Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  * Women's magazines of the mid—twentieth century advised readers to assess the pertness of their breasts by seeing whether the breast sagged sufficiently to hold a pencil in place against the rib cage. Only those whose breasts could not keep the pencil from falling "passed" this test.

  'Indeed, it still is. On the shelves of many an adult bookshop one can find vaginal creams called things like China Shrink Cream and Tighten Up. Though touted as containing "secret herbs" and various oriental essences, the active ingredient in such concoctions is often alum in the form of food-grade potassium aluminum sulfate. Mixed with polyethylene glycol, a water-soluble waxy substance often used as a base for medicated ointments and cosmetics, it becomes a lotion or cream that is touted as being able to increase sexual pleasure by tightening the vagina so that it is "as tight as a virgin's."

  CHAPTER 7

  Opening Night

  A Virgin's Bath: If a young woman about to have sex for the first time bathes in mint tea, rubs her body with vetiver oil, and drinks a cup of sage tea warmed with a dash of whiskey, her first sexual experience will be good.

  —Traditional hoodoo recipe, related by Catherine yronwode

  SHORTLY AFTER I BEGAN WORKING on this book, I discovered that it was next to impossible to actually have a discussion about virginity. Every time I tried, the conversation was inexorably yanked to the topic of "losing it." It was as if there were some strange force that kept pulling conversation away from virginity and toward the moment of its end. Wanting to discuss other things—virginity in religion, the myth of the droit de seigneur, season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—this vexed me. I wasn't writing a book about virginity loss, after all.

  Eventually it dawned upon me that this wasn't just my friends' oversexed imaginations at work, but rather the nature of the beast. Virginity is invariably defined in terms of what it is not, and is believed to be proven most incontrovertibly by whatever signs (blood, pain, etc.) become obvious only in the moment of its obliteration. We usually describe our own virginities starting from the point at which we ceased to be virgins at all. In retrospect I realize that the tendency to speak of virginity loss rather than of virginity itself should not have surprised me. Virginity is because it ends. For this reason if for no other (and there are plenty of others), it makes sense for a book about virginity to also be a book that is, at least in some small part, about the loss of virginity.

  The Ritual

  Throughout history, losing one's virginity has been viewed as a ritual of transformation. Not merely the transformation from being one of the people who hasn't slept with anybody to being one of the ones who has, but a ritual that transforms a boy into a man, a girl into a woman, a child into an adult. But why?

  Simply experiencing sexual curiosity or even engaging in genital acts isn't what makes the difference between child and adult. Sexual play is part of childhood in many cultures around the world, but we don't consider a child an adult just because he or she gets caught "playing doctor." Neither do we attribute adulthood to-a child who has been sexually abused, even if he or she has experienced what we might think of as adult sexuality. If anything, we are prone to see such a child as even more vulnerable and in need of greater protection.

  Losing one's virginity in a socially significant sense, the kind of virginity loss that "makes a woman" or "makes a man" out of someone, is clearly not just a matter of having gone through the motions. Something more than mere mechanical genital activity is at stake. That "something more," it would seem, lies somewhere in the tangled intersection of reproductive capacity, sexual desire, physical maturation, and the massive social importance of parenthood.

  Children's sexual curiosity and adult sexuality are different in many ways. Perhaps the most important difference is that adult (hetero)sexuality has the potential of producing pregnancies, which in turn tends to lead to the assumption of that most adult of responsibilities, the rearing of the next generation. When sexual activity can be directly linked to parenthood—as has been the case for most of human history, since reliable contraception is a fairly recent thing—then it makes perfect sense that sexual activity also gets linked to adulthood and the assumption of adult responsibility. For centuries our social structures have institutionalized this principle, making a tidy tautological circle in which the biological activities of sex and reproduction are yoked to the social assumption of fully adult status in the community. Reproductive sexual capacity becomes the linchpin around which we organize the assumption of social adulthood.

  Historically, few people have felt a need to try to separate out the elements of this process. As long as puberty, marriage, and virginity loss all generally followed fairly closely on one another's heels, a woman's social and biological adulthood could not only appear to unfold as a single streamlined entity, it could actually do so. The rituals that were created to mark the culmination of this process were often structured in ways that supported this impression of a single unbroken unfolding into adulthood—for example, as the ancient Greeks did, by incorporating virginity loss into the wedding. Their wedding festivities, which often took place when a young woman was somewhere in her early to mid teens, commonly included a noisy processional that conducted the bride and groom into a private room or enclosure near the site of the wedding feast. Then and there, with their friends and family just outside singing hymns to the god of marriage and generally carrying on, the marriage was consummated and the wife—no longer a bride—and her husband would emerge to cheering and revelry.

  This custom, seamlessly weaving together the wedding and loss of virginity, survived in various forms in various cultures around the globe, including both Jewish and Christian weddings in the West. Even today it's a common custom for the bride and groom to retire together, at the end of the ceremony, to some area set aside from the rest of the wedding party. It's also commonplace for the guests at the party or reception to cheer when the newlyweds enter the room for the first time as a married couple, just as the guests would have cheered the ancient Greek bride and groom as they left the nuptial chamber and returned to the wedding feast. These days there probably aren't too many couples who seize the opportunities for privacy offered at the end of the wedding or before the reception to consummate their union (one imagines it would rather shock the guests), but that is where the custom arose.

  Symbol and Substance

  Fortunately for those who prefer less pressure and greater privacy, the seclusion of the bride and groom has, over the years, become just another symbolic gesture. But symbols and symbolic gestures are critical to rites of passage. Weddings are correspondingly full of such symbolic images and moments: the throwing of rice to symbolize fertility, the custom of wearing something blue on one's wedding day as a symbol of fidelity, the idea of passing on one's luck and happiness by tossing the bouquet, and so on. Of all the common wedding customs that we currently observe in the West, though, the seclusion of the bride and groom is the only one with a demonstrable link to the issue of the bride's virginity.

  This may come as rather a surprise, given what is often said to be true of other popular wedding customs and symbols. But the historical record bears it out. Take, for instance, our penchant for dressing brides in white. The white wedding gown is popularly supposed to indicate a bride's virginal purity. Many people, including some misinformed scholars, have endorsed this association, perhaps thinking that the gown symbolizes the white sheets upon which some cultures traditionally expect a bride to bleed in order to provide proof of her wedding-night virginity. The two things actually have nothing to do with each other. If they did, we might expect that white would be a pancultural preference in bridal clothing, used wherever virginity is valued. But white has only rather recently become the color associated with brides, and only in the West—China, India, Japan, and other cultures also recognize and value virginity, but do not traditionally favor white for brides.

  The white wedding gown is an inheritance from none other than England's Queen Victoria.
At her 1840 wedding, she made the unprecedented sartorial choice—the traditional wedding color for royal brides at the time was silver—of wearing a splendid white satin gown trimmed with orange blossoms, along with a veil of Honiton lace and a tasteful array of diamond jewelry, some of which had been given to her by her groom, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Victoria's dress unintentionally kick-started the tradition of the white wedding dress: how better to feel like a queen, particularly one who had been enjoying a highly public storybook romance, on one's wedding day than to dress like one? In an era where most women married in whatever constituted their Sunday best, a white gown was also a form of conspicuous consumption, a lavish display of the fact that a bride's family could afford to spend large sums on a garment that the bride would, by definition, never wear again. White is also difficult to keep clean, and thus a spotless white gown had associations both with purity (although not necessarily specifically sexual purity) and with attaining a pristine remove from the grimy workaday world. Fine symbolic meanings to take to the altar, indeed.

  Had Victoria chosen to be married in blue, a popular choice at the time, Billy Idol might have sung about it being a nice day for a blue wedding, not a white one. Blue, yellow (the color associated with the Greek god of marriage, although in other places and times, also the color associated with prostitution), joyous reds, and even black, gray, and brown were common choices prior to Victoria's wedding, and blue and yellow remained popular into the early years of the twentieth century. But gradually, no doubt partly because of the spread of the popular belief that white dresses conveyed some elemental truth about the virginity of the women who wore them, the white wedding gown ascended to its current status as icon of the sexually untouched bride.

  The veil shares the wedding gown's reputation for having some relationship to bridal virginity. Some sources have asserted that the custom of the veil arose from the desire to visually depict the bride's virginity, a sort of symbolic open-air hymen. Alas for the imaginative souls who came up with this interpretation of the bridal veil, none of the evidence we have on the custom of veiling suggests that this is the case. Rather, the primary function historically ascribed to facial veils is protection: against dirt and insects; against the gaze of potentially predatory men; and, most important in terms of weddings, against evil spirits, demons, or the evil eye. Veiling the face and thus the identity of a bride was long believed to render her immune from attacks by demons and witches, who depended on either seeing the eyes of the intended victim or on knowing her exact identity. A closely related custom, dressing the bridesmaids in identical dresses, was similarly intended to confuse evil spirits or those who wished to harm the bride. What becomes clear when we look at customs like white wedding gowns and bridal veils, at their historical meanings as well as the specifically sexual meanings we have attributed to them more recently, is that we are master creators of symbolic gestures. Socially significant moments tend to acquire symbolic meaning, even if we have to stick those symbolic meanings on with glue.

  Equal Rites?

  Rites of passage are not, in and of themselves, changes of status or stage in life. Rather, they are the social and cultural acknowledgment of changes that are either in the process of taking place or which have already happened. The most common rites of passage exist around the events of birth, menarche, attainment of adulthood, marriage, and death. Logically enough, as cultures change, rites of passage change, too, in scope and style. We do still observe some of the rites of passage we have observed as a species since time immemorial, most prominently funerals and weddings. We have also evolved new rites of passage that invoke and serve the kinds of social transitions that are meaningful to us today. One of them is the rite of passage of "the first time."

  Virginity loss gets enacted, as a rite of passage, in a way that is partly private, partly public, partly symbolic, and partly explicit. It is diffuse, happening on an informal basis through peer-to-peer communication, not concentrated in the form of a group event or ceremony. The confirmation of social status change is slow, relying upon multiple retellings of virginity-loss stories in different contexts, for different and usually very private audiences. In many ways it is the opposite to the announcements, invitations, formal ceremony, eventfulness, and public witness of weddings. But it is very similar in its function as a rite of passage that marks the borderland of adulthood, and very similar, indeed, in being a social performance.

  We might well wonder how it became possible for such a seemingly private experience to take on such a central role in the process of becoming socially adult. Part of the answer is that it has always been this way—for men. Men have always commemorated virginity loss and the acquisition of sexual experience on a peer-to-peer basis. In most Western cultures, the bulk of any young man's sexual learning traditionally comes from other men. This takes many forms: locker room braggadocio, the creation of and trade in pornography, young men being taken by male relatives to a brothel for their first experience of intercourse (still common in much of Central and South America; recent studies reveal that around a quarter of contemporary Ecuadoran men lose their virginity in such a setting), bachelor parties, and even ancient Greece's system of paidika, where older men took on younger men as proteges and sexual partners. Men are mutually complicit in one another's sexual upbringings. Among other things, this means that for men, sexuality can and does exist in an independent frame of reference that includes neither women as individual people nor heterosexuality as part of a meaningful human relationship. Men have sex. It is something they do and something they acquire.

  Women, on the other hand, have often been construed as being sex. Women's sexuality, unlike men's, has never really been allowed to exist as a frame of reference unto itself. The K-strategist's dilemma, the need for resources with which to rear resource-intensive offspring, has kept female sexuality tied to so-cioeconomics. Men could experience their own sexual milestones as occasions for private celebration because there is no direct material consequence, for men, to sexual activity. Women, however, often learned the hard way to capitalize on the protections offered them by the public ritualizing of their own sexual milestones. This is not to say that in the past, all women waited until marriage to have sex, or that modern women have become sexual in unprecedented ways. Rather, it is to say that in the past, women who had sex prior to marriage, even if they were victims of sexual violence, typically had to hide it under pain of severe punishment, whereas modern women have acquired the unprecedented ability not to have to do so. The difference is vast. Women's newfound ability to be known as independently sexual is a large part of what has gone into making virginity loss a modern rite of passage all its own.

  Telling Stories

  Marriage has, in the past hundred years, lost much of its gravitas as the rite of passage through which women assume the mantle of adulthood. This is in large part because marriage today rarely takes place at the onset of adulthood. Most contemporary Westerners have completed their education, spent several years as self-supporting members of the workforce, lived on their own and run their own households, and, in most cases, had at least some experience with romantic and/or sexual relationships before they marry for the first time (if indeed they marry at all). But except for weddings, we have no formal public rite of passage that exists to acknowledge the achievement of female adulthood. We come of age in myriad ways, and more often than not we do so long before we marry. Drifting along as we do on the currents of cultural change, the element of the adulthood rite-of-passage to which we seem to cling tightest is not marriage but the onset of sexual activity. Having sex is a true centerpiece of our traditional values.

  As is typical of rites of passage, the actual act or acts—in this case, first-time sex—are only part of the picture. The bulk of a rite of passage is the social acknowledgment of the transition. In the case of virginity loss, the vehicle for this acknowledgment is storytelling. Both before and after the actual event(s) of first-time sex, we both prepare for
and commemorate the transition, this entry into the world of the adult, by rehearsing expectations, fears, experiences, and lore "through the grapevine."

  Virginity researchers Laura Carpenter and Sharon Thompson are among the few academics to have looked at how this rite of passage works, gathering hundreds of examples of the stories contemporary teenagers tell one another about their experiences of virginity loss. It is through telling, comparing, and validating such stories that adolescents confirm to themselves and one another that they've officially crossed the threshold into the world of adulthood. Tales from the trenches provide models for those who have not yet lost their virginity, giving the uninitiated a selection of blueprints for the ways the experience is supposed to happen. They teach us what is considered desirable and undesirable, right and wrong. The social styles of our cultures and peer groups, reflected in the stories we tell, shape our understanding of what our sexual lives mean and are, including what we're likely to say about our own experiences.

  This is why, as collections of virginity-loss narratives like Karen Bouris's The First Time and Louis Crozier's Losing It demonstrate, despite the infinite variety of our personal experiences with first-time sex, we tell a fairly limited number of stories about it. There are positive versions and negative versions, and variety in the details, but over a broad sample, virginity-loss tales are for the most part quite similar. Objective facts—what happened and how—are less important than communicating symbolic truths. The stories that we tell say less about what was literally experienced than they do about how we felt about the experience, how we wanted to feel about it, and how our culture expects us to feel about it. They are the way in which we contemporary Westerners transmute a physical moment into a social fact, hearing and telling our stories of first-time sex as our adult rite of passage.