Virgin: The Untouched History (28 page)

Print, Protestants, and the Pox

Of the various things that contributed to the creation of a climate in which virginity became a pronounced sexual obsession, one of the most influential was the emergence of a popular press. Books were crucial to the formation and dissemination of the idea that virginity was something that could be objectified as a thing in and of itself, without real reference to the women who nominally possessed it. Popular books like Nicholas Venette's enormously influential
The
Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal"d
and the anonymously authored
Aristotle's
Master-Piece
*
helped to transmit the idea of virginity as a physical object to a readership that was growing by leaps and bounds.

Wrhat readers learned about virginity from these books was that it was, as the anatomical description of the hymen in
Aristotle's Master-Piece
made clear, an object. To be sure, it was an object that gave rise to a great deal of anxiety: medical books like Venette's, as well as novels like
Fanny Hill and. Moll Flanders,
exposed their readers not just to an objectified version of virginity but revealed the existence of age-old practices of "sophistication." The spiritual, moral, and psychological aspects of virginity preeminent in the minds of Augustine or Hildegard or even Aquinas had been shoved brusquely onto the back burner. Virginity was an object now, a thing in itself, something that could be discussed in isolation, as if it had no connection to the body of a living, thinking, feeling human being. This was a version of virginity that required no metaphysics whatsoever and indeed admitted none. Conquering the maiden could be considered a separate problem from the more straightforward task of conquering the maidenhead.

Maidenheads were there to be had, and at a disadvantage to boot. Whether a woman was a young girl arrived fresh from the countryside, a daughter of the working classes, or a spinster who had to make ends meet somehow, unmarried women were economically and personally vulnerable. The sexual exploitation of domestic workers was sufficiently widespread that Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the elegantly acerbic literary lions of the French nineteenth century, defined a housemaid as "a girl who was ruined by the young man of a household." For really, what was to stop him? Differences of wealth, social status, and gender put the power on the male side. Most men felt little or no responsibility for whatever consequences might befall a woman with whom they had had a sexual liaison.

For men, the benefits of recreational sex easily outweighed its potential risks. Socially, it was often seen as proof of virility, an asset. As for venereal disease, the frequent affliction of the roue, it was merely another factor in favor of seeking sex with virgins. Both gonorrhea and syphilis were rampant in early modern Europe, treatable but not yet curable. The cautious lothario would thus often seek virgins out on that basis alone. In his 1724
A Modest Defence of
Publick Stews
("stew" being a term for "brothel"), Bernard Mandeville wrote of "epicures in venery," men who pursued sex exclusively with virgins. This erotic fixation on virginity is, however, defensible in Mandeville's eyes, for it is "chiefly for their own personal Safety." Escaping a "taint" or "the pox," Mandeville felt, was a good reason to prefer virginal women, for, as he wrote, "some Men are afraid of venturing even after themselves."

Overall there was a sensibility, among the early modern men who pursued sex with virgins, that the only damage they were really doing was mechanical and short-term. It was both natural and inevitable that a woman be penetrated by a man; every young woman would lose her virginity eventually. Men and procuresses might even congratulate themselves on having done the deflowered woman a favor, on the theory that the indignity were less if a woman were deflowered by a man of station than some member of the great unwashed. Combine these attitudes with a world in which cash had become king, cities swarmed with economic migrants, and the extended agricultural family gave way to fragmented groups of poor people dependent on whatever coin they could bring in, and the presence of a growing bourgeoisie with a well-established fascination for sex and a tendency to spend large sums on luxuries, and the development of a sizeable virginal sex industry should come as no surprise whatsoever.

Virtue and Vice

The sale of virginities as a commonplace branch of prostitution begins to appear in the historical record around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Mandeville's
Defence
makes the availability of virgins-for-hire clear, and there are occasional references in seventeenth-century brothel and entertainment guides to cities like London and Venice intended for wealthy travelers. Brussels was anecdotally claimed to be a hotbed of brothel deflorations as late as the turn of the twentieth century. Cleland's
Fanny Hill,
of course, is often pointed to as evidence of the trade in maidenheads, and it seems reasonable to take it as being at least representative if not documentary. The bulk of the evidence we have to work with on the question of the prostitution of virginity, 'however, comes from nineteenth-century England.

This was the time of the great surge of middle-class philanthropy, the era when urban poverty and its attendant problems had finally begun to draw attention from organized groups of private citizens. We know relatively little about the prostitution of virgins in the nineteenth century, and what we do know is available to us primarily because of the work done by those who were attempting to eradicate the practice. But using these records creates some problems for the historian.

The gulf between the philanthropists and the women they wanted to reform was huge. The world of prostitutes and the poor, as described in the accounts of these philanthropists, is routinely filtered through the pens of people who were neither and often looked down on both. There was continual, uneasy, mutual distrust between those who had realized that virtue alone rarely put bread in their mouths or clothes on their backs and those who, having no shortage of bread or clothes, had no reason to empathize with a shortage of virtue either.

For these reformers, the only conceivable reasons that a woman might enter into prostitution were either that she had been seduced or raped and abandoned, that she were facing starvation, or both. Anything else was scarcely imaginable to them. Prostitutes who seemed glad of the ability to keep a roof over their heads, dress themselves suitably for their needs, and eat regularly were characterized as dissolute and sinfully devoted to fashion and luxury. Women who openly enjoyed male company and sex were seen as wanton and essentially irredeemable. The very existence of unapologetic sex workers, particularly those who brought other women into the life or worked as brothel-keepers, abjectly contradicted the popular notion that there was an inborn female essence of purity, nurture, and virtue. In such perverted creatures, womanhood itself disappeared: no less an eminence than Dr. Elizabeth Black-well wrote that such women became "human tigers who delight in destruction and torture." Indeed, prostitution was believed to make women disappear. There was a notion widely repeated among reformers (despite ample evidence in their own writings of women who had been involved with prostitution for decades) that three years of prostitution were enough to kill any woman.

The truth of the matter is that then as now, women of virtually every type and temperament existed within the sex industry. Many were genuinely victimized and hapless, and those stories are heartbreaking and horrible. But it is no more true that every prostitute was a victim of sexual predation than it is that career prostitutes dropped dead promptly upon spending three years in the business. Nor is it true, despite the vivid claims of many reformers, that every woman who fell into prostitution even once stayed therefor good. Occasional casual prostitution was a relatively common means for poor women to supplement the skimpy wages they received for their regular work, and was sometimes done with the knowledge of husbands or parents.

In considering the prostitution of virgins, it's important to keep all this in mind, and also to remember that what the reformers were willing to show of the trade in maidenheads is as driven by its own agendas as any pornographic version. In fact, reformers' writings about virgin prostitution often sound dramatically like pornography on the same subject, except that where the pornographer writes in order to induce lust, the reformer writes to generate shock and disgust. The object of reform literature was never accuracy. It was emotion—in the interest of spurring political and social action.

What can be pried from philanthropists' writings about the sale of virginities reveals that while it was an acknowledged market, it was also considered a relatively risky one and existed mostly on the quiet. Along with sadism, masochism, bondage, and various less-exotic perversions like anal intercourse, a taste for virgins was just another of the variegated sexual tastes that could be catered to in the brothels if one knew the right people and had sufficiently deep pockets.

We also know some of what a virgin-hunter looked for, knowing as he did that brothelkeepers might try to pass off nonvirgins as the genuine article. There were a number of characteristics that were considered hallmarks of a genuine virgin, generally some combination of a rural background, naivete, and youth. Rural life was seen as wholesome and clean, both literally and metaphorically, by comparison to the filth of the cities. Naivete, such as a lack of awareness of what a "seduction" actually entailed or what was meant when a procuress offered money if a girl would go "play a game with a gentleman," was considered a sure sign that the young woman was not only physically inexperienced, but was too ignorant to recognize the value of her own virginity. Youth, of course, was the sine qua non.

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon

Youth was also the sine qua non of the controversy over the prostitution of virgins, and of the special and concentrated efforts of reformers to end it. At stake in this controversy was nothing less than a redefinition of what it meant, both culturally and legally, to be a child. Passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885 raised the age of sexual consent in England from twelve (prior to 1875) and thirteen (during the decade 1875-1885) to sixteen. Because it was the law, and because those engaged in legally risky practices have a remarkable tendency to know the letter of the laws to which they might be held, these ages formed a more or less functional bottom line for both brothel owners and their clients. What to our modern eyes looks like pedophilia was legally nothing of the sort, prior to 1885. By law, at that point, thirteen-year-olds were not girls but women, and therefore prostituting them was no particularly special crime.

But this would not be the case for long. The culture was changing, and with it, views on both childhood and sexuality were changing, too. Beliefs that children should be sheltered from the harsh realities of the world, that exposure to sexual images and ideas is injurious to children, that children should not be required to work, and that children are naturally innocent are all notions that rose to cultural prominence along with the nineteenth-century middle class from whose ranks the philanthropists came.

The poor could scarcely afford to be so high-minded about children and childhood. Thirteen, however young it may have been for sex, was not at all young to be earning a living. Child labor was endemic to the nineteenth century, and the children of the poor worked as a matter of course. Children of the poor were rarely schooled beyond rudiments, if they got even that much, for formal education took money their families did not have to spare. Instead, as soon as they were judged to be capable, most poor children worked. In rural areas, children labored alongside their parents and relatives in the home, in the fields, and in small family businesses. In the cities, they might help their parents at work, but were just as frequently employed elsewhere. Children as young as four or five worked in factories, mines, and sweatshops. Children also worked in the streets in massive numbers, selling matches and newspapers, hawking various wares, touting entertainments, running errands, and so forth. This was not exceptional. For better than half the population, it was the norm.

When we consider the plight of the nineteenth-century adolescent who sold her virginity for cash, we cannot afford the luxury of thinking of her according to our own contemporary standards. She was expected to do what she could to earn money in order to to help support her family or to provide for herself, and sexual labor was not necessarily out of the question. Indeed, her parents themselves may well have viewed their daughter's virginity as a realizable asset. Trading a daughter's virginity for a spot of cash rather than a strategic marriage is merely a testament to the exigencies of living hand-to-mouth, not evidence of an attitude about women that was fundamentally different from that of the upper classes.

Furthermore, the daughters of the poor were already considered worldly, to a certain extent, in the eyes of others, and were commonly assumed to dispose of their virginities at the first possible opportunity. How, when exposed to the interactions and enticements of the classically male public realms of commerce and the street, could they possibly stay pure?

In reality, they were often purer—or at least remarkably more ignorant in some respects—than one might expect. The carnal culture of the nineteenth century was a firmly double one, as revealed by historian Peter Gay in his landmark study
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,
in which an intimate familiarity with the grisly realities of life from the butchering of food animals to the squalor of urban poverty went hand in hand with a carefully maintained, strictly gendered, sexual ignorance. "Respectable" women were expected to have no awareness of matters sexual until such time as marriage forced the issue. In an 1843 letter to her half-brother, novelist George Sand summed up women's sexual lot in middle-class Victorian society: "We bring them up, as much as we can, as saints, and then we hand them over like fillies."