by Hanne Blank
In fetishizing virginity just as in "proving" it, what counts most is whatever can be made outward and visible, because the thing itself remains eternally elusive. The elusiveness and evanescence of virginity, too, is part of the attraction for some virgin chasers. After all, how much more thrilling the hunt when the quarry is so tricky and fragile? Virginity has long been invested with magic powers. Faith in traditional virginity magic having become at least as rare, these days, as unicorns, it is little wonder that we are inclined to believe that virginity has magic powers in one of the only realms of human experience in which we still acknowledge transcendent experiences: eroticism.
The erotic specialness of virginity is not unlike the emperor's famous clothes. Few people have both the perspective and the temerity to question the nature, much less the existence, of something virtually everyone has agreed not only exists but is fabulously special. Therefore it does exist, and to the victor belong the spoils. And "spoils" is precisely the right word. Virgins as a class are a renewable resource—recall Jerome's comment that he could praise marriage because it produced virgins—but it was also Jerome who noted that not even God could raise up a virgin who had fallen. At the same time, because the body itself is notoriously silent on such matters, no one but God can accurately know whether a virgin has "fallen" or not. For the rest of us, and for virginity fetishists as for virginity testers, there is a constant search for tangible signs and the perpetual reiteration, in story after story, of what those signs mean.
The virginity fetishist's bounty consists of stories. Particularly popular among these stories is the tale of the skilled "conversion" of resistant virgin into willing wench. In these conversion stories, vanquished virginity is the key to sexual "realness" and mastery: it takes a "real man" to convert a virginal "little girl" into a sexually eager "real woman," and she is appropriately grateful. By being the first to have sex with her, the man literally makes the woman. A woman who does not like sex or who is lesbian is often snidely said to have "never had the right man," implying that if she had, she, too, would naturally have been converted—abracadabra!—by the magic of the "right" male wand.
Men also are "made" when they lose their virginity, but in a very different way. A woman who loses her virginity loses her mastery over access to her own person: she has been had. A man who loses his virginity, on the other hand, gains mastery. Our slang reflects it: a man "pops her cherry," but a woman "gives it up to him," a man "breaks her in," a woman "gets her hymen busted." Sex makes both men and women "real," but the subtext that the real male masters, while the real woman is mastered, remains.
Beyond mastery lies connoisseurship. Virginity, or so numerous sources assure us, is a proper object of such an approach. Indeed, some writers have insisted that sex with a virgin is quite lost on the average uneducated slob. "Few of the tens of thousands of whores in London gave their virginities either to gentlemen, or to young or old men—or to men at all," writes the upper-class narrator of the remarkable four-thousand-page sexual diary My Secret Life. "Their own low class lads had them. The street boys' dirty pricks went up their little cunts first. This is greatly to be regretted, for street boys cannot appreciate the treasures they destroy. A virginity taken by a street boy of sixteen is a pearl cast to a swine. Any cunt is good enough for such inexperience. To such an animal, a matron of fifty or sixty would give him as much, if not more pleasure than a virgin." This is an erotic outlook that depends in every way on a strict ideology of class and merit among men, and an even stricter ideology of the erotic value of virgin women.
All this begs the question: why? What's the attraction? What, for instance, is the sex tourist negotiating for the services of a child prostitute in a Patpong bar—or an Atlanta back room—really buying? What are the people who purchase a membership to Sexhymen.com getting for their money that they couldn't get from any other pornographic Web site? Is there something that can be gotten from virgins that genuinely cannot be obtained from a nonvirginal source? Medicine, science, sociology, and a not inconsiderable body of anecdotal evidence argue that there isn't. But perhaps all we need to know is that the most important sexual organ of all is found not between our legs but between our ears. To look for external proof of the erotic superiority of virgins is to put the cart before the horse: all we really need to know is whether one believes that it is true.
Épater le Bourgeois?
The end of virginity is no simple, tidy ending. It cannot be. Virginity drags too much history behind it. To interact sexually with a virgin is to interact sexually in a larger sense with parents, the law, maybe even God. It creates tension and changes social roles. It invokes vulnerability, breakage, and injury as well as validation, transformation, and completion. At the same time, it is often an occasion of demystification and disillusion. Holiness and sin are bound up in it, as are purity and pollution, fetish and taboo, anxiety and fear. Transgression seems inevitable, and unsurprisingly it is one of the primary fuels on which the erotic virgin mythos runs. Of all the motifs that flourish in virginity-related pornography, the most popular are invasion, possession, and destruction. But ultimately, such transgression is not truly transgressive at all. It is in fact terrifically socially conservative, and serves only to reinforce the system that holds virginity up as something that can be transgressed against in the first place.
The erotics of virginity are the priorities of patriarchal sexuality writ large. In eroticizing virginity, youth, physical nubility, ignorance, inexperience, fragility, and vulnerability are objectified from the perspective of someone who, by definition, is none of these things. The erotic charge of sex with a virgin rests on the interplay of the sexual aggression of an experienced partner and the sexual submission of a virginal one. It champions sex as a vehicle for completion and transformation, and it insists that a person who has sexual access to a woman automatically claims or colonizes her, body and soul. It likewise demands that no woman may be considered sexually real by herself, that it is only through the sexual action of a male partner that her sexuality is truly summoned into being.
Virginity porn imagery underscores these patriarchal priorities. It does so in a very specific way, intensely focused on giving the impression of newness, artlessness, and natural beauty. The women whose images make up so much of virginity porn have skin that is youthfully flawless and fair. Their makeup is subtle or nonexistent. There is a particular avoidance of the exaggerated lipstick and mouth gestures so common to the rest of the porn industry. A'darkly painted, O-shaped mouth is too overtly a sexual performance, and this is a context where it is crucial that we be allowed to believe that there is no artifice, that whatever sexuality we see is the real McCoy.
There is a definite tendency, in this pornography, to visually recall early puberty. There is an emphasis on small breasts, slim hips, and pert buttocks. Models' hair is usually worn long but in styles typical of childhood, either left hanging and unadorned or, in what has become a virgin-porn cliche, schoolgirl styles like pigtails, ponytails, or braids. When virgin men are involved—which they are both in male-on-male pornography and in scenarios depicting mutual heterosexual virginity loss—they are likewise visibly young and fair, with little or no facial or body hair, and slim and lightly muscled, with dewy, plump skin. Their hair also may be tousled or slightly clumsy in cut, again a bid to showcase the supposed artlessness of youth.
These trends are extended with impeccable thoroughness to the genitals. Pubic hair is generally trimmed or shaven, both by porn industry standard and because there appears to be an expectation, well reflected in the prose pornography featuring virgins, that the virgin, perhaps because she is not a "real woman" yet, will have only a sparse growth of the stuff. The genitals themselves have the same attributes as the bodies overall. Plump, pink, and healthy, they never show any sign of droopiness. Labia majora are pert and smooth, labia minora small and symmetrical. Scrotums and breasts alike are firm, high, and taut, never pendulous. It is rare for genitals to display normal varia
tion in skin texture or color, and typically they are pale.
In the extreme gynecological close-up, which is a staple of virginity porn whether in prose or picture, vaginas are inevitably depicted as both tight and tiny. Paradoxically, vaginal size is one of the things written pornography can describe more convincingly than photographs can show, because so little of the vagina is visible from the outside. But to ensure that a "tight" impression is given in photos, virginity-porn vaginas generally appear in isolation, disabling size comparisons. Some photographic close-ups purporting to show a "tiny virgin vagina" do not show the vagina at all, but rather the significantly smaller opening of the urethra. This sleight-of-hand goes completely unnoticed by the average porn consumer, who lacks the background to know the difference and who has, for that matter, already willingly suspended his disbelief in regard to what he is being shown.
Suspension of disbelief works in pornographers' favor not just in regard to urethral imposture, but in relation to the hymens of virginity porn. A popular focus object for virginity porn photos, they often appear retouched or perhaps even prosthetic, with strange skin tones and textures. But whether these hymens are fakes—and many of them transparently are—is only tangentially important. After all, how many viewers are in a position to be able to judge the authenticity of what they see, or will even care? They're much more concerned with the fact that they get to see it at all, whatever "it" is. What is important is not that the hymen is real but that it is really obvious. For the purposes of pornography, a hymen can be many things, even many improbable things, such as easily visible from across a room or an incongruous shade of Day-Glo pink. What it cannot be is ambiguous.
From hairdos to hymens, the message transmitted by the bodies of virginity porn is that of nubility and inexperience. They appear ready for experience, but they dare not show signs of having already had it. Breasts can never be allowed to sag. Elaborate hairstyles show too much sophistication and forethought. Stretch marks are out of the question. The bodies virginity porn offers to us are pristine, unmarked, and ready to be inscribed by the experience of being sexually claimed. Such carefully "natural" casualness, combined with the genre's standard stockpile of imagery of middle-class normalcy and iconic teen kitsch, bears an insistent, specific message. Magazines like Hustler subsidiary Barely Legal and its many porn-industry siblings depict their youthful beauties in contexts like suburban bedrooms, college dorms, locker rooms, school gym showers. The women are described as cheerleaders, students, babysitters, and sorority girls. Adult they may be, in the "all models are over eighteen" sense, but the immaturity symbolism is insistent.
The ultimate destination of virginity porn is defloration. Whether it is explicitly shown in a given piece of porn or is left for the reader or viewer to finish off in fantasy, the trajectory is unmistakable. When it is depicted, it must contain either penetration in action, one or more of the classic signs of lost virginity, or some combination. The hands-down favorite talisman of virginity-loss porn is blood. The Web site Ifitbleeds.com not only boasts an appropriately sanguinary name, but takes as its tagline not the journalistic truism "If it bleeds, it leads" (perhaps rejected as being too literary) but instead "If it bleeds, we can fuck it!" Virginity porn Web sites, films, and pictorials entice would-be viewers with copy like "Break their hymens!" and "You'll see their panties, their bedsheets, and more," and "You can see her bloody cherry." Never mind that much of the blood that is visible in photographic virginity porn is suspiciously copious and often appears artificial. This, too, has a long and honorable tradition.
Two other signature motifs of virginity porn are "proof " of the woman's enjoyment and the trope of transformation. There is often a special emphasis on the "realness" of the transformation inherent in first-time penetrative sex. Newvirginseveryday.com promises that the subscriber will see "the cocks that turned these little girls into real women," and furthermore tells us that "you can't afford to miss a second of their journey into REAL womanhood" (emphasis in the original). The "instant nymphomaniac," the virgin who becomes sexually voracious upon losing her virginity, is another of the images on offer. We also frequently find the virgin voyeur, who witnesses others having sex and thus becomes eager to have sex herself, or the virgin who is "sexually awakened" so that she will desire sex and willingly give up her virginity.
The motifs are often combined for greater effect. In the nineteenth-century The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, the surgeon of the title not only gradually awakens the inherent lust of a bedridden young patient to the point where she asks him to deflower her, but the defloration has "such a salubrious effect on my young patient that she eventually quite got the better of her spinal complaint, and was married at the age of eighteen." In virginity pornography, sex is a panacea. It cures immaturity by converting girls into women, transforms the ignorant into the knowledgeable, and turns the unwilling into the eager. It takes incapacitated girls and bestows upon them the capacity for wifehood. These fantasies transgress nothing. They are fantasies of male mastery and female conformity.
Bad Behavior and the Modern Man
The tendency to frame defloration as rebellion is in many ways only to be expected, given the time period in which eroticized virginity first came to the fore. Sexually explicit art and writing have been with us in various forms and modes since before the ancient Greeks, but the virgin as an erotic object really only comes into view beginning in what historians call the modern era, roughly from the sixteenth century forward.
Prior to the sixteenth century, pornography as we know it today did not truly exist. This was not because the sixteenth century represented a second Fall from some porn-free Eden, but because prior to the sixteenth century, the goal of obscenity was unlikely to be entirely prurient. Instead, obscenity might have ritual or mythological significance, as with the legions of phalluses that decorated ancient Rome. It could be an aspect of public entertainment (a lewd painting, joke, or song) or an advertisement for a brothel. It might sharpen the bite of satire, as in Lysistrata, the Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Canterbury Tales, or the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. A lack of what we would now recognize as pornography did not mean a lack of obscenity or sexual content in the cultural waters of those times. Graphic sexual content has always been with us. It simply hasn't always been directed toward the same ends.
As a result of all this earthy art and prose, however, we have a reasonably good idea of what previous generations found smutty or sexy, and virginity seems not to have been much on their minds. In late-medieval Rabelais and Chaucer, for example, the classic erotically objectified woman is not a virgin but a young and lovely wife, like the saucy Alisoun of "The Miller's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales. Nor do we. find the virgin in the book that arguably began the genre of modern, smut-for-smut's-sake pornography, Pietro Aretino's lavishly illustrated Sonetti lussuriosi of 1524. When we find her in Aretino's later Ragionamend (two volumes, 1534-1536), she is not eroticized. Rather, she is a nun, established as one of the three types of women in Aretino's world: nun, wife, and whore.
When virginity does begin to appear in eroticized contexts in the High Renaissance, it is not particularly sexy. Classicized virgins, among them rather a lot of Artemises and Athenas (Queen Elizabeth I was frequently compared to Athena), were depicted as sexually attractive but also as inaccessible, and in fact opposed to carnality. As any reasonably well-educated member of the upper classes knew, those who tried to treat the virgin goddesses as erotic objects paid a hefty price: Actaeon was turned into a stag, Tiriesias was blinded. Conceptualizing well-born virgins as Athenas suited elite models of courtship. It supported the abstracted modes of public flirtation, such as the composition and performance of poems and songs, with which marriageable young people amused themselves while dynastic and political marriage negotiations were hammered out behind closed doors by their older relatives. Being an Athena was, to be sure, a limited-time offer, as virtually all of these young goddesses were destined for marriage. But a
s an archetype the Athena flourished, her virginity formally immune to sexual objectification.
Virgins of the lower classes, who began to emerge in literature and imagery shortly after the Athenas, had no such immunity. Like the Athena, the Servant Girl was also seen as sexually attractive and desirable. But where the Athena was protected by her rank and its corresponding veneer of classical otherworldliness, the Servant Girl's virginity was eminently worldly and vulnerable. Because it was vulnerable, it also became wily. If the Athena's virginity was notable because it was so lofty as to be untouchable, the Servant Girl's virginity was notable precisely because it was so accessible. Servant Girls, on the one hand, were held to be remarkable for the feistiness and skill with which they resisted would-be seducers. On the other, their poverty and lack of education was seen as making them unusually vulnerable to sexual predators.
Then as now, men's attempts on working-class women's virginity often became the site of pitched battles, such as the ones described in the popular early-eighteenth-century song "My Thing Is My Own."
A master of music came with intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument.
I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle must not be played on.
Chorus: My thing is my own, and I'll keep it so still, Other young lasses may do as they will, My thing is my own, and I'll keep it apart v
A cunning clockmaker did court me as well,
And promised me riches if I'd ring his bell.
So I looked at his clockwork, and said with a shock, "Your pendulum's far too small for my clock."