Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  But why? What drove us to begin to identify virginity as a special status? What factors came into play that it should become so fraught with meaning that in the twenty-first century, there is still some level on which we can believe that being a virgin might make a difference to a university admissions decision? Why do we care so much? Why do we care at all?

  On certain levels, our fascination with virginity seems very strange. No other animals, so far as we can tell, perceive the existence of virginity. Human beings have no monopoly on physical virginity. But we have cornered the market on it, both in terms of recognizing that it exists and in making it useful in the ways we organize our cultures and our relationships with one another. There is no question that virginity means a great deal to human beings. Taking a look at how much it doesn't mean to other species helps give us clearer perspective on why this may be so.

  Sealed for Your Protection

  Occasionally one comes across the claim that the reason humans are the only creatures who recognize the existence of virginity is that we are the only creatures who possess hymens. Alas, this is not so. Humans are emphatically not the only animals with hymens. A diverse spectrum of mammal types, including female llamas, guinea pigs, bush babies, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rats, ruffed lemurs, and seals all have them.

  Compared to some of the others that exist, the human hymen is nothing special. Imagine the grand proportions of the elephant hymen, or the eye-popping durability of the fin whale's, which is so resilient that it usually is not ruptured until the animal gives birth. A rat hymen may not be particularly impressive in size or persistence, but when one pauses to realize that the average nubile lady rat is as well-equipped as the average teenaged girl insofar as having a hymen is concerned, it does put that particular scrap of tissue into a bit of perspective.

  Neither are human hymens functional. Unlike those of whales, seals, and manatees, they are not capable of keeping water or waterborne foreign substances out of the vagina, as evolutionary biologist Elaine Morgan argues is the case for marine mammals. Human hymens also do not seal the vagina against sexual intrusion. Guinea pigs and bush babies, so far away from us on the evolutionary scale, have hymens that completely seal the vaginal opening when the animals are not fertile. When the animals ovulate and go into heat, the hymen dissolves. When the animals are no longer in estrus, their hymens grow back until next time. Thanks to their resealing hymens, these animals can only be vaginally penetrated when they are actually capable of conceiving.

  For a few animals, then, the hymen may serve a demonstrable function. For human beings, however, and for most other hymen-bearing species as well, the hymen is nothing more or less than a functionless leftover, a tiny idle remnant of flesh that remains when the opening of the vagina forms.

  What is most fascinating about human hymens is that we have become aware of them at all. No other species seems to know or care. Zoologist Bettyann Kevles, in her book Female of the Species, writes that from the perspective of natural selection, hymens "are explicable only if the male of the species finds it to his advantage to seek a virgin. But there is no evidence that mammal males seek inexperienced females, and no evidence that females with this particular anatomical feature remain monogamous." A gentleman lemur is, in other words, no more or less likely to try to mate with a lady lemur whose hymen is intact; a female elephant who has no hymen left to speak of after having borne young is every bit as sexually attractive in the eyes of males.

  There is no evidence that animal males are the slightest bit aware of when females have hymens and when they don't. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the females are automatically aware of it either, including when they have sex for the first time. So much for Desmond Morris's wishful thinking that the hymen's function was to produce pain if penetration were attempted, thus making it more likely that virgins will postpone penetrative sex, or his corresponding theory that this pain was what made early humans aware of virginity. Not so. Humans are not alone in having hymens, and humans are far from alone in not being innately aware of them. Women are generally not aware of having hymens at all unless these small scraps of tissue create some sort of problem. This may or may not ever happen. It is rare for the hymen to present a problem on its own. As for problems associated with penetration, a given woman's vagina may or may not ever be penetrated, and even if it is, hymens and vaginas vary considerably, as do reactions to vaginal penetration.

  There simply are no symptoms occasioned by virginity loss that are uniform enough to point directly and unequivocally to the existence of the hymen. One would in any case reason that if there were, or if human beings did possess some innate awareness of the existence of hymens—an awareness, again, that all other hymen-bearing animals appear to lack—it would not have taken us until 1544 to figure out exactly what the hymen was and where it was located in the body. Truly, human beings are not so different from all the other animals that have hymens. We too very rarely have any inkling that our hymens exist.

  It seems much more probable, given the importance human beings attach to virginity, that our awareness of the hymen came into existence the other way around. In other words, we became aware of hymens because we are aware of something we call virginity. We found the hymen because we found reasons to search women's bodies for some bit of flesh that embodied this quality we call "virginity," some physical proof that it existed. Humans are not alone in having hymens. We're merely alone in knowing it, and in having given ourselves a reason to care.

  Big Daddy and the K-Strategist

  There is no purely biological argument that explains human interest in virginity, so we are forced to begin considering the possibility that awareness of virginity may have stemmed from social factors instead. Indeed, the leading hypothesis concerning how and why human beings became aware of virginity posits that the concept of virginity arose as a social bargaining chip in negotiations involving a father's investment in his offspring. The so-called paternity/property hypothesis places virginity squarely in the middle of the tangled web of human social organization, arguing that it filled a broadly pragmatic role in mediating the conflicting interests of pregnancy, childrearing, access to material goods, and the creation and maintenance of kinship groups and social hierarchies.

  When it comes to reproduction, human beings are what anthropologists and biologists call "K-strategists." We have relatively few offspring over the course of our lives, and we have to devote enormous energy, time, and resources to the gestation, birth, and upbringing of those children in order to maximize their success in the world. Pregnancy is a lengthy, intense process fraught with dangers to both mother and fetus. Human childbirth is almost ridiculously difficult and long. Only with relatively recent specialized obstetric techniques and technologies has childbirth—at least in the first world—become a process that mothers and infants are expected to survive as a matter of course. Childbirth is just the beginning. As any parent can attest, childrearing is a long, resource-intensive process with tremendous demands.

  These demands fall almost exclusively on the shoulders of mothers. Fathers, after all, have no biological compulsion to stick around long enough even to find out whether a particular act of intercourse has produced a pregnancy, let alone long enough to care for their offspring. This, the hypothesis holds, is the problem at the root of the idea of virginity: how can mothers most efficiently encourage fathers to invest in the children they have sired?

  Archaeologists do not know precisely when the ideas forming the backbone of the social organizational principle known as patriarchy (from the Greek patria, father, and arche, meaning rule or basis) emerged. Nor do they know precisely when the idea of private property became popular. We know only that they did so, and that they were deeply rooted in a vast number of cultures around the globe long before written history began. Based on the historical record derived from burial objects, preserved settlements, and so forth, archaeologists estimate that the twin developments of patri
archy and property arose as elements in human social structures sometime during what is known as the Neolithic era, a period that lasted from roughly 8500 to 2600 B.C.E.

  Another notable development in human civilization, the development of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals, took place in the same general time period, probably more or less simultaneously in numerous locations around the world. As humans exchanged nomadic life for farming, they began, researchers theorize, to think in terms of property as a way to articulate the things that they had put effort into creating or making useful: my land, my field, my cow. From there it would have been a short leap to think of human beings as belonging to other human beings in similar ways: my woman, my child. Combining the ideas of ownership and patriarchy, or the organization of social groups based on members' relationships to a head male, would have provided the origins for the idea of patrimony, or the inheritance of a father's property by his children. This is where virginity fits in. Garden-variety self-interest encourages healthy investment in ensuring the survival and success of one's offspring. It also makes it an object of concern that one's hard-won resources not be squandered or given away to unworthy recipients.

  Virginity became a key to both because virginity can render paternity knowable. Maternity is rarely in doubt: childbirth makes it pretty easy to know who has given birth and to whom. Paternity, on the other hand, is a lot trickier to prove. Human women do not go into heat the way some animals do. Because we are stealthy ovulators, it is nearly impossible to know for sure when a woman is and is not fertile; even with modern medical technology, predicting fertility is a matter of educated guesses, not certainties. Because there's no easy way to know whether a given incidence of sexual intercourse is likely to prove fertile, the simplest way to determine the identity of the father of a given child, and thus to know that the child "belongs to" a particular male, is to limit who has sexual access to individual women.

  The scenario that has the highest potential for producing offspring whose fathers are known is a marriage system that most severely limits women's prerogatives in regard to sex, a system in which sexual access to a woman is reserved for a single man. Female premarital virginity ensures that a woman's first child is of guaranteed paternity. Her post-marital monogamy assures that future children will be of similarly reliable lineage.

  This raises the question of what women stand to gain from limiting their options so severely. Human women, like other female animals of other species, are not necessarily given to such a system by nature. Primates do not often behave monogamously. This common tendency toward nonmonogamous sexual behavior is partially explained by the desire to have the most genetically superlative offspring possible. It is to the biological advantage of a species when females are at liberty to choose to mate with genetically superior males wherever those females might find them. The myth of the naturally monogamous female and the corresponding myth of the naturally promiscuous male have been trotted out for centuries to help reinforce the double standard that has been so pervasive in Western culture. But as numerous scientists have now proven (Bettyann Kevles's Females of the Species provides a reader-friendly, soundly researched introduction), it simply isn't so. Women are no more inherently monogamous than men. If a woman is to behave consistently in a way that runs counter to the biological imperative of maximizing genetic potential—that is, if she is to voluntarily participate in a scheme where she will remain a virgin until she mates with one man, and never mate with any other man thereafter—the incentive has to be a strong one indeed.

  The incentive is indeed strong: K-strategist females need a lot of help if their babies are going to survive. In a burgeoning patriarchy, where property and the distribution of goods are controlled primarily or exclusively by men, this means inducing men to feel that they have an investment in helping to provide food, shelter, clothing, social affiliations and protections, and physical care for women and babies. One of the best ways a woman historically has had of doing this is to convince a man to publicly acknowledge his paternity of her child.

  The stakes in the bid for paternal recognition are high. Not for nothing is it considered a curse to call someone a bastard. In a patriarchy, it is hard to survive without the sponsorship of a patriarch. To this day, being disowned by one's parents is considered serious business. In the distant past, being disowned or not acknowledged by a parent generally meant death, particularly if the child was an infant. Many legal systems still use the terms "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to indicate whether a child was born within the confines of a heterosexual marriage. It is a telling sign of the deep and lasting power of patriarchy that in so many places it remains the prerogative of men to determine whether children are, in the eyes of their society and its institutions, legitimate, and therefore fully real.

  For the K-strategist female in a patriarchy, securing a future for her children means trading on monogamy generally and on virginity specifically. The trade is not necessarily either equal or fair, and the male side of the bargain is easily withdrawn. Nor does a woman who grants exclusive sexual access to her body to just one man always receive, in return, a guaranteed supply of resources to meet her needs and those of her child or children. But for a K-strategist living in a patriarchy, it has historically been her best bet.

  Pure Goods

  The process by which this quid pro quo transaction evolved into an institution invested with enormous religious and moral significance is lost to us. As it did, however, men and women alike became profoundly invested in perpetuating the ideology that holds that female virginity is singular and valuable.

  This ethos has formed a huge part of the bedrock on which our sexual, social, and familial relationships rest, but its prominence does not mean that valuing virginity is something that is inborn or inherent to human beings. Anthropologists have found examples of too many other cultures that do not value virginity or which value it very differently than we do, including cultures in which both private property and virginity are essentially nonexistent concepts, for us to claim that the way our culture does it is either the way that humans are "supposed to" do things, or the only way they can be done. The way we do it may be a popular, even dominant paradigm among human cultures worldwide, but it is hardly the only basis on which human beings might organize their sexual lives.

  The same thing holds true of our tendency to regard virginity as a commodity. Again, we must return to our Neolithic grandparents to imagine the roots of this practice, but the reigning theory runs that as it became increasingly popular for men to bring only virginal women into their households for purposes of having greater control over the paternity of the children they supported they and their women alike began to pay more attention to controlling the sexuality of their daughters in turn. Their daughters would then be more appealing to J: he men of other households or clans, bait for attracting useful allies.

  Raising daughters of quality became another mode of production, as valuable as breeding healthy sheep, weaving sturdy cloth, or bringing in a good harvest. As the head of his household or clan, the patriarch took ultimate responsibility for its productivity and performance. A clan's standing or honor could be affected by its ability to compete economically. Status could similarly be affected by whether the clan brought properly virginal daughters to the marriage market. The gesture is now generally symbolic in the first world, but we nonetheless still observe the custom of a father "giving" his daughter in marriage. Up until the last century or so, however, when laws we're liberalized to allow women to stand as full citizens in their own right, this represented a literal transfer of property from a father's household to a husband's.

  If an inopportune loss of virginity jeopardized this system, it could be catastrophic. It undermined the father's and the clan's status. But far more than mere loss of face hung in the balance. Virginity lost before marriage often rendered the woman unmarriageable, useless on the marriage market. When a valuable commodity is destroyed, the owners seek recompense f
rom the person who destroyed it, or at least the nearest person to whom blame can be made to stick. Thus the unmarried woman found to be (or merely reputed to be) no longer a virgin might be disowned, sold into slavery, beaten, mutilated, or killed in order to redress the loss of property and face.

  An excellent and well-known example of how this worked in practical terms comes from the second half of the twenty-second chapter of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, written down around the seventh century B.C.E.

  I3If a man takes a wife, and goes in to her [to consummate the marriage], and hates her, I4 and speaks libelous words against her, and calls her by evil names, and says, "I took this woman [as a wife], and when I went to her [as a husband], I found her not a virgin," I5 then shall the girl's father and mother bring forth the tokens of the girl's virginity unto the elders of the city, at the city gate.l6 The girl's father shall say unto the elders "I gave my daughter to this man as his wife, and now he hates her17 and has libeled her, saying 'I did not find your daughter to be a virgin,' yet these here are the tokens of her virginity." And the parents shall spread the cloth before the city elders.l8 Then the elders of the city should take the man and flog him,I9 and fine him a hundred shekels of silver to be given to the girl's father, because he [the accuser] has cast an evil name upon a virgin of Israel. She will be his wife [the marriage will be upheld as valid] and he may not divorce her. 20 But if this thing [accusation] is true, and the tokens of the girl's virginity were not found,2I then they will bring the girl to the gate of her father's household and the men of her city will stone her to death because she has done an obscene thing among her people Israel by committing whoredom in her father's house. So you will cast evil away from you.

  In the Deuteronomist's formulation, wrongfully accusing the father of the bride of having presented "damaged goods" constitutes a crime against the bride's father. Slander is a civil crime, not a religious one, as indicated not only by the language used to describe the offense but also by how it is remedied. The father who is slandered by having his daughter falsely accused of having not been a virgin at marriage is paid damages for the damage to his reputation, and whatever social or material gains he had achieved through the marriage of his daughter are solidified because the marriage is upheld. Despite the fact that it was her virginity and her honesty that were impugned, however, his daughter is not perceived as having been slandered by a false accusation. She is never compensated for any damage done to her reputation. Because her marriage is valid, she is considered to have nothing to worry about.