Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Young women who sold their virginities did not have what we would today term a safety net. Their families could not offer them economic security. They did not have access to education or to jobs that paid well enough to make prostitution seem less appealing. Reformers struggled to find a way to help protect these young women. This meant finding a way to characterize them as a class deserving of state protection. To do so, they used the ingenious—if in some ways disingenuous—expedient of making virginity rhetorically synonymous with childhood.

  This trump card was played to international effect in a series of thunderous, vividly sensational 1885 exposes collectively entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." In them, Pall Mall Gazette editor William T. Stead used the image of the victimized child to crack the taboo that had kept the sale of virginity absent from respectable public discourse. Son of a Congregational minister, Stead was, in the fashion of many a pulpit-pounding preacher or favorite professor, an instinctive showman. On July 4,1885, he set his stage, printing in his Pall Mall Gazette a "Notice to our Readers: A Frank Warning" that let the readers know that a "long, detailed report, dealing with those phases of sexual criminality which the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was framed to repress" was to appear in installments beginning the following day.

  Titillated not only by the promise of "sexual criminality" but by allusions to "calculation in high quarters" by those who would prevent the Criminal Law Amendment Act from passing into law, readers could scarcely wait for the curtain to rise on what promised to be a cavalcade of scandal. They were not disappointed. In the name of "the most imperious sense of public duty," Stead set forth a thunderous, sensational stream of reportage, centering upon a seemingly ceaseless supply of young women who had either been victimized or narrowly escaped being victimized, each more pathetic than the last. Name-checking the myth of the jus primae noctis along the way, Stead created a vision of a world in which the "shameful abuse of the power of wealth" resulted in a situation where "princes and dukes, and ministers and judges, and the rich of all classes, are purchasing for damnation, temporal if not eternal, the as yet uncorrupted daughters of the poor."

  Invariably, Stead describes these "as yet uncorrupted daughters" in infantilizing terms. They are "daughters," "girls," "maids," "maidens," "dainty morsels," and "little girls." A young woman may be described as "a frightened lamb," or simply as a child, as in the infamous line with which Stead ends the first lengthy section of his report: "For the child's sob in the darkness curseth deeper than the strong man in his wrath."

  The possibility that any of the young women involved might genuinely be willing to participate in such a transaction is, both explicitly and implicitly, discarded out of hand. The actual age or degree of self-awareness or self-sufficiency of these young women seems to be of only incidental relevance to Stead. Young women of sixteen and eighteen, some with professional jobs (one is a cook in a first-class hotel), are discussed in terms identical to those used to describe penniless adolescents of thirteen or fourteen. A sixteen-year-old capable of stating articulately that given a choice between making a small sum of money and not giving up her virginity and giving up her virginity for a large amount of money, she would prefer the latter, is disregarded as incompetent: "Could any proof be more conclusive as to the absolute inability of this girl of sixteen to form an estimate of the value of the only commodity with which the law considers her amply able to deal the day after she is thirteen?" For Stead, any woman who willingly sells her virginity is a child, because only a child could be so ignorant as not to realize that virginity is beyond price.

  Stead also takes repeated aim at the middlemen responsible for bringing together those with maidenheads to sell and those with means to buy them. On some levels, this was a wholly appropriate thing to do. But procuresses and their accomplices, no matter how satisfying a target their perverse maternalism made for Stead's outrage, were not the whole of the picture. As with similar modern-day exposes of the trade in illegal drugs, blaming the dealers only obscured the problem of demand.

  This demand, Stead claimed, was staggering. Citing procurers who boasted of producing literally dozens of virgins for sale, Stead conjured an image of a rapacious and insatiable market both in England and abroad. He encouraged the impression that this was all a mechanical business, a virtual assembly line in which the bodies of "little girls" were systematically abused for profit and then spit out again at the other end, a nightmarish factory involved in the unfeeling conversion of raw virgin resource into profit.

  It is impossible to say to what extent this might have been true. It is quite possible, on the other hand, to detail the extent to which Stead went out of his way to be sure he had a sufficiently spectacular tale to tell. As part of the research that went into "The Maiden Tribute," Stead himself purchased a thirteen-year-old named Eliza Armstrong, whom he called "Lily," for a paltry five pounds. With the help of retired procuress Rebecca Jarrett, whom Stead blackmailed out of retirement to do the dirty work of arranging his virgin-hunting caper, Stead took custody of the girl. He brought her to a midwife, who pronounced her virgo intacta. From there, Stead and Jarrett took "Lily" to a brothel in Poland Street, where Jarrett administered a dose of chloroform to the young woman, and after she passed out, left Stead alone with her. Stead waited with the young woman until she woke, then took her to be examined by a physician to certify that nothing sexual had transpired. Afterward, he packed young "Lily" off to Paris so that she was conveniently out of the way while Stead wrote and published "The Maiden Tribute." Without ever identifying himself, and alternately omitting and suggesting details, Stead described this salacious undertaking—although not his part in it or the exportation of its subject to France—to thunderous public furor.

  It was a glorious moment for Stead. He was the talk of England, let alone London, unable to print copies of the Gaiette fast enough. But Eliza Armstrong's mother had been reading the newspapers, too. She recognized her daughter in the descriptions Stead had given and went to the authorities. Aided by competing newspapers, she eventually brought a lawsuit against Stead. (Eliza herself was meanwhile quietly returned to England, none the worse for wear.) The eventual outcome, in November of 1885, was that Stead became the first man in England to be sentenced under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the very piece of legislation for which his expose had gathered such effective support. He served a three-month misdemeanor sentence. Cruelly, Rebecca Jarrett, though she had been blackmailed into participating in the scheme, was given a sentence twice as long, as was the midwife involved in the case.

  Despite his conviction and prison sentence, and despite the fact that he was essentially ruined as a newspaperman once his journalistic fraud had been exposed, Stead remained convinced that he had not only done the right thing but that Eliza Armstrong, the "frightened lamb" of thirteen whom he had purchased, subjected to two gynecological examinations, drugged unconscious, and sent off to another country, had "experienced not the slightest inconvenience." Nor did Stead's conviction in any way hamper the cause of criminalizing sex with adolescents. "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" made an intense emotional and motivational impact in England and across the Atlantic as well. In the United States, numerous states revised their ages of consent as well as laws on prostitution and trafficking due to reform efforts prompted by Stead's "Maiden Tribute" and the prominent "white slavery" activism that succeeded it. Illinois, for instance, raised its age of consent from ten to fourteen in 1887 (it was raised again in 1905, to sixteen). Likewise in 1887, New York's age of consent rose from ten to sixteen. Massachusetts made it illegal to have illicit (i.e., unmarried) intercourse with any person under the age of eighteen. Even notoriously laissez-faire Virginia changed its laws during this same time frame, criminalizing seduction and raising the age of consent from ten to twelve.

  Stead's legacy, the canonization in law of the ideal of "female adolescence as a hiatus free from the burdens of adult sexual life," as historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has aptly put i
t, probably would have pleased him a great deal. But much of what people took away from Stead's writing (and that of his imitators) is troublesome. In Stead's view, virgins were children not just at five or eleven but at sixteen and eighteen, and at any age they were hapless victims, completely unable to make sexual decisions for themselves. By failing to address the idea of virginity's erotic desirability itself, and harping on the numbers of men he claimed were willing to pay for it, he confirmed and indeed may have enhanced virginity's reputation as a transcendently desirable erotic object. Neither contention is necessarily true. But Stead made them so emotionally compelling that they were—and still frequently are—taken as writ.

  The Virginity Void

  This is not to say that Stead was necessarily wrong. As with most radical claims, there was certainly a core of truth to Stead's. Young women and children were, then as now, sold into prostitution, and then as now, it is difficult to imagine a more stomach-churning enterprise. Although it was all but lost in the wash of carefully cultivated sensationalism, Stead had a very worthwhile point: children and adolescents generally, and poor children and adolescents specifically, face a well-documented disproportionate risk of sexual exploitation.

  This is saddening, maddening, and indisputably true. Youth plus economic and social powerlessness is a pancultural, panmillennial recipe for sexual exploitation and abuse. This was true for the sexually vulnerable slaves of the ancient Mediterranean whose stolen virginity could be repaid by the transfer of a small sum to their master. Cases like those of the "Blood Countess" Erzsebet Báthory; infamous fifteenth-century molester and murderer of boys Gilles de Rais; and the Abbe Claudius Nicholas des Rues, convicted of having raped 133 virgins in Paris prior to 1726, prove that the same held true thousand of years later.* We have seen the role it played for the many European young women who headed to big cities like London in search of jobs and found themselves prey either to virgin-hunters or to the sexually predatory wiles of their employers. The same combination of youth and poverty plays a large part in the contemporary child sex trade in Asia and even here at home in the First World, where such things are often supposed not to happen. The sexual exploitation of the young has never been limited by time or place. The question, for the purposes of this book, is not whether children and adolescents are sexually abused and exploited—they are. The question is whether or not the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and adolescents has anything to do with the eroticization of virginity.

  The answer to this question is far less clear. We simply do not know to what extent those whose sexual desires run toward children and adolescents are motivated by the eroticization of virginity. Bizarrely and tellingly, given how easy it is to come by examples of the desire for virginity and virgins at work, the erotic fascination with virginity has never been identified as its own discrete phenomenon by sexologists, sociologists, or psychiatrists. There is no word for it, and neither the term "parthenophilia" nor the word "virgophilia" is recognized by sexology or medicine.

  It is an odd omission. During the formative decades of the disciplines of sexology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, terms were developed to describe erotic attractions to children ("pedophilia") or adolescents ("hebephilia" or "ephebephilia"). These terms are still used to describe the attractions of those who sought sex with young adolescents; the term "ephebephilia" is obscure today, but "pedophilia" is a household word.

  As W. T. Stead's canny use of terms like "little girl" and "child" and "lamb" makes clear with such admirable economy, there is a significant degree of overlap between the population of virgins and the population of adolescents and children. Indeed, we would not bat an eyelash if Stead had referred to "pedophiles" instead of "virgin-hunters." Some portion of the men Stead wrote about may have been pedophiles. But this does not seem to have been the case for all of them. First, not all of the virgins about whom Stead wrote were children, and some were as old as eighteen or twenty. Additionally, some virgin-hunters were described as having a strong preference for postpubertal young women of fifteen, sixteen, or older—neither legally nor culturally children.

  "Pedophilia" is not an accurate word to use to describe the erotic desire for virginity for the simple reason that not all virgin fanciers are interested in children and not all pedophiles particularly care about virginity. What I will call parthenophilia—a pronounced sexual interest in virginity or virgins—is a genuine, observable sexual predilection. The reason I propose we have for so long lacked a term for this particular erotic attraction is that unlike sexual interest in children, a sexual interest in virgins is something our culture considers entirely normal, acceptable, and ideologically correct.

  No studies have been done on parthenophilia. We do not know how many people experience it. We do not know when the desire begins to be felt, whether those who feel it perceive it as an innate or learned preference. We have no idea how many people have pursued specific sexual encounters on account of this desire, or what kind of sexual encounters they have pursued. No research into its possible role in motivating sexual assault or abuse has been conducted. We do not know to what extent it does or does not play a role in child sexual abuse or child prostitution. Even Sigmund Freud did little more than glance at it.

  This is the virginity void. Despite the strength and breadth of the erotic interest taken in virginity in our culture, the three centuries of virginity-related pornography, the China Shrink Creams and Lotus Blossum Pocket Pal masturbation sleeves for men (the package copy touts this particular pink plastic production as a "sleek, silky-soft pussy with intact hymen"), even in the face of all the young women's virginities sold around the world, the erotic desire for virginity has been continually avoided as a subject of intellectual and clinical inquiry, as if there were no reason to ask and nothing that could possibly be learned by asking.

  The virginity void exists on the other side of the fence as well. As little as we know about the erotic desire for virginity, we know even less about the erotic lives of virgins. Specifically, we know very little about how virgins themselves might understand themselves to exist as erotic objects or how they might themselves be erotically affected by the mythology of the erotic virgin that so permeates the culture. Virgins are not exempt from the mythologies of their own sexual status, after all. A virgin may well be every bit as erotically caught up in the implications of her own sexual status as the man who fantasizes about popping her cherry, but she is even less likely than he to be asked about it. How strange, in a culture so often obsessed by virginity, that we have chosen to be so blind.

  Virginity is not the opposite of sex. Rather, it is its own unique and uniquely troublesome sexual entity, and one we have largely avoided addressing. Our presumptions about virginity have been with us for a very long time and will require a great deal of time and effort to question, let alone change. If we are ever to fill the virginity void with something more realistic than propaganda and more accurate than pornographic fantasy, however, this work is a challenge we would do well to take up.

  * Venette's book was reprinted in multiple editions and pressings from the time of the 1696 French original to the last British edition, which came out sometime after 1774; versions of Aristotle's Master-Piece appeared from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and were in circulation well into the twentieth.

  *The case of the Abbe des Rues was so sensational and titillating that accounts of the trial were published and sold in several languages, demonstrating that the contemporary appetite for salacious true-crime stories as entertainment reading may not be so contemporary after all.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Day Virginity Died?

  Virgin: teach your kids it's not a dirty word.

  —billboard, Baltimore, Maryland, 2003

  DID YOU HEAR about the virgin parade they were going to have in Hollywood?" asked a popular Jazz Age joke. "One girl got sick and the other didn't want to march all alone." As this 1920s joke demonstrates, the liberalization of sexual culture in Am
erica started well before the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. During the twentieth century, our beliefs and expectations in regard to human nature, our economic lives, our experiences of the body and identity, and our relationships to religion have all undergone massive—and ongoing—change. It is small wonder that our ideals and expectations in regard to virginity have been shifting, too.

  As often as magazine articles have lamented the "death of virginity" in the twentieth century, and as many jokes as have been made about virgins being an endangered species, virginity is hardly so fragile as all that. Still, it has been changing, its place in our lives and its role in our culture shifting with the tides of history. We can see the nature of this shift in a massive study conducted in the late 1980s among young adults in thirty-seven different countries around the globe. The study revealed that while for both males and females premarital chastity—virginity—-still earned a place in a list of the eighteen characteristics considered most desirable in a potential mate, both men and women ranked it lower than most other traits. What was more, men and women assigned it nearly equal importance—sixteenth most important in the eyes of males and eighteenth most important to women. For men and women alike, virginity was significantly less important than things like "dependable character," "education and intelligence," and "emotional stability."