Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Where all this will leave the United States remains to be seen. Attempts to export American-style abstinence ideology to other countries have had little real success thus far, despite attempts to tie it to American foreign aid funding. Among its brethren in the developed West, the American government stands alone with its official virginity policy, and the American people stand alone among other First World countries in having to figure out how to deal with it. Perhaps the only thing that is at all clear about this unprecedented legislation of virginity-flavored agitprop is that a politically powerful right wing, faced with the cumulative social change of the last century, has begun to panic in earnest. Reactionary, hyperbolic, and heavily dependent upon a specifically Christian model of sexual morality, the American federal attempt to resurrect—or, more accurately, manufacture—an "expected standard" of virginity until marriage may be best understood as a signal of nothing more than a deep-seated terror of change.

  *One of the numerous problems of the sexological research is that types of sexual activity are not always delineated separately in surveys. Where a survey presents figures on numbers of people who are "sexually active," there is often no concrete way to tell exactly what kind of activity that represents. The common assumption of many readers of such surveys is that "sexual activity" means "penis-in-vagina intercourse," but this assumption is not necessarily warranted. Additionally, being "sexually active" in terms of having a history of partnered sexual activity does not mean that a consistent or ongoing amount of sexual activity exists, as in fact it does not for most young people. The reader of sexual statistics does well to read "sexually active" as meaning only "has ever engaged in some form of partnered sex" in any report which does not define its terms more specifically.

  *A growing trend in many northern European countries is for couples to cohabit, then marry following the birth of a child. In Sweden, for example, 70 percent of cohabiting couples who have a child marry within five years of the child's birth. Out-of-wedlock childbirth is not an accurate predictor of harm to parent, child, or society, and is not even an accurate predictor of a child's likelihood of being raised in a single-parent home.

  'Vermont's state law permits children as young as ten to be prosecuted as adults under some circumstances. Other states permit at least some cases involving minors to be moved from juvenile to standard criminal court, but the minimum ages for these moves vary. Most commonly the age limits for moving a case are somewhere between fourteen and seventeen years of age, or up to four years younger than the age of majority.

  Epilogue: The Once and Future Virgin

  The stone butch has the dubious distinction of being possibly the only sexual identity defined almost solely in terms of what practices she does not engage in. Is there any other sexual identity, we might ask, defined by what a person will not do?

  —Judith Halberstam

  EVERY TABOO, every law, and every rule serves at least two functions. On an immediate level they exist to control behavior, to keep people from doing things that their culture considers inappropriate, unethical, or wrong. But on a larger level, rules and taboos exist as representations of the abstract concepts that a culture depends upon to help make sense of human experience. A rule like "thou shalt not steal" enjoins people not to steal the belongings of others. But it also conveys the message that the concept of "private property" plays an important role in the culture. Additionally, it presumes that there is something of a consensus within the society about what "private property" is and what "stealing" is, and that the people who live within this culture are aware of these ideas and what they mean.

  Such rules are never entirely complete on their own. When these abstracts become embodied as laws, much less actual events, they acquire context. Context brings variables. With variables come challenges about how these abstracts are understood and interpreted. If a man steals to keep himself from starving, is "stealing" still understood the same way? What if he steals because another man has threatened to kill him if he does not? Or if he steals from someone who has monopolized all of the available resources so that no one else can have any? v

  The job of bridging the gap between an abstract principle and its real-world embodiment is complex and highly temporal. The gap can only be bridged in the moment, and only by individual human beings, inheritors of specific histories and denizens of particular times and places. The process of putting abstract concepts into practice thus inevitably reflects both historical and current surroundings, theories, philosophies, and mores.

  As such, the process also reflects change. The abstract concepts themselves change slowest, real-world applications of these abstracts change fastest. The laws and rules, the mechanisms that shape and guide daily practice, change at a rate somewhere in between. All are artifacts of human culture, tools that we use to organize our lives, our families, our communities, our cities and countries and institutions. They exist in a constant, complex web of creation and destruction, growth and change.

  The regulation and organization of sexual behavior is one of the most basic, and often one of the most volatile, arenas in which culture does its work. Virginity is one of an array of abstract concepts that human cultures have developed to impose some sense of order on the sexual behavior of their members. Not every human culture places a particular value on virginity, and not every culture that does value it values it the same way or to the same degree. Indeed, a given culture's treatment of virginity can change over time.

  Nonetheless, making some distinction between virgins and nonvirgins is a common motif in human culture, and it makes pragmatic sense that this should be so. Potentially reproductive sexual activity is critical to a culture's ability to survive and thrive. Thus the onset of such activity in the lives of individual members of a society is meaningful: it is the moment in which they enter the lists in the battle for long-term survival of their people.

  Everything else we talk about when we talk about virginity, from definitions to rituals to legislation to morality, proceeds from the awareness that sex matters. Sex has always mattered to us as humans, and it is likely that it always will. The ways in which it matters have become increasingly complex, but this is just a testament to our big brains and the complicated cultures we have developed by using them. The fundamental issue remains that sex is important stuff, in very real ways the stuff of life itself. This is why we have always cared, and probably always will care, about virginity.

  What confuses us is when the framework supporting our regard for virginity undergoes renovation. This happened during the early years of the Chris-tan era, when virginity, customarily a socioeconomic and familial concern, was suddenly also mobilized as a primary mode of individual sanctity. And it is happening now, as virginity is drifting away from a religious framework and what remains of its socioeconomic and kinship underpinnings and is becoming instead a way to organize experience and identity.

  The concepts of individual autonomy and human rights egalitarianism are philosophical products of the Enlightenment that have been developing over the course of the last three hundred years. They have not only led to things like women's rights, the abolition of slavery and apartheid, and other advances in social equality; they have, in combination with a number of other factors, also revolutionized sex. Increasingly, sexuality is considered a realm of personal autonomy. Families, religious authorities, and governments once faced little opposition to the idea that they had a legitimate stake in people's sexual behavior. Now we are increasingly likely to believe that the primary legitimate stakeholder in an individual's sexual life is the individual him- or herself. Individual consent, informed and self-aware, has become the gold standard by which sexual activity exists in a person's life.

  Egalitarian and empirical thinking have also combined to generate a philosophy of sexuality that views it as a broadly universal aspect of the human condition, its glories and pitfalls shared by everyone without regard to sex or gender. Men and women alike are recognized to experience sexual feelings
ranging from aversion to desire and beyond. We have learned to use an essentially psychoanalytic model to articulate our perception that human beings experience their individual sexualities as an integral component of the self, something we call "sexual identity." These sexual identities have been observed to encompass not only the statistically (and culturally) dominant heterosexual mode, but also many others as well, notably including homo- and transsexuality. Sexuality, we currently believe, is a constant of which there are myriad possible manifestations.

  As our culture digests and assimilates these and related ideals, the ways we think about virginity continue to change. Virginity is still a meaningful term, and the sexual status it indicates is still important. But its importance is increasingly private rather than public, personal rather than institutional or familial. The decision to begin a partnered sex life is now quite likely to be predicated on the internal realities of emotion, arousal, or curiosity. This is a far cry from the days when a woman's partnered sex life was most likely to begin because mandatory marriage had forced the issue.

  How one understands and defines virginity has likewise become more centered around the individual. The concept that sexuality is the universal, and specific acts only manifestations of that universal, has begun to noticeably nudge penis-in-vagina intercourse out of its long-held position as the sex act of record. Among gay men and lesbians, but also increasingly among hetero- and bisexuals, oral sex, anal sex, and mutual masturbation are now often identified as being the things that turn virgins into no-longer-virgins. Still other people speak, sometimes jokingly but other times earnestly, in terms of having a virginity for each of the orifices that might be involved in a sexual activity, or for each type of sexual act they might engage in. There are a number of different ways to conceptualize "sexual debut," and many different perspectives from which the notion of a first time can be considered.

  Others have begun to redefine virginity according to the sensibility that sexuality is lifelong and ongoing and that a shift from one sexual status to another—the acquisition of genuine carnal knowledge—takes time. Losing one's virginity, in this way of thinking, is not so much an individual physical event but rather a process encompassing the physical, emotional, intellectual, and psychological. We often see evidence of this thinking when people grope for ways to explain a sensation of developing awareness in terms of sex, mentioning, say, a first time that satisfied the technical requirements for the end of virginity, and then describing some later experience or experiences that made them feel as if they had "really understood what it was all about" or "finally felt like I knew what I was doing." This is not necessarily revisionism or doublethink. It is often an honest attempt to express a process of sexual development that takes significantly longer than any single episode of sex.

  Virginity loss as developmental phase may seem an odd conceit on some levels, but on others, it makes perfect sense. Just as adolescence is understood to exist as a developmental bridge between childhood and adulthood, it is not difficult to conceive of a phase of sexual development that bridges sexual inexperience and a sexual status for which we do not have a customary term, but could perhaps be characterized as sexual virtuosity. In a culture that has come to value both egalitarianism and a developmental model of human identity, thinking of a period of sexual learning—a practicum, if you will—as a segment of a lifelong fabric of sexuality has an attractive neutrality, equally applicable to males and females, heterosexuals and nonheterosexuals, irrelevant of chronological age.

  The current multiplicity of ways of thinking about virginity is revolutionary in many philosophical and ideological respects, especially insofar as it represents a historically unprecedented view of women as free agents. But conceptualizing multiple virginities, as this book repeatedly shows, is nothing particularly new. Modern thinking has not smashed a virginal monolith for the simple reason that there has never been a monolith there to smash.

  The current welter of ways of thinking about virginity is, however, unusual. It spans an enormous range of perspectives and philosophies. Such a chaotic maelstrom of virginities has not existed since the early centuries of Christianity, when the evolving sexual ideologies of Christianity swirled, fought, and in some cases mingled with the social, economic, and ritual virginity ideologies of pagan, Gnostic, and Jewish cultures. The intervening centuries have given us all the time in the world to become set in our ways, to assume that the ways in which the Church-dominated West thought about sexuality and virginity were innate, natural, or the will of God. But now, as new paradigms encounter old ones and evolving ideologies rub shoulders with ones that have been around for millennia, many of the ironclad long-timers are showing rather a lot of rust. People may react to this with fear and loathing, with skepticism and analysis, or with eager enthusiasm, but few people, whether they are virgins or not, seem uninterested.

  This is true not just within the developed West, the arena of the broad "Western culture" that has formed the stage for this exploration of virginity's history, but around the world. Thanks to technological innovations from airplanes to e-mail, the world is, as they say, becoming smaller. Disparate cultures make contact in any number of ways every day. In these encounters, the enormous economic and political power of the industrialized West lends a proportionately enormous cultural impact as well. When we travel, when we export goods, when we provide aid, when we fight wars on foreign soil, we take our culture with us. This includes our culture of sexuality.

  Thus the sexuality paradigm shift taking place in the West is not limited to the West at all. But whether it is an unstoppable juggernaut dragging the globe behind it is also debatable. Other cultures have their own priorities, their own philosophies, and their own rationales for handling issues of sex, gender, and virginity, and they are not necessarily any too keen on dealing with sex-culture gate-crashers from foreign parts.

  This often leads to conflict. Women's issues, and particularly issues pertaining to women's sexual and reproductive lives, are routinely pushed to the bottom of international political and social agendas. When action is taken on these difficult issues, the divergent demands of human-rights philosophy, global-aid outreach, and cultural integrity can make it difficult to know what should be done. In the ongoing crusades to stop female genital mutilation (FGM, also known as "female circumcision"), practiced in many places and particularly in the Islamic world, there is enormous tension between the desire to protect girls and women from being physically mutilated against their wills, and the knowledge that by so doing, the largely Western organizations responsible for addressing the issue may only succeed in being seen as forcing their own cultural priorities and sexual ideologies down the throats of those they seek to help. Attempts to address "honor crimes" (acts of violence, including mutilation or murder, committed upon women who have in some way been judged to have damaged the honor of their families, often through perceived or actual violations of their families' and cultures' expectations of their virginity) frequently face a similar fate. Although the United Nations finally filed a resolution condemning honor crimes in October 2004, it is likely that meaningful international confrontations on this issue will be a long time in coming if they ever materialize at all.

  Virginity-related practices of violence against women are outrageous violations of human rights, but they are also complicated cultural problems. Neither FGM nor honor crimes are issues that can be easily addressed in isolation. They cannot even be addressed simply as matters of problematic ideologies of virginity, for both FGM and honor crimes encompass much more than just virginity.

  No matter how desperate our desire to see such devastating violence against women ended, expecting other cultures to simply stop in their tracks and adopt Western cultural priorities when it comes to sexuality is unrealistic. In so profoundly volatile a territory as virginity, particularly, the paths to doing so are often steep and uncertain. Attempting to negotiate such paths in the darkness of presumption and ignorance only makes the process mo
re difficult. Books like this one—although certainly not limited to this one—are a crucial element of change. Information about the full spectrum of virginity issues and their history, even the awareness that one can study it at all, that virginity has a history, is an indispensable weapon when dealing with a social principle that is most often asserted as an irreducible fact of nature.

  Anthropologists and historians have made only rare attempts to study virginity, and their attempts provide only spotty coverage: even a survey-style book like this one only skims the surface for a small portion of the world. There is a great deal of information that has yet to be gathered and many books that have yet to be written about virginity. It is my fond hope that they will fill in the many gaps I have left in these pages—as well as the vast territories of virginal history and culture I could not even begin to approach in this limited treatment—and that this subject will become better and better understood.

  Historical hindsight is a convenience, and in some ways it is a fiction. Books of history often leave the reader with the sense that history happens according to some grandiose plan. The sheer vastness of the historical record, all the millions of bits of data that no given historian can ever include, however, proves that for better or worse this is not true. Events do not happen the way they do in order for certain well-known outcomes to come to pass. They simply happen. The events that make it into the history books do so due to a complicated mix of initiative, inertia, and plain dumb luck. While it seems evident that Western culture is right now in the throes of substantial shifts in its virginity culture specifically and its sex and gender culture at large, it is impossible to say where those shifts will take us.