by Hanne Blank
Cucullus non Facit Monachum
Ever alert to the possibility that women might try to lie about their virginity, many tests are chosen because their criteria are difficult, if not impossible, to fake. But neither can many of these tests be passed except by sheer luck. This is particularly true of tests that take a woman's external appearance as evidence of her virginity or nonvirginity.
The most infamous example of this is the breast test. Since the time of Galen and Soranus at least, and probably for many centuries prior, breasts have been bared and pressed into service as a prima facie proof of virginity, with "small, plump, and elastic breasts" being listed as a sign of virginity in the forensic legal literature as late as the early twentieth century. As we know, short of cosmetic surgery that has only become available in the last fifty years, there has been precious little any woman could do to intentionally alter the size> shape, or nature of her breasts. Yet source after source takes the female breast as a source of evidence for or against virginity. Upward-pointing nipples, nipples that were pink, pale, or small in size, and breasts that had not begun to sag were all characteristics that were supposed to prove virginity. If the nipples pointed downward, were dark or overly large, or the breasts appeared to be thin or saggy, they were said to betray a guilty sexual past.
Today the idea of diagnosing virginity on the basis of whether or not a woman can pass the pencil test* seems laughable at best and blindly misogynist at worst. But many currently used popular "proofs" of virginity rest on criteria that are hardly any better.
Humans have often evinced a strong desire to believe that sexual activity must, somehow or another, literally alter the body. The idea that masturbation causes blindness, pimples, or hair on the palms is one manifestation of this theory. When we hear through the grapevine, or read in books, about the loss of virginity being somehow visible in the look in a woman's eyes, the way she walks or sits, in the shape or size of her breasts, or in the curve of her hips or buttocks, we are hearing the same thing. "By me having, you know, a big butt and hips, they think I'm having sex, too, but I'm not, it just runs in my family," one young woman told researcher Kristin Haglund in a 2003 research report. When Haglund asked this young woman why people would believe that she was being sexually active based on how her body looked, the subject responded, "They said because when you have sex your hips spread or something like that."
Although untrue, the idea that a narrow butt or a sexless walk devoid of swaying hips is an indicator of virginity does, like the breast test, have a certain internal logic. The younger and more childlike one's body appears—the high, small, firm breasts, the slim hips, and the less pronounced buttocks are all characteristic of girls who are just past the cusp of puberty—the more likely one is to be judged to be, or believed to be, a virgin. Bodies that appear more sexually mature are more likely to be presumed to be sexually active.
Attempting to derive knowledge of someone's sexual status from the external appearance of her body or even from the way she dresses is uncannily close to the nineteenth-century attempt to use the pseudoscience of phrenology—the measurement of various regions of the skull and the contours of the head—to determine a person's character and personality. It is strange indeed that belief in phrenology has gone the way of the dodo, but we still commonly find examples of people believing that they can tell a virgin by the size of her butt and the way that she walks, or because she's got perky breasts, slim hips, or favors modest necklines.
There is no such thing as "looking like a virgin." One can only look like what one's culture presumes a virgin should look like, and even then, one's success often depends on whether one's genetics have been cooperative. Cucullus non facit monachum, our medieval ancestors said, "the cowl does not make the monk." Just so: neither the breasts nor the hips, the clothes nor the comportment make the virgin.
Chemistry and the Piss-Prophets
Even when a woman does "look like a virgin," there are always those who remain unconvinced. The author of the late-medieval text De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women) was one of these skeptics, listing first various traits—"shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech," "casting eyes down before men and the acts of men"—by which virgins could be known, then turning around and saying that "some women are so clever . . . that they know how to resist detection by these signs." Those who wished more certain proof of a woman's virginity were advised to look for proof somewhere that the woman could not hope to disguise: in her urine.
The premodern "piss-prophets," as uroscopists were sometimes known during the Renaissance, didn't use the kinds of urinalysis techniques used today. Rather, they listened to and watched patients while they urinated, administered potions and decoctions, and observed urine under a variety of supposedly informative conditions. A virgin "urinates with a subtle hiss," wrote thirteenth-century William of Saliceto, "and indeed takes longer than a small boy" to complete her urination, implying that because her genitals had not yet been opened by intercourse the flow of urine would be constricted. A commentator on the De secretis mulierum claims that the virgin's urine comes from a place higher up in the vulva than it does for nonvirgin women, one of the innumerable examples in the medical literature in which it is implied that intercourse somehow fundamentally alters a woman's anatomy.
The way the urine looked was important. A virgin's urine was clear, sparkling, and thin in consistency, according to many sources, and never muddy or cloudy. Optimally, their urine would be colorless. Golden urine was believed to indicate an appetite for pleasure, which was not necessarily desirable. It was believed by some that if a woman was not a virgin, sperm in her urine would precipitate out if the urine were left to stand, forming a cloudy layer in the bottom of the jar.
Another way that urine was used to test virginity was by seeing whether a woman could be forced to urinate by special means. In his treatise on minerals, thirteenth-century scientist Albertus Magnus wrote that if a woman drinks water in which jet stones have been washed and to which small scrapings of jet have been added, and she immediately urinates, she is no virgin. Other authorities claimed that various other substances, including lily petals and stamens, coal, and lettuce would have the same effect. Lettuce, in fact, was considered so potent that one had only to smell it. "Take the fruit of a lettuce and place it in front of her nose," one early Renaissance writer directed, and if the woman is no virgin, "she will urinate immediately."
Road Trip
A different sort of urine-related test could be performed by fumigating the body with smoke or fumes. A fumigation was performed by introducing vapors, for instance the smoke of particular herbs, into the interior of the body. Fumigations of various body parts were used as treatments for a variety of illnesses, but fumigations of the vagina could be specifically used as a means of diagnosing virginity. In these fumigations, a pan containing the fumigating material would be placed on the coals of a small fire, then the woman being tested would be seated on a special frame with her legs spread over the pan. Her body might be draped with a blanket or heavy cloth to trap the smoke, or perhaps the procedure would be simplified and a pan containing burning resins and such might simply be thrust beneath her long skirts as she stood and straddled it. If her examiner were especially well equipped and sophisticated of technique, the smoke and fumes might be channeled directly into her vulva or vagina through a reed stuck through the stopper of a jug containing the volatile substances. On the other hand, she might simply be instructed to hike up her dress and straddle an open wine barrel or a jug of onions and let the fumes rise up into her body. Fumigations with "the best coal," according to Gilbertus Anglicus (late twelfth to early thirteenth century), or with dock leaves, according to the fifteenth-century writer Niccolo Falcucci, would produce the same result as waving a lettuce below a woman's nose: if she were a virgin, she would feel nothing, but if she were "corrupt," she would urinate involuntarily.
Other fumigation tests worked on a different principle. For centuries
, the internal plumbing of the body was understood to function on the basis of the Greek concept of the hodos, or road. The Greeks understood that food, water, and air went into the body, and urine, feces, and menstrual blood came out of it. To them, the logical conclusion was that the openings for the outbound traffic, the genitals and anus, were directly connected to the openings for the inbound traffic, namely the mouth and nose. What connected them was the inner bodily path of the hodos. The only reason that the hodos should fail to be a reliable thoroughfare between the upper orifices and the nether ones would be if some part of it were closed off.
On the assumption that the vaginas of virginal women were held closed by webs, knots, folds, or gathers of blood vessels and other delicate tissue, women whose virginity was to be tested were fumigated from below to see whether or not the smell of the fumes could be detected up above. If one could smell the fumes on her breath, it would mean that the vaginal entrance to her hodos had been opened and the fumes had traveled all the way up the internal "road." If nothing could be smelled, on the other hand, she was closed, and thus a virgin. Given some of the substances used in fumigations and the ways the fumes were released—open wine barrels or kegs of chopped onions and garlic figure in some descriptions—it seems that everything in the immediate vicinity would have been likely to smell of them. One wonders just how many women were deemed nonvirginal on the basis of something that was quite literally in the air.
Other tests likewise traded on the notion of the hodos. These tests had to do with the size or character of the neck and throat. The vaginal canal, often known as "the neck of the womb," was and often still is, in the popular imagination, considered to be vulnerable to the broadening influence of the invading penis. In an era when the theory of one-to-one correspondence between the neck of the womb and the neck between the chin and collarbone was current, many believed in the principle "as below, so above." If the lower neck broadened, the upper one would, too.
From this came the theory that measuring the throat, and in some cases merely listening to the voice, could tell an examiner whether the individual had been sexually active. A broader, wider, or thicker neck, a lower or coarser voice, or a throat that was out of proportion in its thickness might all be considered telltale signs of lost virginity. Various tests recommended measuring the neck in different ways, but a classic example is found in the December 16, 1660, entry in the diary of British man of letters Samuel Pepys: "From thence with Tom Doling and Boston and D. Vines (whom we met by the way) to Price's, and there we drank, and in discourse I learnt a pretty trick to try whether a woman be a maid or no, by a string going round her head to meet at the end of her nose, which if she be not will come a great way beyond."
This test, which Pepys seems to have regarded as nothing more than a good game to play if the barmaid would hold still for it, is described in other writings from the early 1500s to the early 1800s. Each version of the test gives its specific version of the instructions, but a common variant—perhaps the very one Pepys learned—is performed as follows. One end of a string is held against the bony ridge at the base of the skull and the string brought up over the head along the midline. Held down against the skin so that it follows the bridge of the nose, the point at which the string meets the tip of the nose is marked. The string is cut at that point, and it is then wrapped around the woman's throat like a necklace. If she is a virgin, the ends of the string will just meet, its length neatly measuring her neck. If she is not a virgin, on the other hand, the ends will not meet because the woman's neck has expanded, implicating a similar widening of the "neck" below.
Interestingly and unusually, the widened or broadened neck as a sign of lost virginity was not believed to be true of women only but also of men. Though they of course lacked vaginas, boys' voice change was nonetheless sometimes linked by scholars and singing masters to the onset of sexual activity. This might take the form of masturbation or, as one eighteenth-century German writer darkly hinted, the possibility of homoerotic acts with other choirboys: "In cities, where choirs exist, one should especially watch out for boys who sing soprano parts. If their treble voice darkens before they are seventeen, even though they observe the dietetic rules of a soprano singer, it is obvious what is the matter with them."
Pucker Up
Across history, the two most common tests of virginity are not really tests so much as they are things observed during and after the process of penetrating the vagina during first heterosexual intercourse: the degree of tightness of the vagina and the bleeding associated with virginity loss. Both are described as being found only once and as vanishing as virginity does, and so their appearance has a definitive air about it. Sources ranging from the Talmud to the eighteenth-century standby Aristotle's Master-Piece debate the meaning and importance of these two characteristics. Debates on the matter continue apace in the world's locker rooms and on Internet bulletin boards. It remains an ironic fact that the two "proofs" are only capable of being assessed when virginity is destroyed.
This is all of a piece with the ideology that holds that virginity is a sort of placeholder, something that exists until such time as it is removed or destroyed by a man. Presumably the "right man," to be sure, but nonetheless, virginity exists for him and for his use: many people over the centuries have described virginity as a gift that a woman is given by God for the purpose of giving it to her husband. The fact that the man is then entitled and even expected to assess the quality and existence of the virginity he has been given—particularly in regard to whether he happens to perceive the woman's vagina as being adequately "tight"—merely emphasizes that virginity has fundamentally little to do with actual women and a great deal to do with men's fantasies.
Ironically, such standards of "proof" make virginity relatively simple to counterfeit. Unlike with penises, where what you see is pretty much what you get, female genitals are conveniently amenable to being rigged, treated, toned, and primped. The subject of artificially narrowing or tightening the vagina is, in fact, taken up in many premodern medical treatises. The practice no doubt handily predates the second- and third-century writings of Galen and Soranus, who recommend, in a tone that suggests the practice was well known, the insertion of perfumed pessaries made with oils and fats to "rejuvenate" the vagina and its appearance. These and other ancient recipes that would assist in the manufacture of the signs of virginity—a practice known as "sophistication" to later European writers—make it clear that women have for millennia been doing vaginal renovations for the purpose of placating men.
Some of the best-known early recipes "for the violated woman/that this be kept secret," as Theodoris Priscianus put it, come from the lineage of what are known as the Trotula texts. These tenth- and eleventh-century writings were by a woman or women whose real name(s) we do not know, and they exist in many different forms and formats. At the time they were written, however, the recipes might not have been used only as sophistications but as a genuine medical therapy. It was believed for many centuries that a narrow, tight vagina was necessary for successful conception, because a too-wide or too-loose vagina would allow the male seed to pour right back out of the woman's body so that pregnancy could not occur. Helping a woman to tighten her vagina to improve her chances of conceiving was quite legitimate. If such a recipe had an alternate use, so be it: honi soit qui malypense.
Most of the recipes for tightening and narrowing the opening of the vagina and the tissues of the vulva are astringents, applied topically as baths or poultices and more rarely internally as douches or pessaries. A thirteenth-century recipe tells the "girl who has been induced to open her legs and lose her virginity by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises" that when it is time for her to get married, she should keep her husband from knowing the truth by taking ground sugar and egg white and mixing them in a decoction made from alum, fleabane, the dry wood of a grapevine, and other. astringent and drying plants, then bathing her private parts with the resulting mixture.
The
highly caustic compound alum, otherwise known as aluminum sulfate or potassium aluminum sulfate, was a frequent star in these recipes. A common household and culinary chemical until reasonably recently, it is still used in pickling and as an ingredient in baking powders. It generally represents the strongest active ingredient in vagina-tightening mixtures.* The herbs in these mixtures, however, were also active components. The seeds of fleabane (Inula dysentericd) were a well-known and popular astringent, shrinking and tightening the tissues to which they were applied. Numerous recipes call for members of the mint family. Mint oil is an irritant that would cause a certain amount of puffiness and swelling and thus help give the appearance of a plump and youthful vulva and vagina. Many recipes require pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium), a mint long known to women around the world as an emmenagogue, abortifacient, and contraceptive, and thus one with a long-standing association with women's reproductive concerns. Another popular ingredient in these recipes was bearfoot or lady's mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris), likewise a popular astringent and styptic plant of well-established medical utility.
Doctors and midwives, in essence "double agents" when it came to virginity, have always been aware that sophistications were available and have, in many cases, helped women to employ them. But they were also well aware that the men who paid their fees as virginity testers would expect the doctors to be able to uncover a fake. Sensibly enough, they developed sophistications with which to counter sophistications, or put another way, tests to foil women's attempts to foil virginity tests. Nicholas Venette, the French author of the eighteenth-century sexual self-help blockbuster L 'amour conjugal (The Mysteries of Married Love), describes one of these in considerable detail. Venette's countertest is given just prior to his instructions on how to go about counterfeiting virginity—he is nothing if not comprehensive.