by Hanne Blank
Male- Order Brides
Historically speaking, one of the favored ways of resolving the rape of a virgin was to see to it that the victim married her rapist. More than a few legal codes, pre-Christian and post-Christian alike, have indicated this as a preference. The woman's feelings in the matter were of no import in these decisions. From the perspective of property, it was the way to make the best out of a bad situation. If the man who stole a woman's virginity was given the right to it through marriage, at least the woman was (in theory) provided for, and no other man would find his fortunes undermined by having a new wife bear another man's child.
While callous, cruel, and gobsmackingly sexist from our perspective, this solution is perfectly sensible in its own context. Over the centuries, marriage has far more often been about economics than it has been about romance. Marriage as an outgrowth of romantic love only became common in the West within the last three hundred years: romance, after all, is rather peripheral to the functioning of a society, whereas resources are crucial. As a means of maximizing wealth, cementing alliances, solidifying land and other holdings, and organizing the transfer of property across generations, marriage has been an institution of the utmost pragmatic and strategic importance.
As part of the apparatus of this institution, virginity was materially important because of what it meant in terms of verifiable paternity of children. It was also important because it signified a woman's willingness to put the priorities of her family, her future husband, and her community ahead of her own desires. A bride's virginity was considered an indicator of her good upbringing, her fitness to be taken into a new household and family line, and her trustworthiness as a wife. It represented a symbolic guarantee of a woman's behavior and value system, and a material guarantee that at least the first child born within her marriage would verifiably be sired by her new husband, not some potential competitor.
Virginity, in short, was a critical element of the material and symbolic value any bride had to offer to a potential husband. One could even call it a part of her dowry. Dowry, like its inverse practice, bridewealth, is a one-way transfer of wealth that takes place at marriage. Dowry means a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household, so that property accompanies the bride. In cases where wealth is given to the bride's family by the groom in exchange for the privilege of absorbing their daughter into his household, we call it bridewealth instead. Bridewealth was never widely practiced in the West. Dowry, on the other hand, was nearly ubiquitous, only eventually fading out in the nineteenth century as a combination of socioeconomic forces and the rise of the romantic marriage rendered dowries less important and less popular. Even so, vestiges of dowry, like the hope chest and the bride's trousseau, remain fairly popular as wedding customs.
Like the rest of the items in her dowry, virginity was one of the valuable goods that went with a woman from her own household to her husband's household when she married. Like the linens and clothing, household goods, livestock, and other items that might be part of her dowry, it became her husband's property, of which he would dispose in the process of consummating the marriage. In essence, this means that the Western tradition was not only to enhance the value of daughters on the marriage market by keeping them virgins prior to their weddings, but to actually pay the men to marry them, too. If this seems paradoxical, it is.
Or is it? The common presumption has long been that if virginity is valuable, men will give a good deal in order to acquire virgin brides, and the potential of an increased bridewealth would be one of the major motivators for a family to keep its daughters virginal. But as the studies of researchers including Jack Goody and Alice Schlegel have shown, it doesn't quite work that way. In cross-cultural surveys of marriage practices, in fact, it has been shown that cultures that practice bridewealth transactions place less stress on the premarital virginity of women, not more. It is the dowry-giving cultures (wealth going from the bride's family to the groom), not the bridewealth-givers, that tend to care the most about virginity.
Anthropologist Schlegel posits that this has to do not with religion or morals but with good old-fashioned social climbing. Essentially, if a family wants to ensure that its daughters get married to men of optimal rank and status, it needs to make its daughters as appealing as possible to the kinds of families with which they wish to become allied. Simultaneously, they must keep their daughters away from all inappropriate suitors. In cases where the stability or improvement of family status depended upon the marriages of its daughters, as was certainly true throughout the preindustrial West, virginity was co-opted as a primary asset for increasing a family's leverage in the husband-finding market. If Schlegel's conjectures are true, then men wouldn't have had to pay for virgin brides for the simple reason that families with daughters would already be using virginity as a means of attracting better grooms. In effect this would ultimately mean that most any man could comfortably expect to marry a virgin, because virtually every family would be invested in the possibility of one of its daughters "marrying up," something it would be impossible to do without a virginal daughter to offer in marriage.
We cannot say why the system evolved this way in the West when it didn't in other cultures. For instance, cultures that practice bridewealth or potlatch in conjunction with weddings rather than dowry often have a radically different perspective on bridal virginity. The fact remains that not all cultures handle virginity in the same way, however; indeed some don't recognize or value it at all. The value we place on virginity is precisely that, placed upon it, and not intrinsic either to human beings or to virginity itself.
Despite occasional claims to the contrary, human males do not have an inherent desire for female virgins. It would be a fine trick indeed if they did, since virginity is an intangible quality that one cannot see, touch, smell, or reliably identify. To claim that men innately desire virgins is every bit as baseless as claiming that people have an inborn yearning for sexual partners who are philanthropic or insightful, or have a keen sense of fashion. Which is not to say that we do not ever desire intuitive, well-dressed altruists, but rather to say that our desire for these qualities and these people is neither biological nor inborn. We learn to desire these attributes because we learn that within the context of our culture, they are valued and desired.
So it is with virginity. Men learn to desire virgins over nonvirgins when they live in cultures where virginity is construed as being valuable. In such cultures, there are few sexual acts that can increase a man's image of sexual success like laying claim to it. When it comes to the kinds of things that men have developed the habit of acquiring in order to show off their superior status to other men, the maidenheads of young mistresses are worth at least as much as the canvases of old masters. Like winning an athletic trophy, winning the "prize" of a woman's virginity implies a certain type of physical prowess. Like the stuffed head of a moose or tiger on a club room wall, it evokes the idea of a successful hunter capable of bagging his quarry. Like tales of exotic travel, it carries connotations of having been the first person to lay claim to a new and previously unclaimed territory.
Where virginity is a sought-after commodity, a conquered virgin can reflect a multitude of stereotypically masculine virtues. Little wonder that some men have made a fetish out of the destruction of virginity. It's a surprisingly egalitarian pastime. A career in popping cherries requires few resources beyond audacity, charisma, and a penis. It rewards traits that aren't dependent on rank or wealth, such as ingenuity and a gift for gab. It's sexually gratifying, and, at least from certain angles and to certain mentalities, it can definitely make a man's social stock soar. As a venue for conspicuously participating in sexual competition, the acquisitive defloration of virgins has few equals.
One of the reasons that the claiming of women's virginity works so efficiently in this sense is that virginity is not merely acquired when it is taken; it is destroyed, removed permanently from the available pool. The virginity of any woman, at least the way v
irginity has classically been construed, can only belong to one man. This finality makes the defloration of virgins a potent social weapon. Women, however, aren't the only ones who have reason to fear it. Men fear "virginity poachers," too. Taking the virginity of a man's daughter without intending to marry her, whether by force or seduction, has long been thought of as one of the most underhanded and devastating blows one man could deal another. Seducing another man's fiancee and taking her virginity is closely related and very nearly as bad. As sexual mores and gendered expectations in regard to sex have changed, these sorts of sexual attacks have become less common, or at least less likely to be interpreted as attacks. But within some social groups, this sort of sexual theft is still considered a mortal insult to a man's virility, authority, honor, and strength.
As a result of the stress put on the redemption of a stolen virginity, men have not infrequently been known to deflower women precisely because it was a way to force marriages the women's families might otherwise have opposed. This Machiavellian use of virginity sometimes involved genuine rape, but in other cases the "rape" was a consensual event a woman participated in with a man she wanted to marry over parental objections. Presented with a fait accompli of such major and potentially pregnant proportions, it was fairly likely that her family would throw in the towel and call for a priest. In other words, shotgun weddings may have been a matter of wife or death in some cases and entrapment in others, and yet for some women they may have represented one of the few times that they could use the significant value of their own virginity to their own ends.
Unforgettable
Is it true that, in the words of the ad campaign for the 1999 movie American Pie, "you never forget your first piece"? For centuries, one of the things that has frequently been believed to be true about losing one's virginity is that the experience is indelibly and automatically etched upon one's brain. Some believe, for instance, that people, especially women, form an instantaneous and unshakable emotional bond with their first sexual partners. Others claim that the quality and nature of your first sexual experience is an indicator of the kind of sex life you will have for the remainder of your days. The virgin is thought of as a blank slate, an empty canvas, and the first sexual experience she has is seen as making an inevitable and permanent mark. It is a somewhat poetic sentiment, but it is also false. A first sexual experience is no more and no less likely to permanently shape one's sensibilities, identity, or responses than any other milestone in life, from a first step to a first parking ticket. Nonetheless, over the years many people have believed that the way you lose your virginity not only can but will influence you for the rest of your life.
The idea has a long history, but its current incarnation is largely the result of the work of Sigmund Freud. The third of three essays in his Contributions to the Psychology of Love, the 1918 essay "The Taboo of Virginity" was for decades considered one of the definitive scientific discussions of the topic of virginity. In this essay, while admitting that our Western ideology of virginity is simultaneously deeply rooted and essentially inexplicable, Freud nonetheless did not hesitate to profess a number of wholly unsubstantiated "truths" about virginity and its loss.
Chief among them—prominently placed in the second paragraph of the essay, so no one could miss it—is the idea that the experience of losing her virginity "brings about a state of 'thralldom' in the woman that assures the man lasting and undisturbed possession of her and makes her able to withstand new impressions and temptations from without." Without so much as a footnote to back up this amazing assertion, Freud takes the notion of female emotional dependency on sexual partners (an idea he borrowed uncredited from the notebooks of his sexologist colleague Richard von Krafft-Ebing) and claims that it is the nearly inevitable result of women losing their virginity. The idea is completely in line with late-nineteenth-century middle-class notions of the proper relationship between the sexes, but the mechanics of this "thralldom" are a classic example of magical thinking. This is Sleeping Beauty's story: the woman is "awakened" into instant and permanent pair-bonding by the first sexual touch of a man.
Freud acknowledged that this hapless, helpless relationship dynamic was not benign. Those who still believe in the existence of this spontaneous, unasked-for bond between virgins and their deflowerers think likewise, and see it as one of the major pitfalls of having sex with a virgin. The flip side of this myth is no prettier. Many a woman has gone into her first sexual experience convinced that losing her virginity would produce an automatic commitment on the part of the man to whom she lost it.
However, as many women have discovered to their dismay, the magic is a myth. Historian Ginger Frost relates numerous occasions where late-nineteenth-century men, arraigned and charged with breach of promise after having seduced women they'd promised to marry, replied with the predictable response that of course they'd promised commitment to get sex, that "all men do." It seems almost superfluous to mention that this phenomenon is by no means limited to the Victorians. Indeed, if there is anything as timeless as losing one's virginity, it may be the empty promises that often precede it: an old Arab proverb laments it with the poetic formula "He promised me earrings, but he only pierced my ears." Whether faced with desperate clinging when one wanted cool independence or dealing with cool independence when one wanted clinging, the former virgin and her partner may both, in the end, view virginity loss as little more than a basket of terribly sour grapes.
But there were other ways that the supposed "imprinting" of virginity loss might, or so Freud claimed, turn into a fiasco. There was a very real risk that a woman would reflexively and inescapably despise her deflowerer for what he'd done. As "The Taboo of Virginity" explains it, such fury is due not to any conscious personal animosity but by the (supposedly) inevitable pain of defloration. This pain was not just physical, according to Freud, although he presumed that women did suffer bodily pain and bleeding. There was also the deeper pain of an inevitable psychic "wound" caused by the destruction of "an organ" (whether Freud meant the hymen specifically or virginity itself is less than clear). The resulting wounded-animal rage could take the form of verbal and physical assaults. Freud reported cases of women who tongue-lashed, physically threatened, or actually struck their husbands after not only the first act of intercourse, but every sex act thereafter. Turned inward, Freud argued, the same fury caused frigidity.
Freud wasn't alone in believing that the wrong first experience of sex, or even the right experience improperly handled, could result in catastrophe. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sex manuals are rife with descriptions of how a husband could cause his wife permanent damage if he bungled the wedding night. Victorian-era writer John Cowan, for instance, warned that a naive bride's refined sensibilities, to say nothing of her delicate constitution, might well be overcome by violent or crass boudoir tactics: "The husband, in the exercise of what he is pleased to term his 'marital rights,' places his wife, in a very short time indeed, on the nervous, delicate, sickly list." Later, British sex education reformers such as Stella Browne and Marie Stopes downplayed the inevitability and permanence of such damage, proposing instead the much more reasonable notion that anyone's first experience of sex can be made better, and the associations they will have with sex improved, if they are given a chance at both sex education and sexual experiences that are unpressured and noncoercive. But even the resolutely progressive Stopes, in her bestselling Married Love (1918), could not entirely get away from the notion of the permanently ruinous first sexual experience, relating that there have been "not a few brides whom the horror of the first night of marriage . . . has driven to suicide or insanity."
It took most of the twentieth century for the notion that virginity loss permanently shaped one's sexual existence to fade from the sex manuals and psychology texts, and even now one still occasionally finds traces of it in the literature. As late as 2003, analysts Deanna Holtzman and Nancy Kulish were still hard at work, in an issue of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, de
bunking the Freudian "vengeful virgin" theory with a curt "we feel this idea of revenge against the deflowerer is an example of a male fantasy projected onto the female." Few if any reputable professionals still espouse the idea that virginity loss gives rise to these spontaneous, uncontrollable reactions, but the belief lives on despite the change in the psychoanalytic party line. A bad first experience of sex, particularly if a woman loses her virginity as a result of rape or incest, is still often popularly touted as the cause of frigidity, inability to orgasm, or lesbianism. (It is sometimes similarly claimed that a bad first experience with a woman can "turn a man gay.") Conversely, in the long tradition of making a disease of female sexual desire, a woman who enjoys her first sexual experience might become a nymphomaniac or a "sex addict," instantly and permanently dependent not on the specific man in question but on the act itself. With the recent resurgence of emphasis being placed on virginity (or "premarital sexual abstinence" as it's often called in today's rhetoric) for teenagers of both sexes, we sometimes find young men turning this mythology on themselves as well, embracing virginity out of fear that if they taste the forbidden fruit, they might not be able to keep themselves from becoming "man-whores."
What all of these beliefs about virginity loss have in common is the idea that there is a deep, core portion of the self that cannot be altered consciously, yet is completely reshaped in an instant by a single sexual experience. Newly deflowered virgins are imagined as the helpless recipients of some sort of automatic imprint, helplessly following in the wake of their own virginity loss like baby ducks following their mother. In reality it's just another manifestation of the fantasy that losing our virginity should by rights leave traces. For better or worse, however, what we generally take away from losing our virginity are only the same sorts of memories, variegated in type and intensity, prone to distortion and fading, as we have of the other memorable events in our lives.