by Hanne Blank
The print media also had a large role to play in attempts to regulate the sex lives of young people. A wide variety of articles and advice columns appeared in magazines like Mademoiselle, Nash 's, and Women's Own. Young people turned to these publications not only to see what their peers were wearing, seeing, and dancing to but also what they were thinking and how they were conducting their dating lives. The magazines attempted to strike a balance between the old and the new, simultaneously acknowledging the desirability of a certain amount of sexual freedom and insisting that it have strict limits. While dating was considered normative and kissing understood to be enjoyable, young women were also cautioned that "kisses, like other good things in life, are valued in proportion to their scarcity." Emily Post described the phenomenon in 1937 as "the same cheapening effect as that produced on merchandise which has through constant handling become faded and rumpled, smudged, or frayed and thrown out on the bargain counter in a marked-down lot." Peer pressure, enhanced by the messages disseminated in popular magazines, was another mode for ferocious grassroots enforcement of sexual expectations and limits.
Over the past century and a half, those expectations and limits have often been directly correlated to romance, emotional intensity, and perceived commitment to a relationship. Beginning around the mid-18oos, a particularly sentimental version of romantic love was held up as a relationship ideal for women. It was, as Joan Jacobs Brumberg points out, "a singularly important source of female identity," so much so that Stanley Hall enshrines it in his textbook on adolescence, adding the imprimatur of science to the notion that experience of romantic love was part and parcel of the adolescent female self. The presence of romantic love rapidly became a key factor in the equations that determined sexual boundaries for young women.
A promise of marriage has, across history, frequently been the price of admission for sexual access to a woman. But with the increased centrality of romantic emotion, the coin of the realm gradually became "true love." Established as the pinnacle of emotional experience—and often in a way that contrasted it negatively against marriage—being "in love" assumed extraordinary pride of place. Emotional intensity in a love relationship took on a marriagelike function in terms of representing commitment and the strength of a bond between two people, and it is still perceived in that light today. Currently, surveys show that about 80 to 90 percent of people who marry have some premarital sexual experience, and that well over half of them profess the belief that premarital sex is acceptable as long as it is in the context of a "committed" love relationship.
Just how many women had intercourse prior to marriage, during the early years of the twentieth century, is difficult to pinpoint. Sex-behavior studies dealing with that period are relatively few and far between, and their sample populations were often numerically limited, demographically skewed, or both, but the data we do have about women's premarital sex lives from the 1920s until the 1953 release of Kinsey's Sexual Response in the Human Female demonstrate a decided rising trend.
Katherine Bement Davis's 1929 Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty Two Hundred Women reported that only 8 percent of the women she surveyed who were married before World War I had had intercourse prior to marriage; a similar level, 12 percent, was noted in Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman's Psychological Factors in Marital Unhappiness (1938) for those marrying prior to 1912. Contrast this with what Terman claimed for the women who married during and immediately after World War I: their premarital intercourse rate had, it seemed, jumped to 26 percent. New York physician G. V. Hamilton's A Research in Marriage, based on interviews with one hundred men and one hundred women conducted in 1928, showed a premarital sex rate of 35 percent. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and Florence Haxton Britten's 1938 Youth and Sex looked at undergraduate university women and determined that somewhere between a quarter and a third of them had "indulged in the sex act."
Viewed in light of this upward trend, Kinsey's post—World War II revelations that of his female respondents, nearly 50 percent of those who married by age twenty-five and as many as 66 percent of those who married between the ages of twenty-six and thirty had lost their virginity before they married comes as no surprise at all. Premarital intercourse had been on the rise since the beginning of the century, and as the century progressed, it became increasingly obvious to the general public that for a rising plurality of women, virginity loss and marriage had become two separate events.
Progress in a Pill
People often refer to the period from the early 1960s through the early 1970s as "the sexual revolution," but as we have seen, this "revolution" did not appear out of nowhere. In truth, what historian of sexuality Hera Cook has characterized as "the long sexual revolution" began not with the Summer of Love but far earlier, and as Barbara Ehrenreich, Dierdre English, and other commentators have long noted, the revolution was primarily about women's sexuality, not men's.
A largely silent, but truly massive, part of this revolution consisted in the destabilization of the value placed on virginity. The development and availability of effective contraception has been and continues to be a major contributor to this destabilization.
Historically, women have been at the mercy of fate when it came to the question of whether and how often they would become pregnant, how many children they would bear, and even whether they would survive childbirth at all. The desperation and fear that even many married women felt in regard to sexual intercourse was a direct result of their inability to know whether or not a given episode of intercourse would mean another risky pregnancy. For unmarried women, of course, the prospect of pregnancy was all the more fraught. Although romantic and even sexual dating had become quite commonplace by the start of the World War II, sexual intercourse was still often reserved for an engagement or for marriage itself for the simple reason that women were justifiably terrified of ending up unwed mothers.
This was part of what lay behind the trend toward very youthful marriage during World War II and immediately after it. Youthful dating, with all its sexual intrigue, had become the norm, but the expectation that women would not become pregnant until they were married remained in full force. Although there were other forces in play as well, not least the emotional and demographic turmoil of a protracted world war, the upshot was that that brides were younger than they had been in some decades. Between 1940 and 1959, the percentage of women aged fourteen to seventeen who married had jumped by 33 percent in the United States, and by 1959 a quarter of first-time brides went to the altar prior to their nineteenth birthday. In the United Kingdom, a similar though less dramatic drop took place: between 1926 and 1930, most first-time brides were close to twenty-six years of age, but after that point the age went steadily down to hover at around twenty-three years of age by i960. That marriage was taking place earlier by no means indicates that young people were marrying instead of having premarital sex—one British national survey revealed that 46 percent of women marrying in the 1950s did not marry as virgins—but rather that those who did have premarital. sex were likely to marry soon after. This resurgence of early marriage led some people to believe that Jazz Age excesses had given way to a return to a more "traditional" prioritization of marriage and family, an interpretation that was extended as well to the 1950s' valorization of the happy space-age housewife. Such assumptions, however, proved premature.
Into this milieu it emerged that the biggest single obstacle to female sexual autonomy had, for all practical purposes, been overcome. For as long as we have records, women have attempted contraception, often at significant risk. Most contraceptives, historically, have been troublesome, difficult and expensive to obtain, unpleasant or even debilitating to use, and often dependent upon male cooperation. Adding insult to injury, many have been indifferently effective. Then the world changed: following several breakthroughs in the laboratory synthesis of hormones, the first contraceptive pills were released into the British and American markets between 1957 and i960.
The birth control pil
l had been a dream of contraceptives activists since the beginning of their movement: Marie Stopes stated in 1928 that "the demand for a simple pill or drug" contraceptive would be unimaginably huge. She was correct. The Pill was originally available only to married women, yet by the mid-1960s, approximately a third of married American women and about 25 percent of younger working-class British couples used it. The percentages only rose from there.
The Pill's reliability and the fact that it was mess-free and convenient helped make it popular, but those were not the only reasons it was embraced so quickly by so many. For the first time in history, women could separate sex and pregnancy both literally and symbolically. The Pill did not have to be taken at the time one had sex. The Pill also did not directly involve the genitals. Contraception could happen entirely behind the scenes and on a woman's own initiative.
This unprecedented control was, as Lara Marks points out, not without ironic drawbacks. "By diminishing the risk of pregnancy, the oral contraceptive undermined the powerful psychological weapon women had previously possessed to deny sexual intercourse. After all, men could now argue that as there was no risk in having intercourse why should they not do so. Within this context the pill changed expectations about sexual intercourse. Now sexual intercourse was much higher on the agenda for some couples than other forms of sexual activity, such as heavy petting, which had been one way of avoiding pregnancy."
This insight provides some perspective on the popular perception of a link between the introduction of the Pill and the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While there is no question that the Summer of Love and related events came rather rapidly on the heels of the introduction of the Pill, there is no evidence that suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. The Pill certainly revolutionized contraception and made it possible for women to develop, for the first time, a concept of female heterosexuality that concerned itself more with pleasure than with the prospect of pregnancy. But as historians like Elizabeth Siegel Watkins accurately note, "In the 1960s and early 1970s, demographers focused on the contraceptive habits of manied women to document the contraceptive revolution, while sociologists surveyed the sexual attitudes and practices of unmarried women to study the sexual revolution. Journalists combined the two contemporaneous changes and developed the lasting image of the Pill as the symbol of the sexual revolution; scientists and the public accepted and promoted this interpretation of the pill" [emphases in the original].
The Day Virginity Died?
As Gloria Steinem, then a young journalist writing in the pages of Esquire magazine, wrote in 1962, "The pill is obviously important to the sexual and the contraceptive revolutions, but it is not the opening bombshell of either one." Indeed, large percentages of unmarried women had for decades, as we have seen, been having sex without it. The firestorm of sexual politics that took place in the wake of the Pill was not caused by the Pill so much as catalyzed around it.
In a time of intense, emotional, and self-consciously political challenge and tumult, sexual politics was only one of the many issues on which the rebellious and radical sought wholesale change. Second-wave feminism, the birth of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the idea of free love, and experimentation with family and household structures among young adults all contributed to a dramatic, chaotic expansion of sexual politics and possibility.
Somewhere in the midst of it all, the pendulum of the ideology of virginity took a hard swing to the left. Increasingly, there was a sensibility that female virginity had finally been stripped of its mystic value and could now be regarded as essentially identical to male virginity, more an event than an attribute. It separated the mature and the immature, but not necessarily in the same way that it traditionally had been understood to do: to many it was now seen as the difference between being "liberated" and being "hung up." To actually be a virgin betrayed one as repressed. The Sensuous Man, a popular 1971 guide to the new sexual culture of swinging singles and recreational sex, characterized virginity as "woman's most hideous ailment."
"Liberated" people were supposed to have gotten beyond feeling inhibited in regard to sexual appetite and pleasure. Along the way, more and more women began to insist that female sexual pleasure was just as important as male sexual pleasure. Rather than using romantic commitment and marriage as their sole yardsticks of a successful interpersonal life, some men and women took to gauging personal success on the basis of sexual experience. Intrepid explorers of the new "liberated" ethos experimented with sex independent of marriage or even romantic relationships, with thousands of men and women engaging in what was called "free love" but is more accurately described as merely relatively unfettered sex.
Despite the doomsday predictions of some pundits, this unprecedented and unabashed wantonness failed to cause the end of the world or even the downfall of civilization as we know it. Evolving egalitarian philosophies of sexuality and gender, however, have indeed transformed the way we civilize our sexual impulses, and this very much includes the way we think about virginity. Since the 1960s, the practice of placing social and economic value on virginity has often been dismissed out of hand as an artifact of an obsolete mode of patriarchy, a now-irrelevant throwback to an ignorant time. As such, the idea has appeared to many to have no legitimate place in a sexually liberated, nonsexist culture. "Virginity" could only be useful as a value-neutral term that distinguished between those who had experienced partnered sex and those who had not yet done so.
This way of thinking about virginity had its predictable critics among social conservatives, to be sure. But it also had its detractors among liberals and radicals. Lesbian feminists, notably including Marilyn Frye, took issue with the heterosexual bias inherent in the fashionable denigration of virginity as a social status. A virgin, Frye argued, was a woman who owed nothing to men, whatever her sexual history. Virginity, she argued, was still powerful, but only if it were understood in what she purported was its original meaning of feminine autonomy. (There is no real sense in either Greek or Latin that the words parthenos or virgo necessarily indicated anything of the sort when applied to human beings; as we have seen, they were primarily used to describe young unmarried women and girls.) Frye was in turn criticized by other lesbian feminists, who sought to rehabilitate the term "virgin" differently, applying it only to lesbians who were, as writer Rita Mae Brown quipped, "penis-pure and proud."
Such radical deconstructions and redefinitions contributed to the general instability of the idea of virginity. This instability has in turn enhanced the sense that virginity must be going the way of the button-hook and the Victrola. Reports of its demise are, of course, exceedingly premature: we are all still born virgins. As a point of social history, however, the anxiety over vanishing virginity is more defensible. If the course of the twentieth century is anything to go by, the ideology of virginity as a stand-in for specifically female virtue and human worth is indeed making its leisurely way to the egress. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift where virginity is concerned, one that neither began nor ended with the sexual revolution, but constitutes a broader, longer revolution all its own.
Pop Goes the Virgin
One of the better ways to gain some perspective on this shift is to look at where, when, and how virgins and virginity show up in popular culture. The virginity-related pop culture of the twentieth century could easily fill volumes, but zeroing in on a quartet of programs—the films The Rocky Honor Picture Show and Little Darlings and the internationally popular American television shows Beverly Hills go210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—lets us see some of what has been happening to virginity since the "revolutionary" 1960s, including our increasing tendency, as a culture, to reflect upon virginity itself.
Attracting a cult following from the earliest days of its existence as a stage musical in 1973 London (it ultimately ran for nearly three thousand performances), Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Honor Show became The Rocky Honor Picture Show in 1975 when it was made
into a film version starring Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry. A send-up of horror and science-fiction movie cliches of the 1950s and 1960s, Rocky Honor is also a campy, overblown dissertation on the culture clashes of the sexual revolution. In it, the thoroughly virginal and comically repressed couple Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) become engaged following the wedding of friends, but while driving home from the wedding they become lost in a forest. It is a dark and stormy night, so naturally enough by the conventions of the B-movies Rocky exists to lampoon, they end up at the doors of the creepy Gothic castle of the outrageous hypersexed transvestite mad scientist, Dr. Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry).
In the course of things, both Brad and Janet are debauched by Frank, whose mottos are "give yourself over to absolute pleasure" and "don't dream it, be it," but Brad and Janet react very differently to their experiences of sex. Brad remains uptight, tense, and defensive of the conservative morals he espoused at the start of the film, while Janet embodies the virgin-to-slut cliche. She ends up having an illicit tryst with Rocky (Peter Hinwood), Dr. Frank N. Furter's muscle-bound, golden-haired "Frankenstein's monster." In the song "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me," Janet sings to Rocky about having been the kind of girl who had "only ever kissed before" and of having been afraid of the consequences of petting, but then promptly announces, by way of inviting him to bed her, that everything changed when she lost her virginity. "I've tasted blood and I want more," she sings, echoed by two female household servants who voyeurize the whole thing via closed-circuit television, chanting "More! More! More!"