A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

  The colonial postcards of the time emphasised the breasts, exaggerated buttocks and nakedness of women of colour in order to signify their sexual availability to European men. The women in these postcards are simply window dressing – props to affirm colonial power. They are reduced to their physicality, just as Sarah Baartman was: consumables for a white audience. And it was not just black bodies the Europeans sexualised. As Africa, Asia and the Americas were colonised by Europeans the same process of sexually othering non-white women as ‘exotic’ took place.

  A German postcard reads ‘Another city, another girl!’ From Inge Oosterhoff, ‘Greetings from the Colonies: Postcards of a Shameful Past’.

  These postcards reveal more about the colonial fantasies of the photographer than the woman being photographed. Photograph from Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem.

  Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte du Noüy, Rhamsès Dans Son Harem, in Louis Enault, Paris-Salon, 1887.

  Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Wedding in Morocco, 1841.

  We have no record of Sarah Baartman’s own voice. Many people spoke for her, or about her, but her own voice has been lost to us completely. We will never know her thoughts on her life, her body and her treatment. Sadly, all the evidence we have is mediated through white writers. Her experience may be shocking, but it is part of a wider history of sexualising women of colour – and of using women’s bodies to justify their oppression. We will never know what Sarah’s choices were, but women today can at least choose to be part of a narrative that fetishises them. Many women find reclaiming sexuality on their own terms empowering and work to redefine their stories on their own terms. But it is important to fully understand the history that frames such choices today.

  * * *

  * The word ‘Hottentot’ dates to the late seventeenth century and was the name white Europeans gave to the Khoikhoi people of South Africa.

  ** For a detailed history of race and the penis, see David M. Friedman, A Mind of its Own (London: Hale, 2001).

  1 Sir Mix-a-Lot, ‘Baby Got Back’ (Def American, 1992).

  2 Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Women, Crime, And Forgiveness in Early Modern Portugal (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2016).

  3 William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea, 2nd edn (London: John Nourse, 1745), p. 221.

  4 Reports of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of all Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations (London, 1789), p. 119.

  5 Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

  6 François Le Vaillant, New Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa, by the Way of the Cape of Good Hope (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), p. 351.

  7 John Barrow, Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801), p. 281.

  8 The Times, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, 1810, p. 3.

  9 ‘Baartman, Sara [Performing Name the Hottentot Venus] (1777X88–1815/16), Celebrity and Subject of Scientific Speculation | Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography’, Oxforddnb.com, 2018 [Accessed 7 August 2018].

  10 Bell’s Weekly Messenger, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, 1810, p. 7.

  11 Georges Cuvier, ‘Extrait D’Observations Faites Sur Le Cadavre D’Une Femme Connue À Paris Et À Londres Sous Le Nom De Vénus Hottentotte’, in Mémoires Du Musée Nationale D’Histoire Naturelle, 1817, pp. 259–74.

  12 Adrien Charpy, ‘Des Organes Genitaux Externes Chez Les Prostituées’, Annales De Dermatologie, 3 (1870), pp. 271–79.

  13 Cesare Lombroso and Gugliemo Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente (Turin: Roux, 1893), pp. 38, 361–2.

  14 William Lee Howard, ‘The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization’, Medicine, 60 (1904), pp. 423–26.

  ‘As Easily Made as a Pudding’

  A History of Virginity Tests

  In 2017, researchers at the University of Minnesota published a systematic review of all available, peer-reviewed research into the reliability of so called ‘virginity tests’ where the hymen is examined, as well as the impact on the person being examined. The team identified 1,269 studies. The evidence was summarised and assessed, and this was the conclusion:

  This review found that virginity examination, also known as two-finger, hymen, or per-vaginal examination, is not a useful clinical tool, and can be physically, psychologically, and socially devastating to the examinee. From a human rights perspective, virginity testing is a form of gender discrimination, as well as a violation of fundamental rights, and when carried out without consent, a form of sexual assault.1

  The following year in 2018, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Human Rights and the United Nations Women issued a statement calling for the elimination of virginity testing; stating that ‘“Virginity testing” is a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and can be detrimental to women’s and girls’ physical, psychological and social well-being. “Virginity testing” reinforces stereotyped notions of female sexuality and gender inequality.’2 There is no reliable virginity test. You can no more tell if someone has had sex by looking between their legs than you can tell if someone is a vegetarian by looking at their belly button. However, the fact that virginity cannot be proven, tested or located on the body has not deterred people from claiming otherwise.

  Sadly, a woman’s virginity is still highly prized around the world today, a fact which has, in turn, led to the creation of numerous damaging rituals around keeping and proving a woman’s sexual purity that are still in force today. These tests usually involve searching for an intact hymen, or what’s known as the ‘two-finger test’, which checks for vaginal tightness. Countries where this practice has been reported include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Turkey and Uganda. The FGM National Clinic Group states that female genital mutilation is valued ‘as a means of preserving a girl’s virginity until marriage (for example, in Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia). In many of these countries FGM has been seen as a prerequisite to marriage and marriage is vital to a woman’s social and economic survival.’3 The World Health Organisation estimates that 200 million girls globally have been subjected to female genital mutilation, in no small part to preserve their virginities until marriage.4

  Henry O’Neil, Jephthah’s daughter contemplating her virginity and her imminent death, surrounded by woeful attendants with musical instruments, 1846.

  The idea of female sexual purity being a prerequisite for marriage underpins many cultures and religions around the world. In Indonesia, virginity testing remains a requirement for women wanting to join the army or police force. So-called ‘Purity Balls’ are held all over America, where fathers take their teenage daughters on a ‘date’; she pledges to stay a virgin until marriage and he, in turn, pledges to protect his daughter’s virginity until she is married (presumably with a shotgun and some kind of alarm system). Women can now pay to have their hymens rebuilt for the marriage market, and the hymenoplasty business is booming. In 2016, a South African KwaZulu-Natal municipality introduced an academic bursary for young women who can prove that they are virgins.5 And in 2017, the Russian Investigative Committee and the health minister, Vladimir Shuldyakov, caused outrage by ordering doctors to carry out ‘virginity tests’ on schoolgirls and to report any found without a hymen to the authorities.6

  Not only is virginity impossible to prove, it’s also quite difficult to define. We might think that virginity is a very simple thing to understand, but it doesn’t hold together all that well when we start to poke it a little. Precisely what we count as sex for the first time can be more complicated than we might initially think. If two girls have sex, does that count as losing their virginity? What if they used a strap-on? If a heterosexual couple hit first, second and third base, but strike out at fourth in a sweaty, satisfied mess,
are they still virgins? Can you lose your virginity to yourself? Does it have to involve penile–vaginal penetration? If so, does that preclude same-sex sex? Is gay pride really a mass virgin rally? How about if a heterosexual couple just have anal sex? Does he lose his, but she keeps hers on a technicality?

  1960s advert for Pursette tampons that reassured ‘unmarried girls’ (virgins) that they too can use tampons.

  Despite considerable research into hymens, many myths still surround them. People still believe exercise and horse-riding can rupture the hymen (they don’t), and Tampax were still reassuring young women that they couldn’t ‘pop their cherries’ (1988) on a tampon as late as the 1990s.

  Even the language surrounding virginity is loaded. The concept of ‘losing’ or ‘keeping’ your virginity suggests that once lost, we are all lacking something and no longer whole. It also suggests that virginity is something tangible that we had in the first place. You can metaphorically ‘give’ someone your V-card, but it’s not like they can hang it above their fireplace, or resell it on eBay (although several women have tried).

  The concept of virginity is undeniably gendered, and the reason we think we know what we mean when we discuss ‘losing’ said ‘cherry’ (1933) is because we subconsciously understand virginity as belonging to penis-in-vagina sex. This is what is meant by ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. This doesn’t mean that heterosexuality is literally compulsory, but that our cultural scripts around sexuality focus more on heterosexual sex than any other kind: it has become our ‘normal’. Now, this is undeniably cis-gendered privilege, but it is the product of thousands of years of cultural conditioning. It is only with the tremendous work done by LGBTQ activists over the last fifty years that we have begun to create space to discuss alternatives to boy–girl sex at all. But there is still a long way to go.

  When anyone is concerned about virginity it is almost always a woman’s virginity. Even the word ‘virgin’ comes from the Latin virgo, meaning a girl or a woman who is not married. Men and boys have never been valued by their virgin status in the same way women have. At various points in history, women have been disowned, imprisoned, fined, mutilated, whipped and even killed as punishment for losing their virginity outside of marriage, whereas funny films are made about forty-year-old male virgins.††††

  Quite why it is female rather than male virginity that has been so rigorously sanctioned is a matter of some dispute, but it is likely all down to paternal legacies. It’s unfair, but in the pre-Pill world, pregnancy out of wedlock was a far more immediate physical and financial concern for the mother than the father; consequently, it was her shenanigans that were scrutinised rather than his. But more than this, in a paternalistic society where wealth and power are passed down the male line, female chastity is heavily policed to ensure legitimate offspring, and that your worldly goods pass to your children (and not the milkman’s). This theory holds some weight when we consider that in the few matriarchal societies around the world, wealth is passed down the female line. In these cultures, female sexuality is regarded very differently.**

  Today, the most well-known ‘proof’ of virginity test is blood produced from a ruptured hymen. But our ancestors didn’t even use the word ‘hymen’, and certainly didn’t go rooting around inside vaginas like they were digging for buried treasure to find one. In fact, medical texts don’t start talking about a hymen until the fifteenth century.7 None of the Classical physicians make mention of it (Galen and Aristotle, for example). Greek physician Soranus suggests that any post-coital vaginal bleeding was the result of burst blood vessels, and categorically denied any kind of membrane inside the vagina.8 Many early texts acknowledge that virgins may bleed when they have sex for the first time, but this wasn’t linked to the hymen. Rather, it was thought that the bleeding was caused by the trauma of penile penetration and was not proof enough of virginity. It was the Italian physician Michael Savonarola who first used the word ‘hymen’ in 1498, describing it as a membrane that ‘is broken at the time of deflowering, so that the blood flows’.9 After this, references to the hymen and its links to virginity become increasingly common. But just because our ancestors didn’t search for intact hymens does not mean that virginity was not subject to rigorous tests before the hymen became the benchmark for proof of tampering.

  The most famous virgins in the Ancient World were Rome’s Vestal Virgins. The Vestal Virgins were priestesses, dedicated to the goddess of hearth and family, Vesta. They were chosen at a young age and had to dedicate thirty years of worship and chastity to the city of Rome and tend the temple flame of Vesta; the punishment for a Vestal having sex was to be entombed alive and left to starve to death.

  Pietro Saja, Vestal Virgin Condemned to Death, 1800.

  So, how do you test a Vestal’s virginity? Well, some praying is involved. The priestesses were believed to have a special connection with the gods, so when the Vestal Tuccia was accused, she was given the opportunity to conjure a miracle and prove she was still a virgin. According to Valerius Maximus, Tuccia proved her virginity by carrying water in a sieve. Tuccia called out, ‘O Vesta, if I have always brought pure hands to your secret services, make it so now that with this sieve I shall be able to draw water from the Tiber and bring it to Your temple.’10 The sieve has since become a symbol of virginity and Queen Elizabeth I was often painted holding one to symbolise that no one had taken a bite of her cherry bun. But if you did not happen to have a sieve to hand there were other virginity tests available to you – as long as you had a snake, some ants and a cake. The Roman writer Aelian (AD 175–235) describes a ritual for testing virginity that took place on holy days:

  In a grove is a vast deep cavern, the lair of a snake. On fixed holy days maidens bring barley cakes in their hands, their eyes bandaged. Divine inspiration guides them straight to the serpent at a gentle pace without stumbling. If they are virgin, the snake divines the answer and accepts the food, if not, it remains untasted. Ants break up the cakes of the deflowered and carry the pieces outside the grove and thus cleanse the spot. The people get to know of the results and the girls are examined and the one who shamed her virginity is punished.11

  Quite what this ‘punishment’ was is not elaborated upon, and given that snakes are not widely known for their love of Battenberg, this test seems rather unfair.

  But to really confirm the seal had not been broken, you needed a bottle of wee. The thirteenth-century text De Secretis Mulierum explains that the urine of virgins is ‘clear and lucid, sometimes white, sometimes sparkling’. The reason that ‘corrupted women’ have ‘muddy urine’ is because of the ‘rupture’ of skin and ‘male sperm appear on the bottom’.12 Pissing Perrier is a neat party trick, but there are other signs to look for. William of Saliceto (1210–1277) wrote that ‘a virgin urinates with a more subtle hiss’, and if you had a stopwatch handy, it ‘indeed takes longer than a small boy’.13

  A Physician Examining A Urine Flask, after Gerrit Dou (1613–1675).

  Medieval virginity tests are quite urine-focused, and fifteenth-century Italian physician Niccolo Falcucci was also a piss prophet, but he had a few other tricks up his sleeve.

  If a woman is covered with a piece of cloth and fumigated with the best coal, if she is a virgin she does not perceive its odor through her mouth and nose; if she smells it, she is not a virgin. If she takes it in a drink, she immediately voids urine if she is not a virgin. A corrupt woman will also urinate immediately if a fumigation is prepared with cockle. Upon fumigation with dock flowers, if she is a virgin she immediately becomes pale, and, if not, her humor falls on the fire and other things are said about her.14

  The anonymous, thirteenth-century Hebrew text Book of Women’s Love says, ‘The girl must urinate over marshmallows in the evening, and bring them in the morning; if they are still fresh she is modest and good, if not she is not.’15 Before you start pissing into a bag of flumps, the marshmallow referred to here is a medicinal plant.

  But perhaps you are struggling to inspect
, listen to or time your intended’s waterworks. In which case, you will need to study her general appearance for the tell-tale clues that her flower has been plucked. Before explaining that a virgin’s piss sparkles, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum explains what to look out for. ‘The signs of chastity are as follows: shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men and the acts of men.’ (FYI, these are also signs she ordered and ate the Pizza Hut family feast on her own and is praying you don’t find the evidence in the bin.) Magnus continues:

  If a girl’s breasts point downwards, this is a sign that she has been corrupted, because at the moment of impregnation the menses move upwards to the breasts and the added weight causes them to sag. If a man has sexual intercourse with a woman and experiences no sore on his penis and no difficulty of entry, this is a sign that she was first corrupted. However, a true sign of the woman’s virginity is if it is difficult to perform the act and it causes a sore on his member.16

  Of course, once the hymen became the go-to virginity test, checking for sparkling wee that whistled, perky boobs and the ability to smell coal without wetting oneself largely fell out of favour. Virginity testing became all about tightness and blood.

  Producing bloodied bedsheets as proof of a wife’s virginity does still occur around the world today, although it’s rare. In certain regions of Georgia, brides have a ‘Yenge’, usually an older family member, who will instruct her in what to expect on her wedding night. Traditionally, it was the Yenge’s responsibility to take the bloodied sheets from the marital bed and show them to both families to ‘prove’ the bride was a nookie newbie. Although the Yenge’s role is largely ceremonial today, in some areas the practice of showing bloodied sheets still goes on.17