Virgin: The Untouched History (13 page)

Telling Stories

Marriage has, in the past hundred years, lost much of its gravitas as the rite of passage through which women assume the mantle of adulthood. This is in large part because marriage today rarely takes place at the onset of adulthood. Most contemporary Westerners have completed their education, spent several years as self-supporting members of the workforce, lived on their own and run their own households, and, in most cases, had at least some experience with romantic and/or sexual relationships before they marry for the first time (if indeed they marry at all). But except for weddings, we have no formal public rite of passage that exists to acknowledge the achievement of female adulthood. We come of age in myriad ways, and more often than not we do so long before we marry. Drifting along as we do on the currents of cultural change, the element of the adulthood rite-of-passage to which we seem to cling tightest is not marriage but the onset of sexual activity. Having sex is a true centerpiece of our traditional values.

As is typical of rites of passage, the actual act or acts—in this case, first-time sex—are only part of the picture. The bulk of a rite of passage is the social acknowledgment of the transition. In the case of virginity loss, the vehicle for this acknowledgment is storytelling. Both before and after the actual event(s) of first-time sex, we both prepare for and commemorate the transition, this entry into the world of the adult, by rehearsing expectations, fears, experiences, and lore "through the grapevine."

Virginity researchers Laura Carpenter and Sharon Thompson are among the few academics to have looked at how this rite of passage works, gathering hundreds of examples of the stories contemporary teenagers tell one another about their experiences of virginity loss. It is through telling, comparing, and validating such stories that adolescents confirm to themselves and one another that they've officially crossed the threshold into the world of adulthood. Tales from the trenches provide models for those who have not yet lost their virginity, giving the uninitiated a selection of blueprints for the ways the experience is supposed to happen. They teach us what is considered desirable and undesirable, right and wrong. The social styles of our cultures and peer groups, reflected in the stories we tell, shape our understanding of what our sexual lives mean and are, including what we're likely to say about our own experiences.

This is why, as collections of virginity-loss narratives like Karen Bouris's
The First Time
and Louis Crozier's
Losing It
demonstrate, despite the infinite variety of our personal experiences with first-time sex, we tell a fairly limited number of stories about it. There are positive versions and negative versions, and variety in the details, but over a broad sample, virginity-loss tales are for the most part quite similar. Objective facts—what happened and how—are less important than communicating symbolic truths. The stories that we tell say less about what was literally experienced than they do about how we felt about the experience, how we wanted to feel about it, and how our culture expects us to feel about it. They are the way in which we contemporary Westerners transmute a physical moment into a social fact, hearing and telling our stories of first-time sex as our adult rite of passage.

Male- Order Brides

Historically speaking, one of the favored ways of resolving the rape of a virgin was to see to it that the victim married her rapist. More than a few legal codes, pre-Christian and post-Christian alike, have indicated this as a preference. The woman's feelings in the matter were of no import in these decisions. From the perspective of property, it was the way to make the best out of a bad situation. If the man who stole a woman's virginity was given the right to it through marriage, at least the woman was (in theory) provided for, and no other man would find his fortunes undermined by having a new wife bear another man's child.

While callous, cruel, and gobsmackingly sexist from our perspective, this solution is perfectly sensible in its own context. Over the centuries, marriage has far more often been about economics than it has been about romance. Marriage as an outgrowth of romantic love only became common in the West within the last three hundred years: romance, after all, is rather peripheral to the functioning of a society, whereas resources are crucial. As a means of maximizing wealth, cementing alliances, solidifying land and other holdings, and organizing the transfer of property across generations, marriage has been an institution of the utmost pragmatic and strategic importance.

As part of the apparatus of this institution, virginity was materially important because of what it meant in terms of verifiable paternity of children. It was also important because it signified a woman's willingness to put the priorities of her family, her future husband, and her community ahead of her own desires. A bride's virginity was considered an indicator of her good upbringing, her fitness to be taken into a new household and family line, and her trustworthiness as a wife. It represented a symbolic guarantee of a woman's behavior and value system, and a material guarantee that at least the first child born within her marriage would verifiably be sired by her new husband, not some potential competitor.

Virginity, in short, was a critical element of the material and symbolic value any bride had to offer to a potential husband. One could even call it a part of her dowry. Dowry, like its inverse practice, bridewealth, is a one-way transfer of wealth that takes place at marriage. Dowry means a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household, so that property accompanies the bride. In cases where wealth is given to the bride's family by the groom in exchange for the privilege of absorbing their daughter into his household, we call it bridewealth instead. Bridewealth was never widely practiced in the West. Dowry, on the other hand, was nearly ubiquitous, only eventually fading out in the nineteenth century as a combination of socioeconomic forces and the rise of the romantic marriage rendered dowries less important and less popular. Even so, vestiges of dowry, like the hope chest and the bride's trousseau, remain fairly popular as wedding customs.

Like the rest of the items in her dowry, virginity was one of the valuable goods that went with a woman from her own household to her husband's household when she married. Like the linens and clothing, household goods, livestock, and other items that might be part of her dowry, it became her husband's property, of which he would dispose in the process of consummating the marriage. In essence, this means that the Western tradition was not only to enhance the value of daughters on the marriage market by keeping them virgins prior to their weddings, but to actually pay the men to marry them, too. If this seems paradoxical, it is.

Or is it? The common presumption has long been that if virginity is valuable, men will give a good deal in order to acquire virgin brides, and the potential of an increased bridewealth would be one of the major motivators for a family to keep its daughters virginal. But as the studies of researchers including Jack Goody and Alice Schlegel have shown, it doesn't quite work that way. In cross-cultural surveys of marriage practices, in fact, it has been shown that cultures that practice bridewealth transactions place less stress on the premarital virginity of women, not more. It is the dowry-giving cultures (wealth going from the bride's family to the groom), not the bridewealth-givers, that tend to care the most about virginity.

Anthropologist Schlegel posits that this has to do not with religion or morals but with good old-fashioned social climbing. Essentially, if a family wants to ensure that its daughters get married to men of optimal rank and status, it needs to make its daughters as appealing as possible to the kinds of families with which they wish to become allied. Simultaneously, they must keep their daughters away from all inappropriate suitors. In cases where the stability or improvement of family status depended upon the marriages of its daughters, as was certainly true throughout the preindustrial West, virginity was co-opted as a primary asset for increasing a family's leverage in the husband-finding market. If Schlegel's conjectures are true, then men wouldn't have had to pay for virgin brides for the simple reason that families with daughters would already be using virginity as a means of attracting better grooms. In effect this would ultimately mean that most any man could comfortably expect to marry a virgin, because virtually every family would be invested in the possibility of one of its daughters "marrying up," something it would be impossible to do without a virginal daughter to offer in marriage.

We cannot say why the system evolved this way in the West when it didn't in other cultures. For instance, cultures that practice bridewealth or potlatch in conjunction with weddings rather than dowry often have a radically different perspective on bridal virginity. The fact remains that not all cultures handle virginity in the same way, however; indeed some don't recognize or value it at all. The value we place on virginity is precisely that, placed upon it, and not intrinsic either to human beings or to virginity itself.

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, human males do not have an inherent desire for female virgins. It would be a fine trick indeed if they did, since virginity is an intangible quality that one cannot see, touch, smell, or reliably identify. To claim that men innately desire virgins is every bit as baseless as claiming that people have an inborn yearning for sexual partners who are philanthropic or insightful, or have a keen sense of fashion. Which is not to say that we do not ever desire intuitive, well-dressed altruists, but rather to say that our desire for these qualities and these people is neither biological nor inborn. We learn to desire these attributes because we learn that within the context of our culture, they are valued and desired.

So it is with virginity. Men learn to desire virgins over nonvirgins when they live in cultures where virginity is construed as being valuable. In such cultures, there are few sexual acts that can increase a man's image of sexual success like laying claim to it. When it comes to the kinds of things that men have developed the habit of acquiring in order to show off their superior status to other men, the maidenheads of young mistresses are worth at least as much as the canvases of old masters. Like winning an athletic trophy, winning the "prize" of a woman's virginity implies a certain type of physical prowess. Like the stuffed head of a moose or tiger on a club room wall, it evokes the idea of a successful hunter capable of bagging his quarry. Like tales of exotic travel, it carries connotations of having been the first person to lay claim to a new and previously unclaimed territory.

Where virginity is a sought-after commodity, a conquered virgin can reflect a multitude of stereotypically masculine virtues. Little wonder that some men have made a fetish out of the destruction of virginity. It's a surprisingly egalitarian pastime. A career in popping cherries requires few resources beyond audacity, charisma, and a penis. It rewards traits that aren't dependent on rank or wealth, such as ingenuity and a gift for gab. It's sexually gratifying, and, at least from certain angles and to certain mentalities, it can definitely make a man's social stock soar. As a venue for conspicuously participating in sexual competition, the acquisitive defloration of virgins has few equals.

One of the reasons that the claiming of women's virginity works so efficiently in this sense is that virginity is not merely acquired when it is taken; it is destroyed, removed permanently from the available pool. The virginity of any woman, at least the way virginity has classically been construed, can only belong to one man. This finality makes the defloration of virgins a potent social weapon. Women, however, aren't the only ones who have reason to fear it. Men fear "virginity poachers," too. Taking the virginity of a man's daughter without intending to marry her, whether by force or seduction, has long been thought of as one of the most underhanded and devastating blows one man could deal another. Seducing another man's fiancee and taking her virginity is closely related and very nearly as bad. As sexual mores and gendered expectations in regard to sex have changed, these sorts of sexual attacks have become less common, or at least less likely to be interpreted as attacks. But within some social groups, this sort of sexual theft is still considered a mortal insult to a man's virility, authority, honor, and strength.

As a result of the stress put on the redemption of a stolen virginity, men have not infrequently been known to deflower women precisely because it was a way to force marriages the women's families might otherwise have opposed. This Machiavellian use of virginity sometimes involved genuine rape, but in other cases the "rape" was a consensual event a woman participated in with a man she wanted to marry over parental objections. Presented with a fait accompli of such major and potentially pregnant proportions, it was fairly likely that her family would throw in the towel and call for a priest. In other words, shotgun weddings may have been a matter of wife or death in some cases and entrapment in others, and yet for some women they may have represented one of the few times that they could use the significant value of their own virginity to their own ends.

Unforgettable

Is it true that, in the words of the ad campaign for the 1999 movie
American
Pie,
"you never forget your first piece"? For centuries, one of the things that has frequently been believed to be true about losing one's virginity is that the experience is indelibly and automatically etched upon one's brain. Some believe, for instance, that people, especially women, form an instantaneous and unshakable emotional bond with their first sexual partners. Others claim that the quality and nature of your first sexual experience is an indicator of the kind of sex life you will have for the remainder of your days. The virgin is thought of as a blank slate, an empty canvas, and the first sexual experience she has is seen as making an inevitable and permanent mark. It is a somewhat poetic sentiment, but it is also false. A first sexual experience is no more and no less likely to permanently shape one's sensibilities, identity, or responses than any other milestone in life, from a first step to a first parking ticket. Nonetheless, over the years many people have believed that the way you lose your virginity not only can but
will
influence you for the rest of your life.