Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  A Recycled Box?

  Contemporary Westerners have an odd, paradoxical relationship to virginity, simultaneously protesting that too much emphasis on virginity is "medieval" and sexist even as we demonstrate that we still believe that virginity goes hand in hand with desirable attributes like purity, self-control, and respectability. In many ways we have a similarly paradoxical relationship to our bodies. We seem to believe that "the body is a temple" and, simultaneously, that these "temples" are private property that can be decorated—tattooed, pierced, transformed through bodybuilding or plastic surgery or corsets or what have you—as the owner sees fit. Little wonder, then, that we have a complicated time coming to grips with surgically rebuilt hymens.

  Over the course of the last twenty years or so, the hymen "reconstruction" procedures known as hymenorraphy and hymenoplasty have become increasingly popular. They are performed all over the world, including in countries where they are technically illegal. Unlike hymenotomies, there is no such thing as a medically necessary hymen reconstruction surgery: the hymen does not perform any physiological function, therefore there can be no physiological reason to install one. Hymen reconstruction is a purely elective surgery, performed for no reason other than to give a material presence to a virginal status that may or may not actually exist.

  The majority of women seeking hymen reconstructions do so to cover up a history of consensual sex, although others seek it out in the wake of sexual assault, injury to the genitals, or because they are concerned that their own hymens may be too insubstantial to perform "correctly" on a wedding night. For about $2,000, such women acquire a deftly constructed flange of mucous membrane that is basically indistinguishable from something that might easily have been part of the original equipment.

  This may be accomplished in one of two ways. Hymenorraphy is a procedure in which the original hymen, or whatever bits of it are still in evidence, are sewn together to approximate an "intact" hymen. Hymenoplasty is somewhat more involved, and is done either when there are not sufficient hymen remnants to work with, or when the hymen is so fragile that it won't hold up to being pieced together like a genital jigsaw puzzle. In a hymenoplasty, a small slice of mucous membrane is lifted from the vaginal wall and sutured into place as an ersatz hymen. Typically, in cases where the reconstructed hymen is being created for an upcoming wedding, these surgeries are scheduled a few weeks prior to the big day.

  Some doctors provide their hymen reconstruction patients with advice to help them ensure there will be adequate "proof " of virginity on the wedding night. Patients may be told, for example, to try to time their wedding nights with the onset of their periods. The doctors who perform these surgeries don't always provide this kind of advice, but the fact that some do is revealing: even physicians who've made a business of repairing hymens are well aware that merely having the correct flap of skin in the correct place doesn't mean that it will behave "correctly" when the time comes.

  Such awareness of the body's variable responses is the basis for some of the ethical controversy surrounding these procedures. Increasingly we understand that bodies are not identical, nor do they behave identically when women lose their virginity. Many doctors are thus understandably troubled by the implications of the physical and cosmetic uniformity that these surgeries are intended to create. Is a hymen reconstruction surgery just another form of catering to a patently inaccurate and misogynist ideology about women's bodies and sexuality that tries to force all women into the same procrustean bed? Or is plastic surgery just plastic surgery, and a "recycled box" no different from breast implants or a nose job? Some clinics offering the surgery package it as part of a genital "rejuvenation" aimed at increasing erotic sensation (although on whose behalf can be unclear), surgeries that may include narrowing the vaginal entrance or other modifications.

  Around the world boyfriends, fathers, and husbands register frequent objections to hymen restoration surgeries, to the point that some doctors and clinics have received death threats for their role in abetting what some men see as an unjustifiable and even criminal deception. Some doctors say that this just underscores the need for the procedures, and believe that by performing them, they are helping women avoid the possibility of the unjust consequences (including beatings, mutilations, or "honor killings") they might suffer as a result of not measuring up to a family's or community's unrealistic virginity standards. One would, of course, prefer a world in which virginity or lack thereof did not represent a burden of proof for women at all. In lieu of this, compassion seems to dictate that other, medical, options be made available.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Blank Page

  And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page.

  —Isak Dinesen, "The Blank Page," from Last Tales

  WITHIN THE VAGINA OF EVERY VIRGIN, or so the Spanish Roma (Gypsy) people called Gitanos believe, there is a grape, an uva, that contains a yellowish liquid. Neither this grape nor its contents exist in any Western book of anatomy, nor do gynecologists recognize their description. But the Gitano insist that both the grape and its juice do exist, and that furthermore they are the only reliable signifier of a woman's virginity. What's more, they've got proof.

  The liquid inside the uva, called the honra, can be spilled only once. When it goes, the woman's virginity goes with it. It is burst—virginity and honra spilled at the very same time—in a ceremonial defloration that happens as part of the wedding celebration, for a woman's honra should not be permitted to just trickle away unnoticed. It would hardly be proper. This is an occasion for witness, celebration, and pride.

  In a large room, surrounded by married women from her community, the bride lies down. Her skirts are tossed up and her bottom bolstered by a pillow to make viewing easier, and her legs are spread wide. An elder woman expert in such matters, the ajuntadora, examines her vulva, labia, and the entrance of her vagina. They must look small, dainty, healthy, and pink. Any other color, and any other appearance, indicates that she has been fooling around inappropriately with her sexual purity, although that "fooling around" might have been something as relatively innocuous as wearing trousers instead of skirts (trousers are thought to rub against the vulva) or riding a bicycle, which is believed to place a problematic amount of pressure on delicate parts. Sexual misconduct would turn the tissues dark, even black, the Gitano say, and so this is easy to detect.

  As long as everything looks all right, the ceremony proceeds on to the pressing of the grape, the manual bursting of the uva. To the sound of songs from the other women in attendance, each of whom has once been in her place, the bride watches as the ajuntadora takes a handkerchief trimmed with lace and ribbons and wraps it snugly around one finger. This cloth will absorb the bride's honra, and as the older woman inserts her well-wrapped finger gently into the bride's vagina—she is honor bound to stop if the bride should bleed, for the blood would spoil the "flowers" made by the honra—she deftly bursts the uva and presses it to extract the yellowish liquid that will leave a permanent stain on the handkerchief. The examiner presses several times, turning the handkerchief between pressings to expose clean cloth. The more flowers, the more honor: three is considered quite respectable, although even one will do. The handkerchief, yellowish honra marking its whiteness, is displayed, and all the women celebrate, singing and clapping and tossing pink and white candied almonds over the bare belly and thighs of the relieved bride.

  The rest of the wedding is almost a formality, after this. The most important ritual is over. The bride will go through the church ceremony with her husband, but it is the bride's mother who will keep the handkerchief, and the flowers of her daughter's virginity, forever, safely knotted to preserve the stains that are her proof of having raised a good, traditional daughter fit to carry on the family and clan.

  The Gitano may live in the modern cities of Spain—the young bride of contemporary Gitano flamenco star Farruquito was publicly reveale
d on Spanish television to have been tested in much this way at their 2005 Madrid wedding—but their rituals of virginity seem, to the rest of us, to come from a different place, a different time. They even seem to involve a different body. As a proof of virginity, the Gitano believe that the honra is infallible. Blood can be faked, as any fool knows, but the honra cannot.

  A Western physician might counter that the fluid produced by the Bartholin's glands found near the entrance of the vagina is often yellow or yellowy-gray in color, and can build up within the glands at any time during a woman's life whether she is a virgin or not. Any woman, they might argue, possesses the means of producing these yellowish stains. The Western physician might further add that there is no such thing as the uva the Gitano speak of, and therefore the Gitano are mistaking perfectly ordinary and utterly insignificant secretions for something meaningful, making a mountain of social significance out of a mundane anatomical molehill. They would do better to look for bloodstains on bedsheets, or to examine the hymen for evidence of tearing or stretching.

  This in turn would make the Gitano sneer. Any Gitano knows that the condition of the hymen is, like the condition of the rest of the tissues of the genitals, capable of providing only secondary, and possibly merely circumstantial, evidence of virginity. After all, is not the uva normally burst, and the honra spilled, without the loss of a single drop of blood?

  Putting It to the Test

  Who is right? Perhaps neither the Gitano nor the doctors are. Perhaps both of them are. Proving virginity has never been an exact science. It has not even been an exact controversy. The sort of conflict we see between the Gitano and the Western medical tradition over the nature and proof of virginity seems exceptional, but historically speaking it is reasonably typical. Over the course of Western history, so many different methods have been used to try to prove virginity, and so many different standards of proof invented, that it would take another book of this size to catalog them.

  The simple fact is that short of catching someone in the act of sex, virginity can be neither proven nor disproven. We cannot prove it today, nor have we ever been able to. Barring some unprecedented quantum leap in diagnostic techniques, we are equally unlikely to be able to do so in the future.

  Not that the notorious ineffectuality of virginity tests has ever stopped anyone from insisting that they be done. Myriad tests, testing myriad things, have been put into use over the centuries, none of them any more definitive than the others. All virginity tests, however, share three very consistent and telling characteristics. They all look for the same thing, they all share a single basic rule of evidence, and they all have a particular, and peculiar, relationship to objective truth.

  First, the thing that virginity tests look for is not, in fact, virginity. Virginity cannot be seen or measured, in and of itself. Virginity tests do not look for virginity, but for signs of virginity. The difference is subtle but crucial. The quality we call virginity is an abstract, intangible thing. When we look for proof of the existence of an intangible thing, when we look for proof of justice or injustice for example, what we look for is not the thing itself but evidence of the thing. Furthermore, this evidence is gathered and interpreted according to culturally specific systems of thought that attribute particular meaning to particular types of evidence.

  This cultural element means that a sign that may seem to prove the existence of virginity according to the ideology of the people of one era or subculture—for example, the evidence of the uva and its honra—may not be considered to do so by those whose system of thought does not attach the same meaning to the same evidence. The honra and uva don't work within the standard Western medical system of thought on virginity; bleeding and hymen tearing don't work within the Gitano one. Thus in the virginity tests discussed throughout the remainder of this chapter, the question is never, is this woman a virgin or not? or even, is this test the right kind of test or not? but rather, according to the system of thought of the place and time in which this test was used, was it capable of providing evidence that would have been meaningful for people thinking according to that particular set of guidelines? The criteria by which virginity is tested, in short, are by no means universal or empirical, and they must be considered in their own historical and cultural moment.

  This may seem confusing, since virginity tests are performed on individual women. But what they actually involve is not so much the body of the individual being tested, but an idealized standard version of the female body. The results of virginity tests are determined by the degree to which individual bodies (or body parts) conform to the generic virginal ideal. This in turn leads us to the second thing that all virginity tests have in common: virginity tests cannot tell us whether an individual woman is a virgin; they can only tell'us whether or not she conforms to what people of her time and place believe to be true of virgins.

  For all that, there is one constant in virginity testing, and this is the third characteristic that all virginity tests share: women may not speak for themselves. The one form of evidence that is always considered inadmissible in virginity testing is a woman's own verbal testimony. Only her body—or in some cases a magical object that reacts to her physical presence—is allowed to give testimony. Undoubtedly, this is due to the fact that sexually active women have always been presumed to have ample reason to lie about their sexual status. By focusing virginity testing on the body and its physical attributes, tests attempt to bypass hearsay and avoid fakery. In the process, the woman whose virginity is being tested disappears as a person. We cannot forget that the most common virginity test of all time—watching for signs and telltales of virginity during and after the first time a woman is vaginally penetrated by a penis—only looks for evidence of virginity as experienced and reported by the man who penetrates the virgin's body. The standards by which virginity is assessed have nothing to do with what is actually true of a virgin or her virginity in any individual case. They have everything to do with what other people believe is true about virgins as a generic and idealized category.

  Signs and Portents

  In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, stands a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian (and sometime New Yorker) hero of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento. There is an old joke about this statue, which claims that Garibaldi, ever the gallant Italian, will raise his sword and salute any virgin that passes. The punch line? It's been a hundred years since any woman in the Village has received his salute.

  Garibaldi's statue isn't the only inanimate object to have garnered a reputation as a magical virgin detector; legions of college campuses boast statuary of similar reputation. Magical virgin detectors have always been popular. Legends and medieval romances are peppered with things like magic drinking horns that act like a prankster's dribble glass whenever an unchaste woman tries to drink from them, making the invisible stain of sexual sin public as wine spills all over the woman's clothes. A friend of mine once told me that at a college party in the 1980s, another student explained quite earnestly to her that only a virgin could remove the label from a beer bottle in one piece. Similarly direct is the medieval story of Floris and Blaunchefleur, which tells of an enchanted fountain owned by the Sultan of Babylon, the waters of which run red as blood if an unchaste maiden washes her hands in them.

  These tests, and others like them, rest on the principle of symbolic magic. An inanimate object serves as a symbol of virginity or lost virginity, and behaves in some telltale way when a female body is within range. When Garibaldi raises his phallic sword or a beer bottle label is removed as intact as a virgin's hymen is supposed to be, we understand the symbolism intuitively. When an unchaste maiden is revealed through the fountain water running red or by the drinking horn spilling wine across her front, we know instantly the nature of the vivid red stain the wine imitates. No one need wonder what it means when the unicorn lays his sharp-horned head in the tender lap of a virgin, or why she is the only one who can tame him. Virginity, in these tests, is a form o
f elemental magic.

  Virgin magic substantially predates Christianity. In ancient Greek literature, we find instances where sacred snakes only accept offerings from virgins, spurning those from any other hands. Mythological virgins like Persephone are capable of visiting the world of the dead. Virgin women like Evadne and Leda and a certain Mary (or Miriam) were singled out to bear the children of gods. In Christian martyr legends, virgins could withstand any torture, stop would-be rapists in their tracks, defeat demons, defy parents and kings and even Satan himself. In the Christian apocrypha, we read that a certain midwife named Salome doubts the virginity of the Virgin Mary and goes to perform a virginity test on her only to have her hand burnt to a crisp by the magical force of Mary's holy and virginal genitals. Over and over again, virgins are magical beings.

  It only makes sense that we might attempt to use magic to test magic. The magical tattling drinking horns, fountains, and unicorns of our medieval past are kissing cousins to the beer labels and park statuary of the present. In rural black communities of the American South, a folkloric tradition holds that a man can test the virginity of a woman by collecting some earwax on his fingertip, then pressing the fingertip to the woman's vulva. If this exposure to a man's earwax hurts her and she cries out, she is a virgin, her virginity capable of being "burned" by any secretion from the body of a man. It is a classic demonstration of symbolic and sympathetic magic. The incidental fact that it is no more accurate an indicator of virginity than a coin toss is, magically enough, considered irrelevant.