Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  From 1582 until her death in 1603, Elizabeth's virginity became superhuman. Portrayed as Cynthia, Selene, Diana, Vesta, or Athena, Elizabeth and her virginity were poeticized, glorified, and abstracted. Her virginity was no longer a matter affecting a mundane human body and its reproductive functionings but a metaphysical aura attached to a larger-than-life persona. The doctrine of the King's Two Bodies, which held that the king (or queen, if she ruled independently) had a "body naturall" of flesh and blood and a metaphorical "body politicke" the abilities and role of which transcended whatever infirmities might inhere to the physical body, had been invoked at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign to argue that the intrinsic instability and lesser worth of her female "body naturall" were not as important as the intrinsic stability and value of kingship. During the last twenty years of her reign, though, the public image of Elizabeth's, and England's, "body politicke" had become enhanced by the overlay of her hard-won and ultimately mythicized virginity. Prior to Elizabeth's reign, this attribute could have been understood only as belonging to the feminine and frangible physical body that temporarily occupied the throne. Now it stood for something far larger, grander, and much more formidable: virginity as bulwark, standard, and shield.

  "Her Treasures Having Never Been Opened"

  During Elizabeth's reign, new vistas opened in more areas than just the queen's reputation. For over a century, voyagers and explorers had been returning from fantastic sea journeys with tales of unthinkably profitable lands far beyond Europe's shores. Elizabeth herself, well aware of the trading opportunities such remote locales represented, chartered the East India Company into existence in late 1600 to help her country take advantage of what lay beyond the horizon. Aside from her political and economic interest in efforts of discovery, exploration, and settlement, the queen also shared an unexpected similarity with these exotic locales: a reputation for opulent and well-endowed virginity. Indeed Virginia Colony, the first English settlement in North America, founded in 1607, was named for the recently deceased queen via her most celebrated attribute.

  To many, the effulgent virginity rhetoric of the European expansion—Sir Walter Raleigh's characterization of Guiana as "a country that hath yet her maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought," for example—comes as a bit of a shock. Elizabeth's virginity may have been the elegant stuff of classical allusion, but the virginity of the New World was usually the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of the brothel. The soil of the New World was seen as being, as Robert Johnson's Nova Britannia (1609) put it, "strong and lustie of its own natur." Even the rocky, difficult shores of the New England coast were praised as "Paradise with all her Virgin Beauties." Indeed, as Thomas Morton wrote in 1632, it seemed to the colonization-minded explorers as if these new territories yearned for the touch of European, Christian settlement "like a faire virgin, longing to be sped / and meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed."

  This seductively idyllic vision of eager, fecund virginity was a powerful motif. In illustrations of the era of colonial expansion, the New World is often depicted as a naked or at least bare-breasted woman, her hair loose, her posture unashamed. These female embodiments of the land beckon, sometimes even from a relaxing hammock, just another specimen of the tame-looking game that gambols in lushly fruited forests. The Americas, and by implication the indigenous peoples who lived there, were clearly understood as desirable, forthcoming, and, most important, unspoiled partners who not only failed to resist but indeed received with interest the advances of European men.

  Partly this was wishful thinking: Europe and the British Isles had become crowded, arable land was pushed to its limits, and the reward of incessant backbreaking work was often poverty, disease, and, in bad years, famine. The idea of a place where one scarcely had to lift a finger to provide for one's self was understandably tantalizing. What better symbol for such an environment than a welcoming, sexually ready woman?

  Indeed the New World did contain vast unsettled land as well as other resources that appeared to be wholly unexploited and ripe for the picking, so the vision was not an empty promise. Not only that, but as explorers began to return from the New World and publish tales of their adventures on the other side of the ocean, they produced a steady stream of stories of sexual encounters with virgin women who, it seemed, yielded to the Europeans as willingly as did the land. In accounts like Carolina explorer John Lawson's, published in 1709, we find goatish and doubtless hyperbolic descriptions of sexual interludes not just with indigenous women and girls, but eager, "naturally" promiscuous indigenous women and girls, who began their sexual lives "as soon as Nature prompts them." Even better, Lawson claimed, these were females whose reputations or lives could not possibly be ruined if a horny colonist happened to indulge his desires, "A Multiplicity of Gallants never being a Stain to a Female's Reputation, or the least Hindrance of her Advancement, but the more Whorish, the more Honourable."

  There is a strong stench of what we might now call "sex tourism" in some of these descriptions. Virginia planter and chronicler Robert Beverley described a sort of prodigal aboriginal harem of which visiting "Strangers of Condition" were invited by their hosts to partake. "A Brace of young Beautiful Virgins" would be chosen for the European visitor to the native camp, to serve him, undress him, and be his bedmates, one woman to either side of him. It was, Beverley promised, no platonic gesture, for the women would "esteem it a breach of Hospitality not to submit to every thing he [the visitor] desires of them."

  Accounts like these stirred multiple reactions both on the ground in North America and back home in Europe. On the one hand, they strengthened the resolve of the religious to send missionaries to try to civilize and Christianize the New World's apparently habitually wanton indigenes. On the other, they represented an alluring prospect for the numerous single men who went to the North American colonies (Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas particularly) to seek their fortunes. These tales were so influential that when some white Europeans, like Virginian planter-statesman William Byrd, visited with Amerind tribes and did not find themselves the recipients of the sort of hot two-girl action promised by accounts like Beverley's, they reacted quite peevishly at not receiving what they obviously thought was their due.

  To what extent such stories and claims might have been true is almost impossible to assess at this historical remove. It is likely that at least some of the indigenous peoples intended the sharing of their women to forge reciprocal alliances between the European newcomers and the people already living there. Barriers of language, culture, and custom, on the other hand, assured that such intent would easily (and perhaps sometimes willfully) have gone unperceived by the Europeans. In any event, most European men would not have considered such "savages" as serious partners, despite the fact that numerous early male settlers depended on their indigenous common-law wives to translate, navigate, and help them feed themselves in an unfamiliar land. But as the titillated response to John Rolfe's 1614 marriage to Pocahontas (and their subsequent celebrity when they traveled, sponsored by the Virginia Company, to England) proved, a fully recognized marriage between a European and an indigenous American was a curiosity with few parallels.

  The Puritans

  In the United States, the iconic image of settlers in the New World is that of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Resolute members of a profoundly Calvinist version of Protestantism, their resistance to the state religion, their passionate devotion to their own version of moral and spiritual purity, and their militancy created tension and eventually contributed to the outbreak of outright war (the English Civil War) in England. Before the war and especially after it, Puritan believers, and particularly the more hard-line, often sought refuge in places either more congenial to their beliefs or at least less likely to oppose them.

  One of these places was the East Coast of North America. Both the Virginia Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were founded by Puritans on the principle that they would attempt to establish in the New World the Holy Commonwealth th
ey had failed to institute in England. In Massachusetts, this plan prospered. In 1648, four Massachusetts communities adopted the Cambridge Platform, instituting a form of government where authority was centered in the "elect," the most upstanding and pious male members of Puritan congregations. The elect served as paterfamilias to their communities just as they did to their own households. The "little Commonwealth" of the Calvinist Protestant family was therefore the essential building block of the larger commonwealth then being carved from Massachusetts's stony soil.

  Virginity was a serious issue in both literal and figurative commonwealths. It was part of the proper life pattern for women, as well as a determining factor in the reputation a woman and her family had within these close-knit communities. If an unmarried woman lost her virginity it was a socioeconomic crisis, because it made it unlikely that she would marry. A female-headed household was anathema; only a man could master a household or represent his household within the congregation.

  A lost virginity was also an ideological and dogmatic crisis. Puritans believed that just as a wrongdoing on the part of one member of a family might reflect poorly upon the rest, a sin on the part of any member of the commonwealth could draw down God's wrath upon the entire community. Punishment and repentance were necessary in order to escape this fate, for example to have the wrongdoer stand, possibly in stocks, in a public place while wearing a sign that identified the nature of his or her particular sin. Although Puritan punishments often seem unnecessarily humiliating to our modern eyes, the fact that they were public and shaming was precisely the point: justice had to be seen to be done in order to alleviate fears that adequate reparations might not have been made to God.

  The very public ways Puritan women were prosecuted for sexual transgressions have led some historians to assume that premarital sex was epidemic in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The truth, however, appears to have been rather different. The work of historian Else Hambleton has revealed that the numbers of women representing known violations of premarital virginity taboos as either unwed mothers or pregnant brides were fairly small. Additionally, the numbers were, at least in the seventeenth century, typically about equal for unwed mothers and pregnant brides: in Essex County, Massachusetts, between 1641 and 1685, 135 married and 131 unmarried women were cited for fornication evinced by the birth of a child.

  There were a few important differences between those who managed to marry while pregnant with a child conceived out of wedlock and those who did not. It was not that some were prosecuted and others were not: unmarried women who bore children and married women whose babies were born within eight months of their weddings were prosecuted alike. Nor was it a difference in the nature of the penalty, since fines, whippings, and other punishments were dispensed without regard to marital status. The difference was also not age, since most women involved in fornication prosecutions were under the age of twenty-five and over half were between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Rather, the differences had to do with the ways in which the women had become pregnant in the first place and what this meant for their lives down the line.

  Women who were married by the time their babies were born were much more likely to be fully reintegrated into the community, in part because they married the men with whom they shared their regrettable lapse of conduct. As many as three-quarters of unmarried women convicted of fornication, on the other hand, would never find husbands. In this marriage-centric culture, this left them stuck on the fringes socially, economically, and religiously for the rest of their lives. These unmarried mothers were highly likely to have borne children fathered by men who were already married to other women and were far higher in the social and economic hierarchy. They were also significantly older. Approximately 60 percent of the men fined in Essex County fornication proceedings involving unmarried young women were at least twenty-seven years old. These disparities of age and status, to Hambleton, are "evidence not of an affective bond but of a predatory relationship."

  Only rarely were any of these men, by definition more important to the community than the girls they impregnated, punished for their behavior. This led to a subclass of women in Puritan New England who lost their virginities to older, more powerful, and, frequently, predatory men, then ended up paying for it for the rest of their lives. Despite the superficial egalitarianism of the way this moral offense was punished in the Holy Commonwealth, with unmarried and married fornicators punished equally under the law, genuine redemption of a virginity lost outside of marriage was reserved for parties of two.

  'Although Philip was eager to renew his strategic alliance with England, the marriage was not a prospect Elizabeth was prepared to entertain seriously for a host of reasons, not least of which were Philip's Catholicism and the legacy of British hatred for Mary's Spanish marriage. What this meant to virginity was that it became, almost by definition, brief and transitional. In the Protestant mind, there was no place for the convent, nor for any behavior that smacked of it. The cultural category of the spinster or old maid became prominent in English culture around this time, for there was no longer a functional niche in the society for women who either did not wish to marry or could not find husbands. Indeed, the assumption in regard to women was that, as a 1632 pamphlet entitled The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights put it, "all of them are understood either married or to be married."

  CHAPTER 11

  The Erotic Virgin

  A virginity taken by a street boy of sixteen is a pearl cast to a swine.

  —Walter, anonymous author of My Secret Life

  REGARDING ONLY WHAT IS BELOW THE GlRDLE, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an Old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement," Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1745 letter to a friend. In this famous missive, he pointed out that from the male perspective, sex with older and more experienced women had a great deal to recommend it. Recognizing that "the debauching of a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy," and "having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections," Franklin concludes that any man is likely to be better served by a woman of some experience than he is by a virgin.

  Franklin's opinions on the subject were doubtless a matter of considerable reflection and experience: he was well known as a lifelong ladies' man. For much of Western history, though, those sharing Franklin's sentiments have been in the distinct minority. For several hundred years—and possibly longer, although it is difficult to document these things in the West prior to the late-Renaissance flowering of pornography—the virgin has been touted as the ultimate erotic experience, a sort of sexual Holy Grail.

  In this case as in so many other instances where we appear to be talking about virgins, what we're really discussing isn't virgins at all but what other people believe is true about them. (The erotic experiences and attitudes of actual virgins are virtually never taken into account for the simple, if inaccurate, reason that virgins are assumed not to have erotic experiences or attitudes to discuss.) When we talk about "the erotic virgin," we are not talking about virgins' subjective experiences but about how virgins have been experienced and imagined as erotic objects.

  Pleasure, Power, and Projection

  Why should virginity ever be perceived as sexy? A woman who has not been sexually active is a valuable commodity for genetic, and thus socioeconomic, reasons. In cultures where paternity is the underlying principle of social and economic organization, this is critical. But verifiable paternity itself is much too abstract to be sexy. One might argue that virginity is perceived as sexy because virgins are sexually appealing. But everyone alive, whether ugly or lovely, graceful or lumpen, is at some point a virgin. Nor can we make a reasonable claim that all virgins possess some physical quality that makes them more gratifying sex partners. This is particularly untrue in regard to virginal genitalia, which vary every bit as much as the nonvirginal va
riety except insofar as the specifics of their experience are concerned.

  We come a bit closer to understanding what makes virginity sexy when we consider that virgins are often referred to as being "untouched." What is sexy about virgins is, in a very real way, their unknownness. Any virgin's body can be believed to possess specific appealing qualities. There is, after all, no evidence to the contrary. A virgin is a blank screen upon which to project one's fantasies of sex and of virginity itself. No matter how much we intellectually grasp that virgins and virginities are far from uniform, the fact that no one has yet proven this virgin to be one thing or the other means that we can fantasize that she is the way virgins are "supposed to be," whatever that may be in our minds.

  A number of the things we believe virgins are supposed to be sexually are the very same things that are used as evidence in virginity tests. The Talmud, romance novelists, theologians, and pornographers all wax obsessive about the portentous and supposedly invariable tightness of the virgin vagina; it makes perfect sense that medical texts and sex toy catalogues alike offer means of generating said vaginal tightness through methods as diverse as exercises, irritants, and surgery. It is no coincidence that the demurely downcast eyes, chaste demeanor, and earnest ignorance that "prove" a virgin to Tertullian, Albertus Magnus, or William Acton are the very things that arouse the narrator of the nineteenth-century sex memoir My Secret Life to bribery, blackmail, and even self-acknowledged, outright rape. The bloody bedclothes demanded in the book of Deuteronomy are a critical part of the attraction for Mr. Norbert, the jaded Fanny Hill brothel patron who purchases Fanny's elaborately artificial "virginity" for an extravagant sum.