ingredient in such concoctions is often alum in the form of food-grade potassium aluminum sulfate. Mixed with polyethylene glycol, a water-soluble waxy substance often used as a base for medicated ointments and cosmetics, it becomes a lotion or cream that is touted as being able to increase sexual pleasure by tightening the vagina so that it is "as tight as a virgin's."
A Virgin's Bath: If a young woman about to have sex for the first time bathes in mint tea, rubs her body with vetiver oil, and drinks a cup of sage tea warmed with a dash of whiskey, her first sexual experience will be good.
—Traditional hoodoo recipe, related by Catherine yronwode
S
HORTLY AFTER I BEGAN WORKING on this book, I discovered that it was next to impossible to actually have a discussion about virginity. Every time I tried, the conversation was inexorably yanked to the topic of "losing it." It was as if there were some strange force that kept pulling conversation away from virginity and toward the moment of its end. Wanting to discuss other things—virginity in religion, the myth of the
droit de seigneur,
season two of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
—this vexed me. I wasn't writing a book about virginity loss, after all.
Eventually it dawned upon me that this wasn't just my friends' oversexed imaginations at work, but rather the nature of the beast. Virginity is invariably defined in terms of what it is not, and is believed to be proven most incontrovertibly by whatever signs (blood, pain, etc.) become obvious only in the moment of its obliteration. We usually describe our own virginities starting from the point at which we ceased to be virgins at all. In retrospect I realize that the tendency to speak of virginity
loss
rather than of virginity itself should not have surprised me. Virginity
is
because it ends. For this reason if for no other (and there are plenty of others), it makes sense for a book about virginity to also be a book that is, at least in some small part, about the loss of virginity.
The Ritual
Throughout history, losing one's virginity has been viewed as a ritual of transformation. Not merely the transformation from being one of the people who hasn't slept with anybody to being one of the ones who has, but a ritual that transforms a boy into a man, a girl into a woman, a child into an adult. But why?
Simply experiencing sexual curiosity or even engaging in genital acts isn't what makes the difference between child and adult. Sexual play is part of childhood in many cultures around the world, but we don't consider a child an adult just because he or she gets caught "playing doctor." Neither do we attribute adulthood to-a child who has been sexually abused, even if he or she has experienced what we might think of as adult sexuality. If anything, we are prone to see such a child as even more vulnerable and in need of greater protection.
Losing one's virginity in a socially significant sense, the kind of virginity loss that "makes a woman" or "makes a man" out of someone, is clearly not just a matter of having gone through the motions. Something more than mere mechanical genital activity is at stake. That "something more," it would seem, lies somewhere in the tangled intersection of reproductive capacity, sexual desire, physical maturation, and the massive social importance of parenthood.
Children's sexual curiosity and adult sexuality are different in many ways. Perhaps the most important difference is that adult (hetero)sexuality has the potential of producing pregnancies, which in turn tends to lead to the assumption of that most adult of responsibilities, the rearing of the next generation. When sexual activity can be directly linked to parenthood—as has been the case for most of human history, since reliable contraception is a fairly recent thing—then it makes perfect sense that sexual activity also gets linked to adulthood and the assumption of adult responsibility. For centuries our social structures have institutionalized this principle, making a tidy tautological circle in which the biological activities of sex and reproduction are yoked to the social assumption of fully adult status in the community. Reproductive sexual capacity becomes the linchpin around which we organize the assumption of social adulthood.
Historically, few people have felt a need to try to separate out the elements of this process. As long as puberty, marriage, and virginity loss all generally followed fairly closely on one another's heels, a woman's social and biological adulthood could not only appear to unfold as a single streamlined entity, it could actually do so. The rituals that were created to mark the culmination of this process were often structured in ways that supported this impression of a single unbroken unfolding into adulthood—for example, as the ancient Greeks did, by incorporating virginity loss into the wedding. Their wedding festivities, which often took place when a young woman was somewhere in her early to mid teens, commonly included a noisy processional that conducted the bride and groom into a private room or enclosure near the site of the wedding feast. Then and there, with their friends and family just outside singing hymns to the god of marriage and generally carrying on, the marriage was consummated and the wife—no longer a bride—and her husband would emerge to cheering and revelry.
This custom, seamlessly weaving together the wedding and loss of virginity, survived in various forms in various cultures around the globe, including both Jewish and Christian weddings in the West. Even today it's a common custom for the bride and groom to retire together, at the end of the ceremony, to some area set aside from the rest of the wedding party. It's also commonplace for the guests at the party or reception to cheer when the newlyweds enter the room for the first time as a married couple, just as the guests would have cheered the ancient Greek bride and groom as they left the nuptial chamber and returned to the wedding feast. These days there probably aren't too many couples who seize the opportunities for privacy offered at the end of the wedding or before the reception to consummate their union (one imagines it would rather shock the guests), but that is where the custom arose.
Symbol and Substance
Fortunately for those who prefer less pressure and greater privacy, the seclusion of the bride and groom has, over the years, become just another symbolic gesture. But symbols and symbolic gestures are critical to rites of passage. Weddings are correspondingly full of such symbolic images and moments: the throwing of rice to symbolize fertility, the custom of wearing something blue on one's wedding day as a symbol of fidelity, the idea of passing on one's luck and happiness by tossing the bouquet, and so on. Of all the common wedding customs that we currently observe in the West, though, the seclusion of the bride and groom is the only one with a demonstrable link to the issue of the bride's virginity.
This may come as rather a surprise, given what is often said to be true of other popular wedding customs and symbols. But the historical record bears it out. Take, for instance, our penchant for dressing brides in white. The white wedding gown is popularly supposed to indicate a bride's virginal purity. Many people, including some misinformed scholars, have endorsed this association, perhaps thinking that the gown symbolizes the white sheets upon which some cultures traditionally expect a bride to bleed in order to provide proof of her wedding-night virginity. The two things actually have nothing to do with each other. If they did, we might expect that white would be a pancultural preference in bridal clothing, used wherever virginity is valued. But white has only rather recently become the color associated with brides, and only in the West—China, India, Japan, and other cultures also recognize and value virginity, but do not traditionally favor white for brides.
The white wedding gown is an inheritance from none other than England's Queen Victoria. At her 1840 wedding, she made the unprecedented sartorial choice—the traditional wedding color for royal brides at the time was silver—of wearing a splendid white satin gown trimmed with orange blossoms, along with a veil of Honiton lace and a tasteful array of diamond jewelry, some of which had been given to her by her groom, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Victoria's dress unintentionally kick-started the tradition of the white wedding dress: how better to feel like a queen, particularly one who had been enjoying a highly public storybook romance, on one's wedding day than to dress like one? In an era where most women married in whatever constituted their Sunday best, a white gown was also a form of conspicuous consumption, a lavish display of the fact that a bride's family could afford to spend large sums on a garment that the bride would, by definition, never wear again. White is also difficult to keep clean, and thus a spotless white gown had associations both with purity (although not necessarily specifically sexual purity) and with attaining a pristine remove from the grimy workaday world. Fine symbolic meanings to take to the altar, indeed.
Had Victoria chosen to be married in blue, a popular choice at the time, Billy Idol might have sung about it being a nice day for a
blue
wedding, not a white one. Blue, yellow (the color associated with the Greek god of marriage, although in other places and times, also the color associated with prostitution), joyous reds, and even black, gray, and brown were common choices prior to Victoria's wedding, and blue and yellow remained popular into the early years of the twentieth century. But gradually, no doubt partly because of the spread of the popular belief that white dresses conveyed some elemental truth about the virginity of the women who wore them, the white wedding gown ascended to its current status as icon of the sexually untouched bride.
The veil shares the wedding gown's reputation for having some relationship to bridal virginity. Some sources have asserted that the custom of the veil arose from the desire to visually depict the bride's virginity, a sort of symbolic open-air hymen. Alas for the imaginative souls who came up with this interpretation of the bridal veil, none of the evidence we have on the custom of veiling suggests that this is the case. Rather, the primary function historically ascribed to facial veils is protection: against dirt and insects; against the gaze of potentially predatory men; and, most important in terms of weddings, against evil spirits, demons, or the evil eye. Veiling the face and thus the identity of a bride was long believed to render her immune from attacks by demons and witches, who depended on either seeing the eyes of the intended victim or on knowing her exact identity. A closely related custom, dressing the bridesmaids in identical dresses, was similarly intended to confuse evil spirits or those who wished to harm the bride. What becomes clear when we look at customs like white wedding gowns and bridal veils, at their historical meanings as well as the specifically sexual meanings we have attributed to them more recently, is that we are master creators of symbolic gestures. Socially significant moments tend to acquire symbolic meaning, even if we have to stick those symbolic meanings on with glue.
Equal Rites?
Rites of passage are not, in and of themselves, changes of status or stage in life. Rather, they are the social and cultural acknowledgment of changes that are either in the process of taking place or which have already happened. The most common rites of passage exist around the events of birth, menarche, attainment of adulthood, marriage, and death. Logically enough, as cultures change, rites of passage change, too, in scope and style. We do still observe some of the rites of passage we have observed as a species since time immemorial, most prominently funerals and weddings. We have also evolved new rites of passage that invoke and serve the kinds of social transitions that are meaningful to us today. One of them is the rite of passage of "the first time."
Virginity loss gets enacted, as a rite of passage, in a way that is partly private, partly public, partly symbolic, and partly explicit. It is diffuse, happening on an informal basis through peer-to-peer communication, not concentrated in the form of a group event or ceremony. The confirmation of social status change is slow, relying upon multiple retellings of virginity-loss stories in different contexts, for different and usually very private audiences. In many ways it is the opposite to the announcements, invitations, formal ceremony, eventfulness, and public witness of weddings. But it is very similar in its function as a rite of passage that marks the borderland of adulthood, and very similar, indeed, in being a social performance.
We might well wonder how it became possible for such a seemingly private experience to take on such a central role in the process of becoming socially adult. Part of the answer is that it has always been this way—for men. Men have always commemorated virginity loss and the acquisition of sexual experience on a peer-to-peer basis. In most Western cultures, the bulk of any young man's sexual learning traditionally comes from other men. This takes many forms: locker room braggadocio, the creation of and trade in pornography, young men being taken by male relatives to a brothel for their first experience of intercourse (still common in much of Central and South America; recent studies reveal that around a quarter of contemporary Ecuadoran men lose their virginity in such a setting), bachelor parties, and even ancient Greece's system of
paidika,
where older men took on younger men as proteges and sexual partners. Men are mutually complicit in one another's sexual upbringings. Among other things, this means that for men, sexuality can and does exist in an independent frame of reference that includes neither women as individual people nor heterosexuality as part of a meaningful human relationship. Men
have
sex. It is something they do and something they acquire.
Women, on the other hand, have often been construed as
being
sex. Women's sexuality, unlike men's, has never really been allowed to exist as a frame of reference unto itself. The K-strategist's dilemma, the need for resources with which to rear resource-intensive offspring, has kept female sexuality tied to so-cioeconomics. Men could experience their own sexual milestones as occasions for private celebration because there is no direct material consequence, for men, to sexual activity. Women, however, often learned the hard way to capitalize on the protections offered them by the public ritualizing of their own sexual milestones. This is not to say that in the past, all women waited until marriage to have sex, or that modern women have become sexual in unprecedented ways. Rather, it is to say that in the past, women who had sex prior to marriage, even if they were victims of sexual violence, typically had to hide it under pain of severe punishment, whereas modern women have acquired the unprecedented ability not to have to do so. The difference is vast. Women's newfound ability to be known as independently sexual is a large part of what has gone into making virginity loss a modern rite of passage all its own.