Read Virgin: The Untouched History Online
Authors: Hanne Blank
No studies have been done on parthenophilia. We do not know how many people experience it. We do not know when the desire begins to be felt, whether those who feel it perceive it as an innate or learned preference. We have no idea how many people have pursued specific sexual encounters on account of this desire, or what kind of sexual encounters they have pursued. No research into its possible role in motivating sexual assault or abuse has been conducted. We do not know to what extent it does or does not play a role in child sexual abuse or child prostitution. Even Sigmund Freud did little more than glance at it.
This is the virginity void. Despite the strength and breadth of the erotic interest taken in virginity in our culture, the three centuries of virginity-related pornography, the China Shrink Creams and Lotus Blossum Pocket Pal masturbation sleeves for men (the package copy touts this particular pink plastic production as a "sleek, silky-soft pussy with intact hymen"), even in the face of all the young women's virginities sold around the world, the erotic desire for virginity has been continually avoided as a subject of intellectual and clinical inquiry, as if there were no reason to ask and nothing that could possibly be learned by asking.
The virginity void exists on the other side of the fence as well. As little as we know about the erotic desire for virginity, we know even less about the erotic lives of virgins. Specifically, we know very little about how virgins themselves might understand themselves to exist as erotic objects or how they might themselves be erotically affected by the mythology of the erotic virgin that so permeates the culture. Virgins are not exempt from the mythologies of their own sexual status, after all. A virgin may well be every bit as erotically caught up in the implications of her own sexual status as the man who fantasizes about popping her cherry, but she is even less likely than he to be asked about it. How strange, in a culture so often obsessed by virginity, that we have chosen to be so blind.
Virginity is not the opposite of sex. Rather, it is its own unique and uniquely troublesome sexual entity, and one we have largely avoided addressing. Our presumptions about virginity have been with us for a very long time and will require a great deal of time and effort to question, let alone change. If we are ever to fill the virginity void with something more realistic than propaganda and more accurate than pornographic fantasy, however, this work is a challenge we would do well to take up.
* Venette's book was reprinted in multiple editions and pressings from the time of the 1696 French original to the last British edition, which came out sometime after 1774; versions of
Aristotle's Master-Piece
appeared from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and were in circulation well into the twentieth.
*The case of the Abbe des Rues was so sensational and titillating that accounts of the trial were published and sold in several languages, demonstrating that the contemporary appetite for salacious true-crime stories as entertainment reading may not be so contemporary after all.
Virgin: teach your kids it's not a dirty word.
—billboard, Baltimore, Maryland, 2003
D
ID YOU HEAR about the virgin parade they were going to have in Hollywood?" asked a popular Jazz Age joke. "One girl got sick and the other didn't want to march all alone." As this 1920s joke demonstrates, the liberalization of sexual culture in America started well before the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. During the twentieth century, our beliefs and expectations in regard to human nature, our economic lives, our experiences of the body and identity, and our relationships to religion have all undergone massive—and ongoing—change. It is small wonder that our ideals and expectations in regard to virginity have been shifting, too.
As often as magazine articles have lamented the "death of virginity" in the twentieth century, and as many jokes as have been made about virgins being an endangered species, virginity is hardly so fragile as all that. Still, it has been changing, its place in our lives and its role in our culture shifting with the tides of history. We can see the nature of this shift in a massive study conducted in the late 1980s among young adults in thirty-seven different countries around the globe. The study revealed that while for both males and females premarital chastity—virginity—-still earned a place in a list of the eighteen characteristics considered most desirable in a potential mate, both men and women ranked it lower than most other traits. What was more, men and women assigned it nearly equal importance—sixteenth most important in the eyes of males and eighteenth most important to women. For men and women alike, virginity was significantly less important than things like "dependable character," "education and intelligence," and "emotional stability."
Clearly, virginity still matters. But just as clearly, it matters differently now than it did a hundred years ago, or five hundred, or a thousand. As the primary determining factor in perceptions of female virtue, honor, character, and worth, virginity is indeed on the decline. If we believe that reckoning intrinsic human value should be based on deeper and more substantive qualities than whether or not someone has once been sexually active, we should find this pleasing.
The Empirical Virgin
There is in any event little point to hysterical proclamations that virginity is vanishing. To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, there's a virgin born every minute. And as long as human beings have to negotiate the transition into adult-partnered sexuality, virginity will continue to be meaningful both personally and socially. The question we need to be asking is not
whether
the culture of virginity has been changing over the last century or so. It has. The questions we need to be asking are
how
and
why
it has changed and whether or not these changes are yet complete.
The primary way that we have done and continue to do this is through the scientific study of sexuality. Accustomed as we have become to having an empirically based medical establishment, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate how recently this mode of research became commonplace, but in truth we cannot begin to speak of a consistently scientific approach to either medicine or sexuality until the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier research into sexuality typically depended more upon compelling anecdote than on reproducible data.
Sexology, the scientific study of sexuality, had its beginnings in the late-nineteenth-century work of psychologists and psychiatrists like Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Although early sexologists were primarily concerned with abnormal and criminal sexuality, as in Krafft-Ebing's famous
Psychopathia Sexualis,
they soon began to study the parameters of "normal" sexual desires and activities as well. Surveys of sexual behavior and attitudes began to be conducted in the United States as early as the 1920s. Within a couple of decades, British and continental researchers had begun to follow suit. Still, the kinds of massive, quantitative sex surveys we now think of when we think of sex research did not come into being until after World War II, with Alfred Kinsey's monumental 1948
Sexual Response in the Human Male.
However one might be tempted to critique Kinsey's work (and some of the criticism is merited), it nonetheless transformed our expectations about what we could and should know about sex. Prior to Kinsey and Kinsey-influenced research efforts, such as the British Mass Observation surveys that followed close on Kinsey's heels, notions of what could be considered sexually "normal" or "average" were based mostly on hearsay and conjecture. After Kinsey, on the other hand, laypeople and experts alike could point to charts, graphs, and statistics and use them to determine what was and was not "typical." Attempts to take the behavioral and attitudinal measures of entire populations through statistics became a hallmark of sex research.
During the same time period, increasingly rigorous research methods helped to reduce the role that emotions and cultural prejudices played in how the medical establishment dealt with women's bodies. This did not, by any means, magically eradicate sexism within medicine, but it did provide for vastly improved levels of transparency and frankness. Many women eagerly embraced this more matter-of-fact approach to their own reproductive and sexual lives. Women like Stella Browne and Marie Stopes in England and Margaret Sanger in the United States, all of whom worked to educate women about sexual health and contraceptive options in the early years of the twentieth century, were often overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of women who wanted to learn what science had to teach them about their own bodies and sexualities. An unsqueamish and, above all, unsentimental approach to dealing with women's reproductive and sexual health rapidly became the expected standard for the medical profession.
Between 1890 and 1945 the West witnessed the rise of the birth control movement, the first commercially produced menstrual tampons, the establishment of the custom
of
the premarital gynecologist visit, the requirement (in some places) of venereal disease testing prior to the issue of a marriage license, the beginnings of a sexuality self-help literature written by women, and an increase in the popularity of hospital births.
This new frankness was by no means limited to doctors' offices and the family planning clinics that were beginning to crop up in larger cities. For example, at the phenomenally popular 1939 World's Fair display devoted to the new vaginal product known as Tampax (introduced to American markets in 1936), hundreds of women a day stopped to get information and ask questions of the nurses there to answer them. Topics gynecological were addressed in books, pamphlets, and in the new genre of magazines appealing to female audiences. Even in 1918, a young British couple might get advice on contraceptive devices and sexual compatibility from Marie Stopes's
Married Love.
By 1930 a book intended for similar audiences, Theodor van der Velde's
Ideal Marriage: Its
Physiology and Technique,
quite unsqueamishly reassured its readers that many women did not enter married life as virgins. In 1940 books like Oliver Butter-field's
Sex Life in Maniage
provided readers access to clinical detail on topics as explicit as resistant hymens, vaginal lubrication, and "honeymoon" cystitis. Magazine advertisements for contraceptive devices and nostrums tended to remain back-of-the-book items along with other quasi-medical appliances, but advertisements hailing the convenience of tampons moved into the main pages of major women's magazines. Women increasingly felt entitled to take advantage of, and even to demand, no-nonsense, directly vaginal products like tampons that were both convenient and conducive to an active lifestyle. A large number of women clearly wanted to be able to deal with their sexual and reproductive lives in a practical, literally hands-on way. This was particularly true in the United States, where, as contraceptives historian Lara V. Marks has revealed, women were earlier and more fervent adopters of female-controlled intravaginal contraceptives like diaphragms and contraceptive jellies.
At first such products were marketed to and considered acceptable only for married, presumably nonvirginal, women. But this state of affairs did not last long. What mothers and big sisters used and liked in terms of managing their own needs, particularly in regard to menstruation, younger women eventually heard about. And while this "trickle down" effect took some time, it is clear that women of all ages quickly came to embrace tampon use. As early as the end of World War II, Dr. Robert Dickinson's medical assessment of tampon use appeared in both the
Journal of the American Medical Association
and, in a somewhat less technical version, in
Consumer Reports.
Dickinson specifically stated that tampons did not "impede standard anatomic virginity," thus paving the way for younger women to use them and for tampon manufacturers to feel justified in marketing to that demographic. Authors of late-1940s and 1950s office gynecology textbooks took it as a given that any woman of menstruating age might well use tampons.
By the 1980s, up to three-quarters of high school women used tampons regularly. While tampon manufacturers have occasionally felt moved to publicly allay fears that tampon usage threatens virginity, as in a 1990 Tampax ad that showed an introspective, white-shirted teenaged girl beneath the question "Are you sure I'll still be a virgin?" (the ad's text made it clear that the answer to that question was "yes"), on the whole it has become relatively rare for contemporary First World women to question the suitability of tampon use for any woman of menstruating age. The lesson of the tampon was that the vagina could be emotionally and sexually neutral territory. To learn to use tampons to absorb menstrual flow was also to learn that the insertion of an object into the vagina might be purely utilitarian, with no larger social meaning at all.
It is difficult to appreciate, from our current vantage point, just what a radical departure this was from the nineteenth-century view. As in the controversy over the use of the speculum, Victorian doctors and patients alike lived in fear of even the most stringently medical contact with the vulva, let alone vaginal penetration. This permeated the nineteenth century's attitudes toward women and their genitals to the point that Victorian girls and women were ideally not to be permitted to straddle anything, ever. Little girls were kept from riding on seesaws or hobbyhorses, and they were discouraged from running, jumping, or gymnastics, for, as historian of childhood Karin Calvert notes, it was believed that "playing the wrong game or with the wrong toys could prematurely awaken sexual feelings in children and destroy their natural purity." Ladies who rode horseback did so sidesaddle for the same reason. In this paranoid context, even bicycling constituted a terrifying threat. As two-wheelers became more and more popular among middle-class young people around the end of the nineteenth century, the medical journals revealed a feverish, sometimes pornographically detailed, concern that the pressure that the bicycle seat placed on the vulva and perineum not only held the menace of creating "arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealized by the young maiden" but might, the articles claimed, contribute to painful and debilitating disorders of the genitals as well.
Intriguingly enough, the idea that such spraddle-legged activities constitute a threat to virginity shows up in sex education texts to this day. Despite the lack of any actual studies in the literature regarding whether horseback riding, gymnastics, or riding bicycles might have a particularly high rate of damaging women's hymens, virtually every contemporary writing about virginity aimed at teen girls is duly equipped with a disclaimer that says something along the lines of "many girls tear or otherwise dilate their hymen while participating in sports like bicycling, horseback riding, or gymnastics." Other activities, like tampon use and masturbation, are sometimes added to the list. But astonishingly, given the near-complete lack of hard evidence to support their inclusion, the odd mantra "bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics" shows up again and again.
Today these three activities are invoked in a very different way than they were a hundred years ago. A century of liberalization of attitudes toward women—and sports and sexuality as well—has transformed bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics from looming bogeymen into a laundry-list reminder that not all women will have the same experience of virginity loss. Whether or not physical activity can actually damage the hymen is debatable; more debatable still is whether or not the hymen alone is a useful gauge of virginity anyhow. "Bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics" is now a placeholder for the idea that just because something happens to physically involve the genitals doesn't mean it's sex. Women's genitals, in other words, may finally be achieving the ability to simply be just another bit of the body, as essentially neutral and as variable as any other.
The New Woman
At the same time as empirical science was transforming attitudes about women's bodies, social and philosophical understandings of women were being transformed by progressivism, urbanization, and, perhaps most of all, by sheer economics. Urbanization, the rise of factory labor, and the accompanying surge of poor and working-class migration to the cities continued at a dizzying pace in the new century. The huge labor market meant that more and more women went to work, not merely as domestics (although many did) but also in sweatshops and factories. Regardless of whether the job was mechanized "women's work," as much sweatshop work still is to this day, or something quite different, women worked for a living and were paid in cash.