Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Those of us who consider ourselves to be nonvirgins can usually explain why. Those of us who consider ourselves still-virgin can typically articulate what would have to happen to change that status. We usually know what criteria we would employ if asked to determine whether someone else's virginal status had changed. But the criteria we might apply to someone else are not necessarily identical to the ones we apply to ourselves. Moreover, we do not necessarily know that our next-door neighbors' criteria, or even those of our partners or parents, would be identical to our own.

  This isn't to say that virginity is relative and therefore irrelevant. To the contrary, we have more than two and a half millennia of written history that make it abundantly clear that virginity is relative and therefore immensely relevant. It is precisely its relativity that makes virginity so troublesome and so fascinating.

  Virginity has not always served the same purposes in society, been experienced in the same ways, or been predicated on the same understandings of sexuality, sexual activity, or sexual identity. It hasn't even always had to do with the same body parts: the hymen, which we often think of as synonymous with virginity today and assume must have been so for our ancestors, too, wasn't even confirmed to exist until the sixteenth century. From law to religion to medicine to art and beyond, the variety of ways we have understood, defined, and used virginity over the course of Western history reflects the shapes and motions of the giant, constantly changing entity that is our common culture.

  This helps explain why we're so bad at defining it. As one of the large-scale background conditions of human life and human sexuality, our ideals in regard to virginity, like those in regard to gender and class and race, have always depended on historical circumstance. As cultural circumstances have shifted, our thinking about virginity has shifted, too, changing slowly and often subtly over time to reflect changes in demographics, economics, technologies, religious dogmas, political philosophies, scientific discoveries, and attitudes about the roles of women, children, and the family. Because these things tend to change so slowly, it is common for people to see them as unchanging, monolithic givens, things that existed before they were born and which will continue to exist, substantially unchanged, long after their deaths. Frequently this is even true, since large-scale cultural change tends to happen at a pace that, by comparison to human life spans, seems downright glacial. But even the largest and slowest-moving glacier cuts grooves into the earth as it goes, leaving a trail behind it.

  To trace the changing ideologies and operations of virginity, then, we follow the tracks of cultural glaciers. The secrets of virginity are not coded into our DNA or even etched in stone. Insofar as they exist at all, they exist in novels and plays, religious writings and works of art, medical texts and philosophical tomes, courtship patterns, wedding traditions, the oral literature of old wives' tales and barroom ballads, and even the syndicated columns of daily newspapers. It is an enormous, dazzling, confusing array.

  Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this is to take a historical overview of a few of virginity's many varieties. In everyday early-twenty-first-century conversation we tend to think of virginity in one way only: a matter of sexual activity. Either one has "done it" or not. While the nature of that critical "it" may come under considerable debate, it is not controversial to view virginity and its loss as being a matter of having done "it" or not, whatever "it" is construed to be. But this is only one way to think about virginity.

  In his fourth-century De civitate Dei (The City of God), Saint Augustine argued that being raped did not constitute a loss of virginity, providing one had resisted with all one's heart and soul. Augustine's reasoning? If virginity could be said to be irrevocably lost by forcible physical action, then it could hardly be claimed to be an attribute of the soul. Augustine's solution was to define virginity as existing in two valid forms, a physical virginity based in the body and a spiritual one based in the soul. Depending on circumstances, these two forms might coexist or not. As for Thomas Aquinas later on, there was not a single virginity for Augustine, but more than one.

  The idea of multiple virginities has been quite popular. Thirteenth-century philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus, who wrote a treatise on chastity around 1240, discussed four distinct types of virginity. Infants who had not yet reached the age of reason possessed innate virginity. Once a person was old enough to know what they were doing, however, a virgin had to choose virginity. One could choose virginity as part of a religious vow, or a less formal virginity that was not vowed. Finally, Albertus noted with disapproval, there were virgins who didn't look or act like virgins. Virgins might, he wrote, even act like prostitutes. For Albertus, then, virginity might be an inborn quality, or it could be a rather wide range of other things. It certainly wasn't something one could tell at a glance.

  Far from being a monolithic, universal, ahistorical given of the human condition, virginity is a profoundly changeable and malleable cultural idea with an enormous, vital, and mostly hidden history. If we are to attempt to understand virginity, we have to understand not only what it seems to be to us today, but what it has been to our ancestors. We have to understand not just the meanings we might want it to have for our children but the meanings it has had for us, for our grandparents, and for their great-great-great-grandparents. Most of all, we have to understand that these meanings have not always been the same. With virginity as with so much else that pertains to the human condition, the only real constant is change.

  Lines in the Sand

  We have long recognized that virginities and virgins come in a range of modes and types. We distinguish between them not only by what they've done or haven't in sexual terms, but also on the basis of age, developmental stage, sex, motivations, prior behavior, religious affiliation, and even physical appearance. But not all of these aspects matter equally, and not all of them matter in the same way or to the same degree at any given time in history, place in the world, or subculture within the vast and complicated framework of what we loosely call the West.

  Because of this, the question of who gets to define what virgins are and what virginity is matters enormously. Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.

  Virginity has been used as an organizing principle of human cultures for millennia. In the present as well as the past, any woman who trespasses against what her era, religion, community, or family holds as constituting virginity might be teased, harassed, shamed, ostracized, prohibited from marrying, or disowned. In some places and at some times her family might have been fined or punished because of it, or the woman herself might have been sold into slavery. She could be imprisoned, maimed, mutilated, flogged, raped, or even killed as punishment for losing her virginity . . . or even if it was merely believed that she had done so. And lest such humiliations and so-called honor crimes seem the province only of faraway countries with oppressive or backward religious views about women, or insular immigrant communities that adhere to outdated traditions, it bears remembering that twelve-year-old Birmingham, Alabama, schoolgirl Jasmine Archie was murdered by her mother in November 2004—forced to drink bleach, then asphyxiated—because Jasmine's mother believed that the girl had lost her virginity.

  Because the stakes can be so high, it is doubly important to recognize that virginity does not truly have any single ironclad definition and never has. In practical terms, virginity is usually defined through a complicated kaleidoscope of partial definitions, and almost always backward and by exclusion: we define virginity by deciding what terminates it, what virginity is not. No matter how we try, though, it seems that there is always some lingering question, exception, or circumstance that renders even the best definition less than watertight.

  Straight White Female

  One of
the things we learn from looking at history's multiple virginities is that virginity is not necessarily about not having sex. At the same time, across history and cultures, the lowest common denominator of virginity—or rather loss of virginity—has, for countless centuries, been the insertion of a penis into a vagina.

  This particular juxtaposition of body parts certainly may occur in the context of what we call "having sex." But so may a lot of other anatomical arrangements. Many different body parts—fingers, lips, breasts, tongues, anuses, etc.—might be involved in activities we consider to be "sex." Works of art and literature dating back centuries before the dawn of Christianity attest that none of these variegated techniques, whether they be performed between men, between women, or between a woman and a man, can be remotely construed as modern innovations. Sexual activity has always encompassed a great deal more than just penises and vaginas.

  Why, then, we might wonder, is it the particular combination of a penis and a vagina that has for so long been considered the definitive sex act, the act that ' terminates virginity? There are several reasons. For one, the only form of sexual activity that renders women pregnant is that which involves inserting a penis into a vagina. Second, penis-in-vagina intercourse is the single uniquely heterosexual act of which human beings are capable. The other common sexual permutations of body parts of which humans are capable are essentially gender-neutral. Kisses and caresses know no gender, to say nothing of oral sex. For a penis to be inserted into a vagina, on the other hand, there can be only one man and one woman, and furthermore they must be performing the single specific action that cannot be performed by a man on another man or by a woman on another woman. What this means is that virginity, at least in the classical, canonical form, is exclusively heterosexual.

  Virginity is also female. The male body has never commonly been labeled as being virginal even when it is, but rather as "continent" or "celibate"; even within the Catholic church, male renunciation of sex has been characterized as a matter of continence, not virginity. Additionally, virginity has never mattered in regard to the way men are valued, or whether they were considered fit to marry or, indeed, to be permitted to survive. As a result, virgins are, and always have been, almost uniformly female. The very word "virgin" comes from the Latin virgo, meaning a girl or never-married woman (the two were basically synonymous in the culture of ancient Rome, where girls were commonly married off in early puberty), as opposed to uxor, a woman or wife. Similar linguistic shorthand exists in many other languages: parthenos (girl/virgin) and gyne (woman/wife) in Greek, betulah and almah in Hebrew, "maid" and "wife" in a slightly antiquated English. Even today, "virgin" tends to mean female unless stated otherwise.

  In the West, virginity not only has a sexual orientation and a gender, it has a color. Christian symbology traditionally uses light and lightness of color to indicate purity and holiness, while darkness and darker colors are associated with sin and corruption. When European white Christians began to colonize parts of the world where people had darker skins, they often took this light-equals-good/dark-equals-bad mentality with them. Because the sexual rules of these darker-skinned people's supposedly "primitive" cultures failed to map neatly onto what European Christians had come to expect as normal, natural, and indeed God-given laws regarding gender, sex, and the organization of families, European whites often assumed that the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere were simply wicked and lacking any sense of sexual morality. From such encounters, Europeans frequently derived the belief that virginity was an attribute of being civilized, which was to say Christian, European, and white.

  All these things are part of how we in the West understand virginity to exist and function even today. They are part of our virgin heritage. Our way of thinking about virginity and virgins has been changing quite a bit in the past century or so, but much of the age-old ideological paradigm we have inherited in regard to virgins and virginity remains sturdy and strong. The case of Rosie Reid provides an excellent demonstration of the slow and mixed ways that change comes to the ideology of virginity. When the eighteen-year-old University of Bristol student created a scandal in 2004 by deciding to sell her virginity to the highest bidder in an online auction to help pay her educational expenses, neither she, the men who rushed to place bids, nor the numerous news organizations that covered the story seemed to find it at all incongruous that Ms. Reid billed herself as a virgin while simultaneously making it clear that she was a lesbian involved in a long-term sexual and romantic relationship with another woman.

  It did not seem to occur to anyone reporting on Reid's story that perhaps her virginity was already a thing of the past. There was no discussion of whether Reid and her lover might have engaged in vaginally penetrative sex using fingers or sex toys, as hundreds of thousands of women who have sex with women have done throughout history. The condition of Reid's hymen, so often considered a definitive parameter of virginity in our materialist and medically oriented age, was never brought under question in news reports. Whether her body had ever been "opened" did not seem to be on anyone's mind at all, although it would have been very much on the minds of the Greeks. Nor did anyone care whether Reid had ever experienced either sexual desire or orgasm, both of which would have mattered greatly to medieval theologians and physicians.

  Instead, an authoritative silence told the world that Reid's lesbian sexual experience was not considered valid. All that mattered to either the journalists or the many men who placed bids in the hopes of gaining one-time sexual access to Reid was that she had never been penetrated by a penis. The sum total of what defined virginity in Rosie Reid's story was the insertion of a penis into a vagina, an exclusively heterosexual action performed by a biological male on a biological female. What Reid sold, and the ultimate winner of the auction purchased, was nothing more or less than a tangible confirmation of the ideology that a woman is not sexually "real" in her own right, and that it takes a man and his penis to make her so.

  Virginal Variety

  Rosie Reid's case raises many fascinating questions, not the least of which is how we might characterize the variety of virginity she, as a sexually active lesbian, might have represented. If we accept that Ms. Reid was in fact a virgin prior to the successful sale of her virginity (having paid ?12,000—roughly $14,500—for her maidenhead, we can at least assume that the man in question believed she had one to sell), what kind of virgin was she?

  To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, there's a virgin born every minute. But not all virgins are alike. No matter how much stock we put in the whole canonical penis-in-vagina factor, we are extremely unlikely to perceive Rosie Reid's virginity as being the same as the virginity of a nun, an eleven-year-old girl, a thirty-year-old career woman, or an elderly maiden aunt. Just as Albertus Magnus did in the thirteenth century, we also notice and acknowledge that virginities and virgins come in different types and modes. Strangely, though, although we have been recognizing different types of virginity and virgins since at least the second century C.E., we have developed precious little terminology with which to describe the variety we perceive.

  The only phrase the West generally uses in this capacity is the nineteenth-century French term demi-vierge, which roughly translates to "half-virgin." Currently we might, at least in the United States, use the term "technical virgin" to mean more or less the same thing, someone whose life has not been entirely devoid of sexual experience, but who retains some claim to the virgin title by virtue of not having yet crossed some particular experiential threshold, typically the penis-in-vagina one. The demi-vierge or technical virgin, though, accounts for only one of the possible types of virginity. For many others, we have no words at all.

  This odd lack of vocabulary speaks volumes. We no longer live in a society in which the most important thing one could know about a woman was whether or not she was owned by her father—unmarried and presumably virginal—or by a husband, and thus presumably nonvirgin. But our culture has been profoundly concerned with just
those things for most of its history, and it shows. The minimalist vocabulary we've inherited in regard to virginity, and the limits it puts on our ability to discuss virginity and virgins, is a legacy of past priorities.

  This does not stop us, however, from recognizing that different sorts of virgins and virginities exist. At a minimum, Western culture today recognizes four major modes of virginity, with every individual example of a given mode constituting inevitable variations on the theme. The first, default virginity, parallels the first class given by the estimable Albertus Magnus: we are all born virgins. Children's lack of active sexuality is expected and taken for granted, so much so that we find it odd to refer to children as specifically being virgins. They are, as Carl Jung put it, presexual. Despite evidence that some aspects of active genital behavior begin quite early (many children self-stimulate their genitals; fetuses have even been observed stimulating their own genitals while still in utero, thanks to ultrasound technology), we still think of prepubescent children as not yet being sexual beings.

  But eventually adolescence hits, and with it come flash floods of sex hormones, the fast-growing shrubbery of facial and pubic hair, the dangerous curves of breasts and hips, and the unmistakably messy evidence of fertility signaled by first ejaculations and menstrual periods. When the body becomes physiologically sexually mature, we lose the luxury of imagining that the individual is not a sexual entity. This is the point where virginity really begins to count for something.

  The most common postadolescent form virginity takes rests on the assumption that eventually, people will become players in the game of sex, and specifically that they will take part in the enormous generational work of creating new families and bearing children. For if this is to happen, virginity cannot be perpetual, but only transitional. This is precisely what virginity is for most people, a transitional state that bridges the end of childhood and the assumption of full social adulthood, a passage that has often been embodied by marriage.