Virgin: The Untouched History (27 page)

Suspension of disbelief works in pornographers' favor not just in regard to urethral imposture, but in relation to the hymens of virginity porn. A popular focus object for virginity porn photos, they often appear retouched or perhaps even prosthetic, with strange skin tones and textures. But whether these hymens are fakes—and many of them transparently are—is only tangentially important. After all, how many viewers are in a position to be able to judge the authenticity of what they see, or will even care? They're much more concerned with the fact that they get to see it at all, whatever "it" is. What is important is not that the hymen is real but that it is really obvious. For the purposes of pornography, a hymen can be many things, even many improbable things, such as easily visible from across a room or an incongruous shade of Day-Glo pink. What it cannot be is ambiguous.

From hairdos to hymens, the message transmitted by the bodies of virginity porn is that of nubility and inexperience. They appear
ready
for experience, but they dare not show signs of having already had it. Breasts can never be allowed to sag. Elaborate hairstyles show too much sophistication and forethought. Stretch marks are out of the question. The bodies virginity porn offers to us are pristine, unmarked, and ready to be inscribed by the experience of being sexually claimed. Such carefully "natural" casualness, combined with the genre's standard stockpile of imagery of middle-class normalcy and iconic teen kitsch, bears an insistent, specific message. Magazines like
Hustler
subsidiary
Barely Legal
and its many porn-industry siblings depict their youthful beauties in contexts like suburban bedrooms, college dorms, locker rooms, school gym showers. The women are described as cheerleaders, students, babysitters, and sorority girls. Adult they may be, in the "all models are over eighteen" sense, but the immaturity symbolism is insistent.

The ultimate destination of virginity porn is defloration. Whether it is explicitly shown in a given piece of porn or is left for the reader or viewer to finish off in fantasy, the trajectory is unmistakable. When it is depicted, it must contain either penetration in action, one or more of the classic signs of lost virginity, or some combination. The hands-down favorite talisman of virginity-loss porn is blood. The Web site Ifitbleeds.com not only boasts an appropriately sanguinary name, but takes as its tagline not the journalistic truism "If it bleeds, it leads" (perhaps rejected as being too literary) but instead "If it bleeds, we can fuck it!" Virginity porn Web sites, films, and pictorials entice would-be viewers with copy like "Break their hymens!" and "You'll see their panties, their bedsheets, and more," and "You can see her bloody cherry." Never mind that much of the blood that is visible in photographic virginity porn is suspiciously copious and often appears artificial. This, too, has a long and honorable tradition.

Two other signature motifs of virginity porn are "proof " of the woman's enjoyment and the trope of transformation. There is often a special emphasis on the "realness" of the transformation inherent in first-time penetrative sex. Newvirginseveryday.com promises that the subscriber will see "the cocks that turned these little girls into real women," and furthermore tells us that "you can't afford to miss a second of their journey into REAL womanhood" (emphasis in the original). The "instant nymphomaniac," the virgin who becomes sexually voracious upon losing her virginity, is another of the images on offer. We also frequently find the virgin voyeur, who witnesses others having sex and thus becomes eager to have sex herself, or the virgin who is "sexually awakened" so that she will desire sex and willingly give up her virginity.

The motifs are often combined for greater effect. In the nineteenth-century
The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon,
the surgeon of the title not only gradually awakens the inherent lust of a bedridden young patient to the point where she asks him to deflower her, but the defloration has "such a salubrious effect on my young patient that she eventually quite got the better of her spinal complaint, and was married at the age of eighteen." In virginity pornography, sex is a panacea. It cures immaturity by converting girls into women, transforms the ignorant into the knowledgeable, and turns the unwilling into the eager. It takes incapacitated girls and bestows upon them the capacity for wifehood. These fantasies transgress nothing. They are fantasies of male mastery and female conformity.

Bad Behavior and the Modern Man

The tendency to frame defloration as rebellion is in many ways only to be expected, given the time period in which eroticized virginity first came to the fore. Sexually explicit art and writing have been with us in various forms and modes since before the ancient Greeks, but the virgin as an erotic object really only comes into view beginning in what historians call the modern era, roughly from the sixteenth century forward.

Prior to the sixteenth century, pornography as we know it today did not truly exist. This was not because the sixteenth century represented a second Fall from some porn-free Eden, but because prior to the sixteenth century, the goal of obscenity was unlikely to be entirely prurient. Instead, obscenity might have ritual or mythological significance, as with the legions of phalluses that decorated ancient Rome. It could be an aspect of public entertainment (a lewd painting, joke, or song) or an advertisement for a brothel. It might sharpen the bite of satire, as in
Lysistrata,
the
Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Canterbury
Tales,
or the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. A lack of what we would now recognize as pornography did not mean a lack of obscenity or sexual content in the cultural waters of those times. Graphic sexual content has always been with us. It simply hasn't always been directed toward the same ends.

As a result of all this earthy art and prose, however, we have a reasonably good idea of what previous generations found smutty or sexy, and virginity seems not to have been much on their minds. In late-medieval Rabelais and Chaucer, for example, the classic erotically objectified woman is not a virgin but a young and lovely wife, like the saucy Alisoun of "The Miller's Tale" in
The Canterbury Tales.
Nor do we. find the virgin in the book that arguably began the genre of modern, smut-for-smut's-sake pornography, Pietro Aretino's lavishly illustrated
Sonetti lussuriosi
of 1524. When we find her in Aretino's later
Ragionamend
(two volumes, 1534-1536), she is not eroticized. Rather, she is a nun, established as one of the three types of women in Aretino's world: nun, wife, and whore.

When virginity does begin to appear in eroticized contexts in the High Renaissance, it is not particularly sexy. Classicized virgins, among them rather a lot of Artemises and Athenas (Queen Elizabeth I was frequently compared to Athena), were depicted as sexually attractive but also as inaccessible, and in fact opposed to carnality. As any reasonably well-educated member of the upper classes knew, those who tried to treat the virgin goddesses as erotic objects paid a hefty price: Actaeon was turned into a stag, Tiriesias was blinded. Conceptualizing well-born virgins as Athenas suited elite models of courtship. It supported the abstracted modes of public flirtation, such as the composition and performance of poems and songs, with which marriageable young people amused themselves while dynastic and political marriage negotiations were hammered out behind closed doors by their older relatives. Being an Athena was, to be sure, a limited-time offer, as virtually all of these young goddesses were destined for marriage. But as an archetype the Athena flourished, her virginity formally immune to sexual objectification.

Virgins of the lower classes, who began to emerge in literature and imagery shortly after the Athenas, had no such immunity. Like the Athena, the Servant Girl was also seen as sexually attractive and desirable. But where the Athena was protected by her rank and its corresponding veneer of classical otherworldliness, the Servant Girl's virginity was eminently worldly and vulnerable. Because it was vulnerable, it also became wily. If the Athena's virginity was notable because it was so lofty as to be untouchable, the Servant Girl's virginity was notable precisely because it was so accessible. Servant Girls, on the one hand, were held to be remarkable for the feistiness and skill with which they resisted would-be seducers. On the other, their poverty and lack of education was seen as making them unusually vulnerable to sexual predators.

Then as now, men's attempts on working-class women's virginity often became the site of pitched battles, such as the ones described in the popular early-eighteenth-century song "My Thing Is My Own."

A master of music came with intent

To give me a lesson on my instrument.

I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,

For my little fiddle must not be played on.

Chorus:
My thing is my own, and I'll keep it so still, Other young lasses may do as they will, My thing is my own, and I'll keep it apart v

A cunning clockmaker did court me as well,

And promised me riches if I'd ring his bell.

So I looked at his clockwork, and said with a shock, "Your pendulum's far too small for my clock."

Written down by Thomas d'Urfey in his 1719
Pills to Purge Melancholy,
this song speaks volumes about the nature of the working-class battle between the sexes. Conflict over material resources, relationship security, social acceptability, bodily safety, love, and men's right to expect women to fulfill their sexual desires are all in the mix. Not coincidentally, so is the matter of female erotic pleasure, with unabashed comments about penis size. Neither classical allusion nor religious scruple matters much here. Urban caginess, on the other hand, matters a great deal.

Town and Country

The eroticization of virginity is tied to the rise of capitalism and the growth of cities. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the rise of capitalist economies and the eventual prominence of an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy transformed both geography and culture. Over time, currency replaced land as the primary vehicle for wealth. Working for wages, and commerce via currency, became the mode by which labor was done and trading carried out. Cities, particularly those strategically sited for good transportation and shipping, grew at exponential rates over a very short time. London was the biggest of all, its population handily outstripping that of its nearest rival, Paris, to become the first Western city to hit the one million mark around 1835.

As cities grew ever larger and denser, and jobs within this new urban-industrial world grew increasingly specific and specialized, there was inevitable social fallout. All the daily needs of the people living in these huge cities had to be handled: clothing, food, fuel, sanitation. Ever-larger numbers of support staff, like cooks, maids, grooms, seamstresses, laundresses, peddlers, tailors, porters, valets, and delivery boys, were required to fill these and other needs. The moneymaking opportunities the big cities offered lured countless thousands of rural men, women, and children. They arrived by the wide-eyed cartload, and suddenly discovered that the big city had its own rules of engagement about which they knew virtually nothing.

Which brings us back to our virginal Servant Girl. It is possible, were she city born and bred, and a particularly quick and lucky study as well, that she might have been the chary urbanite of "My Thing Is My Own." But far more commonly she was a great deal more along the lines of the babe in the woods we meet in the first chapter of
Fanny Hill.
Raised with the social expectations of the village or rural community, where geographic stability and community interdependence provided for a certain degree of honesty or at least accountability in regard to standards of behavior, these girls lost their safety nets when they arrived in the cities.

Friendless and penniless, new arrivals had few options. And while these country girls might succeed in protecting their virginity through the rocky acclimation period, they also might not. There were, notoriously, brothel-keepers who might trick new arrivals into becoming new hires, and predatory employers who would prey sexually on recently arrived rural women who didn't have anywhere else to go. But a young woman also had to contend with her own perfectly normal desires for affection, comfort, and pleasure. The poverty, hard work, and social isolation of migrant life left women vulnerable. Such vulnerabilities were well known and well exploited. As another tune in d'Urfey's
Pills
counsels, "would ye have a young Virgin of fifteen Years," one must merely "wittily, prettily talk her down . . . and all's your own."

Sophisticated, naive, or somewhere in between, the Servant Girl inevitably had to contend with the issue of sex. Reflecting this, stories of menaced virginity became signature narratives of the eighteenth century. The opening chapters of
Fanny Hill
are one famous example of this (as they are of so many other things), but there are many more. The earlier of Samuel Richardson's two titanic morality-play novels on the theme,
Pamela
(1740), is an operatically proportioned version of this tale.
Pamela
ends victoriously with marriage, but Richardson's later
Clarissa
(1748) ends with its heroine falling victim to rape. The legendary Marquis de Sade wrote his own dramatically darker versions of the story,
Juliette
and
Justine.
Whether comic or tragic, the story of the menaced lower-class virgin serving in a sexually threatening upper-class milieu remained a constant in books and plays partly because of the accuracy with which art imitated life.