Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  We ought to examine the means, by which a counterfeited Maiden-head may be discover'd . . . make a Bath of a Decoction of Leaves of mallows, Groundsel, with some handfuls of Line Seed and Fleabane Seed, Orach, Brank Ursin or bearfoot. Let them sit in this Bath an hour, after which, let them be wiped, and examin'd 2 or 3 hours after Bathing, observing them narrowly in the mean while. If a Woman is a Maid, all her amorous parts are compress'd and joyn'd close to one another; but if not, they are flaggy, loose, and flouting, instead of being wrinkled and close as they were before when she had a mind to choose us.

  Fleabane and bearfoot, astringents both, were common ingredients in recipes for tightening the vagina. Orach (Atriplax hortensis), on the other hand, is another name for a variety of purslane, a plant that was used for various purposes, often as a means of bringing down swelling and reducing lesions. Mallow (Althaea officinalis) and groundsel (Senecio viscosus) are similar in effect. They are demulcents, emollients, and topical anti-inflammatories, and would have helped to bring down any inflammation that had been artificially induced in the name of plumping up the genital tissues.

  One wonders just how consciously Venette was pandering to his public by offering such a countertest to begin with. Venette, after all, was neither an unsophisticated observer nor unsympathetic regarding the various reasons that women might choose to feign virginity. He understood quite plainly that the appearance and dimensions of a woman's genital anatomy didn't necessarily prove anything at all about her virginity, and in fact says flatly that he realizes that some women's genitals simply don't give the impression of being small, narrow, or tight: he offers advice on how to pass oneself off as a virgin on the behalf of women who are "naturally too wide."

  Furthermore, he believed that a woman might have legitimate, defensible, and ethical reasons for wanting to falsify her virginity in order to "secure her Husband's good Opinion the Wedding night." "May it not be allowable," Venette asks, "for the Preservation of Peace in her Family, to take all the pains imaginable to be thought a discreet Woman by her Husband." Indeed, as Venette pointed out, it might be what made it possible for even a prostitute to become an honest married woman, and thus but a small evil that could help to erase a far larger sin. Venette's generosity is all the more striking, and his candor all the more remarkable, given his status as a medical authority: writ large, it is nothing less than an admission that if one is sincere and well meaning, virginity need not matter at all.

  Blood Simple?

  Probably the oldest and foremost belief about female virginity is the notion that when a woman loses her virginity, she bleeds. Many women do bleed, in quantities ranging from the common light spotting to extremely unusual and medically dangerous hemorrhaging requiring emergency treatment. But not every woman bleeds.

  While it is by now fairly well established that not all women bleed on the occasion of their first sexual penetration (indeed, many older sources, too, mention that there may not be any bleeding, although bleeding is assumed as the norm), little research has been done on just how many people bleed, how many don't, and why some do and some don't. One of the only articles in the medical literature on the subject is an anecdotal study of fewer than a hundred women. The women in this study were the colleagues of English doctor Sara Paterson-Brown, who, when she was unable to find any good statistics on the subject of bleeding at virginity loss, began sensibly enough to ask her colleagues about their experiences. While it is perhaps unreasonable to assume that Paterson-Brown's sample is truly representative of the population of women as a whole, it is noteworthy that fully 63 percent of her respondents—and possibly more, since some of the women she asked could not remember—had not experienced any bleeding when they lost their virginity.

  The responses in Paterson-Brown's study shed an interesting light on part of the Gitano ritual defloration described at the beginning of this chapter. When readers reared in the mainstream of Western sexual ideology hear about Gitano defloration rituals and discover that the appearance of blood during the defloration ritual stops the proceedings cold, they are often surprised, even shocked, to discover that the bleeding they had presumed was universally recognized as a sign of virginity simply isn't always recognized that way. As both Paterson-Brown's study and Gitano deflorations prove, not only is coitarche (first intercourse) bleeding not universally recognized as meaningful in terms of virginity, it isn't universal, either.

  This is a valuable corrective. For literally thousands of years, Western culture has presumed that first sexual intercourse creates a wound in a woman's body. Blood is evidence that this is an injury, a thing that is inflicted upon women by men, with all that implies. From Avicenna to Freud, the "primal wound" inflicted by the simple insertion of a penis into a vagina has been painted as one of the major events in the life of any woman, a milestone marked in pain and blood. Historically, many physicians, expecting that intercourse was going to prove both violent and forceful (if not forcible), have provided advice for treating the injuries of defloration. These include soothing baths and styptic waters to stop bleeding and reduce inflammation: Avicenna recommends rose and myrtle infusions. Seventeenth-century French doctor Francois Ranchin, writing in 1627, described a class of disorders associated with defloration that included not only soreness and bleeding but hemorrhage.

  We have no reason to believe that bleeding was any more inevitable a part of virginity loss for our foremothers than it is for us now. But it was, probably due in part to the cumulative weight of received wisdom and written authority, more inevitably expected and even required. Bloody bedclothes or personal linens have, for centuries, been the standard of proof by which a bride's honor was judged in many communities, and some still expect to examine and display them today. The "tokens of virginity" described in Deuteronomy almost undoubtedly consisted of blood on a cloth or garment. Certainly blood was given primary consideration by Soranus and Galen, Gilbertus Anglicus, Albertus Magnus, Nicholas Venette, Jane Sharp, and legions of juries assigned by canon and secular judges to assess evidence in courts of law. In some parts of the world, including certain communities in the West, the absence of blood on a woman's wedding night might still mean repudiation or even murder.

  We still share a fantasy of blood when it comes to women's bodies and women's virginity, and the stakes that ride on the realization of that fantasy can be enormous. When the stakes are high, so is the incentive to counterfeit. As with vaginal narrowness and the appearance of the inner labia and vaginal opening, blood is a fairly simple thing to fake.

  The mechanisms are simple. A modern-day woman might resort to methods not too dissimilar from the recommendations of the ninth-century Persian physician Rhazes, who said that women who wished to feign virginity should combine the application of substances to constrict and tighten the vagina and vulva with the insertion into the vagina of a section of dove's intestine filled with blood. The bladders of fish and the innards of songbirds, the blood of chickens and ducks and doves, and sponges soaked in pigs' blood have been pressed into service, as have modern-day expedients such as gelatin capsules and surgical sponges. True, we are no longer likely to heed the advice of an eleventh-century Trotula manuscript that tells us that "best of all is this deception: the day before her wedding, let her put a leech very cautiously on the labia, taking care lest it slip inside by mistake, then the blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man." But that is merely modern squeamishness.

  Even today, women sometimes try to time the wedding night with the onset of their menstrual periods on the theory that blood is blood, and no one will look too closely. Every once in a while stories surface of a woman employing some form of self-mutilation—inserting ground glass into the vagina, for instance, or nicking the entrance with a razor blade so that the cuts will later be rubbed open and bleed during sex, for example. As these sorts of things are typic
ally done very much in secret, however, they are difficult to verify. Some people even find such stories difficult to believe, but it seems fairly clear, given the popularity of things like hymen reconstruction, that even in the supposedly "postfeminist" West some women do indeed continue to undertake these kinds of efforts to ensure that their blood flows at the right time. Around the world and right here at home, women silently cut into their own genitals in the name of an expectation that may be far from fair and is definitely far from biologically realistic, but is nonetheless still widely viewed as utter and absolute proof.

  Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the News

  Many people are willing to believe that our forefathers couldn't diagnose virginity, but are unwilling to believe that modern doctors cannot do the same. After all, as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put it in a 1995 technical bulletin, "The physician should be able to differentiate a normal and an altered hymen." But can they? And if they can, does this mean that they can tell us for certain whether or not any woman or girl is a virgin?

  The answer, in both cases, is no. This is due partly to the fact that despite what we fantasize, sexual activity simply does not necessarily leave distinctive marks on or in the body. This is true not only for adult women but also for girls. "Only a few vulvar or hymenal findings are reliable indicators of abuse among prepubertal girls," Dr. Abby Berenson writes in the American Journal of Obstetric Gynecology. "Furthermore, these findings are infrequently observed among children who are examined at a sexual assault center. In fact, findings strongly suggestive of sexual abuse were observed in< 5% [less than five per cent] of abused children." As the title of another medical journal article on hymenal evidence of sexual assault put it, "it's normal to be normal."

  Expecting the genitals to provide definitive evidence, however, is really putting the cart before the horse for the simple reason that the results of any genital examination are dependent upon the practitioner who conducts it. Many, probably most, doctors are honestly and simply ignorant when it comes to hymens, and unfamiliar with the literature that has shown them to be all but useless as a basis for virginity diagnosis.

  In the doctors' defense, it must be said that since hymens so rarely present medical problems, there is no particularly good reason for most doctors to know anything about them, or for hymens to be taught in depth in medical schools. Additionally, since only a subset of practitioners will ever practice in branches of medicine in which they would likely be encountering hymens at all, most doctors really have no need to know.

  The trouble is that there is some research to suggest that even those who really ought to know what they're talking about when it comes to the human hymen, namely gynecological specialists, do not always pay attention to the hymen, and when they do, they may not know enough to usefully interpret what they see. In 1999 Emma Curtis and Camille San Lazaro of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, published, in the British Medical Journal, the results of a survey they took of 126 of their pediatric, obstetric/ gynecological, and genitourinary medical colleagues. Only 28 out of a subgroup of 75 of those surveyed regularly examined the hymen as part of a genital examination on an adolescent at all, and of that 75, fewer than half were certain of how to interpret what they saw when they looked at hymens. Asked whether they believed that frequent sexual activity resulted in ongoing loss or damage to the hymen, 44 of the 75 said they simply didn't know.

  An astonishing lack of informed agreement among specialists in regard to the diagnosis of sexual history has been borne out by other studies as well. In 1997 and again in 1999 the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine and the journal Pediatrics featured the results of a pair of studies that revealed just how difficult and unlikely it can be to obtain an accurate and objective diagnosis of sexual history. In the first study, a team of researchers headed by Boston University School of Medicine's Dr. Jan E. Paradise mailed out questionnaires that included seven simulated case histories to members of four physician organizations concerned with issues of child abuse or pediatric gynecology. Each case history contained a relevant clinical photograph to be used in making diagnostic assessments, along with questions about what the doctors believed they saw in the images or read in the written histories, as well as what they interpreted as being medically true of the individuals depicted in those images and case histories.

  When the responses came back, Paradise's team correlated them with standard "textbook" interpretations for the types of evidence with which the doctors had been presented. Startlingly, only about half of these physicians' descriptions of what evidence was mentioned in the written histories or visible in the photographs conformed to those interpretations. Fewer than three-quarters of the doctors' interpretations of what that evidence meant conformed with standard versions. Last but not least, as many as 21 percent of the doctors reported phenomena that were not in fact shown or indicated in either the case histories or the photographs they were given.

  In the second of these two studies, 604 physicians evaluated a set of clinical photographs of the external genitalia of seven girls, presented with brief case histories. Four months later, they were asked to evaluate the same photographs, with the difference being that the second time, six of the seven written case histories that were distributed along with the photos were altered in terms of the extent to which they suggested that the subject of the photograph was the victim of sexual abuse. Both times, the physicians were asked to identify whether they interpreted the photographs they were given as indicating "no [sexual] abuse" or "probable [sexual] abuse."

  When the returns were in, the two sets of responses were compared. The degree to which physicians were likely to revise their opinions of the physical evidence visible in a photograph based on a written case history varied dramatically. The least experienced doctors' interpretations changed nearly one-third of the time. More experienced physicians were a harder sell, more likely to rely on their own impressions of the physical signs they could see in the photographs than on the information they gleaned from the written case histories, but even they revised their opinions as often as 6 percent of the time. This is a substantial margin of error.

  This is in no way intended to denigrate the abilities of intelligent and ethical physicians, but rather to bring to light three vital truths about medical diagnosis. First, diagnosis is a matter of interpretation, and thus always, and inevitably, a matter of opinion. This is one of the reasons why, when a particularly disquieting diagnosis is made, we often seek out a second opinion before starting a course of treatment. Second, the discrepancies Dr. Paradise and his coauthors discovered give us pause to recall that medical diagnosis is not always as simple as we laypeople want to imagine. No single physical sign can tell a physician all the things he or she might wish it would. Making educated guesses is part of any doctor's job. Last, these studies remind us that observer bias is an objective reality: even the best-trained and most high-minded of us will sometimes see precisely what we look for.

  What are we to do, then, if we want to know whether a woman is or is not a virgin? Where can we turn for an answer, if the doctors cannot tell us? The only honest answer is that there is in fact nowhere to turn, and nothing that can give us anything more ironclad than a maybe. In truth, if for some reason we care whether someone is or was a virgin, it would seem that the best solution is simply to ask.

  The Blank Page

  In Isak Dinesen's 1957 short-story collection Last Tales, there is a story that beautifully encapsulates the dynamics of virginity testing. A story within a story, the narrator of "The Blank Page" is a toothless old crone, a professional storyteller. Describing an isolated Carmelite convent high in the hills of Portugal where ceremonial white linens that will later be used on the wedding nights of the aristocracy are made, Dinesen deftly outlines the anxiety, pomp, and circumstance of producing a proof of virginity. "Virginem earn tenemus, " Dinesen has an aristocratic chamberlain pronounce, publicly displaying a princess's b
ridal sheet from the palace balcony with the formulaic Latin "we declare her to have been a virgin."

  These sheets, the story continues, are never washed or used again. Rather, their stained centers are scissored out and delivered back to the convent in whose fields the flax was grown and there hung in ornate gilt frames on the walls of the convent's gallery, a small golden nameplate beneath each one. "In the midst of the long row," however, "there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page."

  In Dinesen's tale, this blank page is the object of great and grave curiosity, an arresting memento . . . but of what? No speculations are given, no projections made. Dinesen does not tell us what to make of this unsullied cloth, nor does she hint at what the royal ladies who make the pilgrimage to the convent might think as they stand before it, lost in thought.

  There is no single virginal body, no single virginal experience, no single virginal vagina, not even a single virginal hymen. There is only the question, how do we know whether this woman is a virgin? The answer has been written innumerable times, with alum and doves' blood and urine and decoctions of mint and lady's mantle, with charts and graphs and clinical photography. But no matter how many times someone attempts to inscribe it, no matter how firmly they press the pen to the paper, we are left forever with the same blank page.