by Hanne Blank
Transitional virginity has not always been the most highly regarded form of virginity in the West—under Christianity, in fact, it took a distant backseat to the vowed virginity of nuns and monks until after the Protestant Reformation—but it has always been the commonest one. The average ages at which people have married have varied widely over the course of human history. Although there have been certain periods of time over the last 2,500 years during which it has been common for at least some women not to marry until they were over twenty, it has been more common for women to be married off as adolescents, often very close to the time they begin to menstruate.
Child betrothals and adolescent marriages are a source for scandal in the West today—an Associated Press report of the tumultuous 2003 wedding of twelve-year-old Ana Maria Cioaba, daughter of the self-proclaimed king of the Romanian branch of the Roma people, generated shocked responses in the news media—but were quite normal for much of our history. Catherine of Aragon was betrothed at age three to Arthur, son of Henry VII of England, and married to him when she was fifteen. Shakespeare's Juliet, all of thirteen years old, is advised by her mother to "think of marriage now; younger than you, here in Verona, ladies of esteem are made already mothers: by my count, I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid." Even today, when average ages at first marriage hover in the mid to late twenties,* matches where a premium is placed on the bride's virginity, like the first marriage of the heir to a throne, often feature a relatively youthful bride. The late Lady Diana Spencer was a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old in 1981 when she became engaged to marry thirty-two-year-old Prince Charles of England; by the time they married and she became Princess of Wales, she had been twenty for all of twenty-eight days.
As average ages of first marriage for women have varied, the lengths of time that the average woman would have been expected to maintain her transitional virginity have varied, too. Today, with women's ages at first marriages greater than they have ever been, a Western woman who maintains her virginity until she marries can probably, if she marries at the average age for her peer group, expect to sustain anywhere from ten to twenty years of transitional virginity between the time she reaches puberty and the time she marries. When we consider that even the vestal virgins were only expected to maintain their virginity for thirty years, from the time they were consecrated at age six until they finished their term of service at the age of thirty-six, it puts such modern-day commitments to premarital virginity into a most intriguing perspective.
Then again, a modern Western woman may choose not to maintain her virginity until marriage at all. This option has only quite recently—within the last thirty years or so—become widely acceptable. Even so, nonmarital and premarital sex has still by no means received a universal seal of approval, and many socially conservative groups and religious bodies continue to condemn it. Even the U.S. federal government, despite a long history of not having national policies concerning sexuality (sex-related law is formulated and enforced primarily at the state level in the United States), has in recent years come down forcefully and paternalistically in favor of the old-fashioned ideology of transitional virginity, which holds that any premarital sexual activity is wrong. Beginning in 1996 big-budget federal initiatives to promote and enforce the teaching of what is euphemistically called "abstinence-based sex education"—curricula that teach that virginity is the only appropriate sexual status for unmarried people—have inserted a vociferously pro-transitional-virginity agenda into the curricula of U.S. public schools. This stunning backlash against changing virginity expectations, and the odd and telling isolation in which the United States pursues it, is proof positive that a culture's approaches to virginity may be more emotional and political than anything else.
Because transitional virginity's end has long been linked with social adulthood, and social adulthood has long been linked to marriage, we have developed an abbreviated ideology of virginity that equates virginity with childhood and loss of virginity with adulthood. But it is, of course, possible to be both an adult and a virgin. Indeed, for roughly the last seventeen centuries, countless thousands of adult women and men have maintained lifelong virginity within the burgeoning monastic institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Reformation permanently destroyed monasticism's ubiquity and prestige, and even though the numbers of those pursuing monastic vocations have dwindled precipitously over the last century, the abstract and the reality of vowed virginity is still with us today.
Perhaps ironically, most of the vows we think of as being vows of virginity in the context of Roman Catholicism are actually vows of celibacy. Priests, nuns, and monks need not necessarily be virgins in order to be admitted to vows of celibacy, although traditionally nuns have been referred to both as "vowed virgins" and as "brides of the Church," and entering the convent has, until relatively recently, been the only means by which a woman could be guaranteed permission to preserve her virginity in perpetuity. However, it remains true that while celibacy is a required element of maintaining virginity, virginity is not a required element of maintaining celibacy.
The Church does have a vocation for women who are specifically and exclusively virgins. It is not a common or well-known office, and it is not part of any monastic order. The Rite for the Consecration of Virgins Living in the World has been available to Catholic women only since May 31, 1970, although it has precedents dating from the earliest years of the Church. The few thousand women worldwide who have consecrated their virginity to God through this rite do not take vows. Instead, they are understood to have already promised their virginity to God privately, as a personal commitment. They wear no habit, follow no holy orders or monastic rule, live on their own, and practice whatever secular professions they please. These vowed virgins of the contemporary Church, in other words, are likely to fly well under the radar of most of the people they encounter in their daily lives. Aside from being single and devotedly Catholic, there is little to distinguish them from any other woman on the street.
Considered from a historical perspective it is startling that any woman can, in effect, be a "stealth" consecrated virgin. In the past the exemption from the roles of wife and mother always made vowed virgins extremely visible exceptions to a nearly universal rule. The ideology of spiritualized virginity holds that a body that is closed to the demands of sexuality and reproduction is more open to the demands of the Divine. Vowed virgins have historically been viewed as members of a rarefied class who sacrifice a "normal" life trajectory—: marriage and motherhood—in exchange for an existence as a living emanation of Divine priorities. It represents an extraordinary change in the way our culture is organized that, at least in some cases, women choosing such a path find that the singlehood and virginity that define their religious commitment do not make them appear terribly unusual in the context of the culture at large. A lifelong commitment to remaining uncoupled once forced a woman completely out of the cultural or social mainstream. Bufour culture has been transformed politically, economically, legally, and socially to the extent that uncoupled adult women are now relatively commonplace. A woman's sexual choices now include, in ways that have not historically been the case, the option to decline.
The ability to refuse sexual activity simply because it is unwanted is the core of the fourth major type of virginity we recognize today: avoidant virginity. Avoidance of sexual activity plays a role in any form of ongoing virginity, of course. What is distinctive about avoidant virginity as I characterize it here is that it does not necessarily require a larger agenda. An avoidant virgin doesn't have to be saving herself for marriage or planning to enter a convent. Avoidance of sex may simply be a matter of personal preference. But only quite recently has it become possible for women to be economically and socially viable and remain unattached to either husband or church: pre-1970s spinsterhood generally meant penury and ostracism. Independent singlehood today need mean neither.
In another light, avoidance is frequently enlisted in the
service of promoting virginity. The potential consequences of sexual activity, from pregnancy and childbirth to venereal disease to the demands of a spouse, have for centuries been invoked as reasons one might consider prolonging one's virginity. For women, on whom the burdens of pregnancy, childbearing, and childrearing fall unequally, these arguments can be particularly compelling. Contemporary sex education pamphlets often spin unappealing tales of prematurely ended education, dead-end jobs, and endless, friendless nights of screaming babies and smelly diapers. Avoid sex, they explain, and you also avoid these unpleasant outcomes. But such scare tactics are hardly new. Indeed, they've scarcely changed in at least the last eight hundred years. The thirteenth-century middle English text Hali Mei&had, intended to awaken readers to the various benefits of the "holy maidenhead" (religiously vowed virginity) of the title, holds some remarkably similar descriptions:
And what if I ask you: isn't it odious what a wife is faced with when she walks in and her baby is screaming, the cat nibbling at the bacon and the dog gnawing at the hides, her cakes burning on the hearth and the calf drinking up all the milk, the pot boiling over and putting out the fire, and even her hired hands complaining about it all.
In the interests of getting people to avoid sex and stay virgins, the consequences of a sexual life, then and now, are often depicted as messy, unpleasant, dead-end mundanity and humiliation. Different eras and different lives, to be sure, but the message is identical.
The specter of sexually transmitted disease has a similarly lengthy history as a sex-avoidance motivator. "Beware of chance acquaintances," a Jazz Age advertisement produced by the United States Public Health Service warned young female urbanites, "as disease or childbirth may follow. Believe no one who says it is necessary to indulge sex desire." Since the early twentieth century, when increasing urbanization, industrialization, and mobility contributed to the rise of a sexually volatile youth culture, efforts to curb the sexual impulses of young adults have been considered an appropriate goal for public policy. In the eyes of public health and morality crusaders, avoidant virginity is just as good as any other kind.
When Is Sex Not Sex?
The relationship between culture and sexuality has always been fraught. Not all sex is the same. Not all sexual activities are identically meaningful. When we talk about sexual acts, we do so within complicated frameworks of understanding that prioritize and value some kinds of sex, demonize others, and may even ignore a few. In codes like law codes, for instance, different sexual misdeeds are understood to warrant different penalties. In the codes of the Catholic Church, masturbation is a misdeed even if it is done in private, and a penance is exacted for it. In the eyes of civil law, on the other hand, private masturbation doesn't even warrant a mention: anyone attempting to bring a case against someone for masturbating privately would be laughed out of court. In the Catholic, Canon law scheme of things, masturbation is taken more seriously than it is in civil law. It mandates a real penalty. It is more "real" in Catholic thought than it is in civil law.
The validity or realness of any given aspect of sexuality is a slippery, tricky thing to talk about and an even more problematic thing to gauge. It is to some degree abstract, it is profoundly cultural, and to a great degree, it is personal. Yet we somehow expect that everyone knows what kind of sexual experience is sufficiently real or valid to be the kind of sex that constitutes the end of virginity. (We don't.) In recent years, however, we have begun to be able to understand from statistical research just how unintuitive and nonuniform distinctions between "real" and "not-real" sex can be.
Thanks to the ongoing fascination with adolescent sexuality, which continues to be such a source of concern to much of the West and particularly the United States, researchers have begun to look directly at the question of what kinds of sex are currently being construed as "real" in the sexual ideologies of contemporary teenagers. The Seventeen/Kaiser Family Foundation survey Sex Smarts: Virginity and the First Time, released in October 2003, for example, indicated that in the population they surveyed there was a roughly fifty-fifty split between teens who perceived oral sex to be "real" sex and those who said that if they had had oral sex, they would not describe it as "having had sex."
This is, many would say, mere adolescent casuistry. But on a number of levels it makes perfect sense. Penis-in-vagina intercourse has for millennia been considered the sexual act of record in our culture. It is the sexual act capable of producing pregnancy, and thus the sexual act with the most far-reaching consequences. Particularly for teens, in whose lives the consequence of pregnancy is perpetually held up as a horrible thing that will poison their lives permanently, potentially reproductive sex is "real" in a way that nonreproductive sexual acts cannot be.
Those parents and grandparents who have the honesty to look unflinchingly at their own sexual histories may recognize a certain similarity between the tendency to think of oral sex as "not real sex" and some of the contextual redefining of sexual acts they themselves might have done at a similar age. In the forties and fifties, for instance, non-intercourse sexual activities that were utterly unthinkable if one were not "going steady" might well have become a permissible extension of making out if one were. Some sort of progressive scale of sexual "realness" was in play in these attempts to help young people find answers to complex equations of fear, desire, and potential negative consequences. Across history, it has been a tremendously useful calculus.
It is, of course, also a tremendously situational one. The fundamental problem of sexual realness is perhaps the single fundamental problem with defining virginity. Both sex and virginity are maddeningly abstract and largely social things, mercurial mixtures of custom, consensus, experience, and ideology. They are important to us personally and culturally. The stakes can be murderously high. We desperately want these volatile aspects of our lives to be knowable and dependable. But like notions of what constitutes real sex, they can only be as unchanging and as definitive as the human beings in whose lives they play a part, which is to say not very, not often, and not for long. Where we do achieve a sense of certainty, it is often at the expense of looking honestly at what the historical record has to show us.
The more we look and the deeper we see, the more we realize that over the course of the millennia we have recognized virginity to exist, it has never been static or unitary. Answering the question of what exactly virginity is, for once and for all, is probably an impossibility. Even if we could, we would still be left with an even deeper problem: the question of why we care about virginity in the first place.
*The 2001 U.S. Census indicated that the average first-time American bride was twenty-five years old and her groom twenty-six; in the United Kingdom, the average ages were higher, twenty-eight and thirty respectively. Throughout the West, first marriages taking place in the second half of the twenties are increasingly the rule.
CHAPTER 2
The Importance of Being Virgin
The high value set upon her virginity by a man wooing a woman seems to be so deeply planted and self-evident that we become almost perplexed if called upon to give reasons for it.
—Sigmund Freud
I'M BEING PUNISHED," angsty teen overachiever Paris wails, melting down horribly halfway through a televised high school speech. "I had sex, so now I don't get to go to Harvard." "She's never had sex," Paris continues, referring to her friend and fellow speechmaker Rory, "she'll probably go to Harvard. She's a shoo-in!" By the end of this spring 2003 episode of the WB network's award-winning sitcom Gilmore Girls, the virginal Rory does indeed end up wallowing in acceptance letters from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as her mother warbles her glee at having "the good kid" not so much because of her daughter's enviable college prospects as because she is still a virgin. These scenes alarmed many feminist Gilmore Girls fans who questioned, in forums like Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman Palladino's decision to make an equation between virginity and Ivy League college acceptance.
More curious than Sherman-Palladino's decision to use virginity this way, though, and far more curious than the feminist response to it, is why the plot device worked, at all. Why, indeed, would such a conceit make dramatic sense to viewers who know full well that even the choosiest Harvard admissions officer would neither know nor likely care about any given applicant's virginity or lack thereof?
The gambit makes sense on the level of social expectation, long-standing philosophical beliefs, and emotion. The equation of virginity with virtue and virtue with success makes emotional sense not just to Paris and to Rory's mom within the context of the show, but to the audience. For good or ill, we live in a culture that cares deeply about female virginity and has a long history of punishing those who lose it under the "wrong" circumstances and praising those who retain it until the "right" ones are at hand.
Whether or not we agree with the values and meanings our culture attaches to virginity, we cannot escape them. We participate in a larger culture that circulates and recirculates its virginity ideologies in various forms and guises—for instance, in episodes of Gilmore Girls. We tell stories about virginity in part to remind ourselves what we as a culture think and feel about it, to help explain how it functions in our culture, and to teach people about the ramifications virginity might have in our lives . . . even if, as in this case, those ramifications are more symbolic than real. The long history of virginity narratives in art and literature stretches back thousands of years—one of the earliest pieces of ancient Greek fiction, Daphnis and Chloe, revolves around virginity—and remains a constant today. Looking at the historical record, it certainly seems as if our concern with virginity has simply always been with us.