Read Virgin: The Untouched History Online
Authors: Hanne Blank
Virgin: The Untouched History (15 page)
And the vagina, hymen very much included, is a complex thing. Vaginas vary from one to the next in numerous aspects, including their at-rest size, the degree to which they can potentially be dilated or opened, and the relative elasticity of their muscles and tissues. There are also characteristics that change not only from woman to woman, but also over the lifetime of any individual woman, including general health, arousal, naturally occurring mucous lubrication, and susceptibility to
dyspareunia
(a generic term meaning painful intercourse), a condition which has a number of possible causes. All of these things, plus the subjective wild cards of attitude, emotional and intellectual comfort, feelings toward one's partner, sexual guilt or shame, and many other such intangibles, play a role in what a woman experiences and how her body reacts during any given sexual episode, including a first time.
Research suggests that experience, knowledge, and patience go a long way in helping women have less painful, more pleasurable experiences of first-time penis-in-vagina sex. We know that women who have nonintercourse sexual experience prior to their first intercourse usually report less painful and more pleasurable experiences when they do have penetrative sex. Relaxation counts for a great deal as well: a recent German study of 669 young women and their experiences with first gynecological exams revealed a significant relationship between anxiety and painful penetration of the vagina. In this light, we might read some of the advice often found in old sex manuals and medical texts very differently. When old sex manuals encourage a woman (and/or her husband) to gently stretch the opening of the vagina with the fingers a little bit at a time before attempting intercourse, we can see this not merely as instructions for gradual dilation of the hymen but as a prescription for a gradual introduction to sex in the form of digital stimulation.
It's not glamorous, it's not titillating, and in fact it's downright mundane: studies show that women who have a comprehensive, nonjudgmental sexual education and who develop affirming, self-empowered attitudes about their own sexuality are more likely to report positive experiences when they lose their virginity. A woman is also more likely to have a painless experience, as well as a more positive impression of losing her virginity overall, research tells us, if she is not coerced or pressured, feels safe and secure with her partner, and is not worried about being interrupted or discovered during sex. Women who are somewhat older than the average for their demographic when they have sex for the first time are more likely to have more positive experiences when they lose their virginity, possibly because they have simply had more time to learn and experience things and gained more autonomy over their lives than those who first had sex at earlier ages.
The research repeatedly indicates that a nontraumatic and perhaps even pleasant introduction to sex for women may be as simple as educating them and letting them do it on their own terms and in their own time. Could it be that the early progressive sex educators, like Stella Browne, Marie Stopes, and Margaret Sanger, all of whom strongly advocated sexual education and autonomy as being central to good sex lives for women, are finally finding vindication in quantitative analysis? Indeed, it seems to be so.
Plus ca change, plusc'est
la m
ê
me chose.
But whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire,
that is it which he for his part calleth good;
and the object of his hate and aversion, evil;
and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable.
—Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan,
1651
Virginal integrity, and the freedom from all sexual intimacy that comes with the devout practice of celibacy, belongs with the angels, and in corruptible flesh it is a foretaste of eternal incorruptibility . . . those whose bodies are already in a certain way unbodily have something special over and above what others have.
—St. Augustine
V
IRGINITY OFTEN FEELS MONOLITHIC, so huge, pervasive, and old that it must have been with us since the dawn of time. In a certain sense this is even true. We do not know how the idea of virginity first arose, what sorts of ideas and ideals—if any at all—were associated with virginity in its earliest days, or anything else about how it might have been relevant to the lives of those who first established the notion. But as long as people have been writing about themselves, they've also been writing about virginity. We can't trace virginity back to the origin of the concept, but we can follow it back as far as we have written references: to the world of antiquity and its Judaeans, Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. The fact that a concept of virginity existed for the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans and was discussed in the Torah (or Old Testament) and Talmud doesn't mean, however, that their ideas about virgins and virginity were anything like ours. Our understanding of the physical nature of virginity has not been historically uniform, and neither has our understanding of any of its other aspects.
It is often claimed, and accurately so, that "the past is another country." When it comes to discussing virginity, the distance between the culture into which Jesus of Nazareth was born and the culture that grew up around the religion founded by his followers is huger than we can easily comprehend. When we look back to the ancient world—a necessary first step if we are to gain any perspective on the roots of our own Western Judeo-Christian ideologies of virginity—we are truly looking at a different place that functioned according to different paradigms of religion, philosophy, medicine, and human relationships. Indeed, we are looking at the other side of a paradigm shift in terms of the ways in which the body and sexuality were understood. This shift, which was a direct result of the emergence of Christianity, began along the shores of the Mediterranean about a hundred years before the time of Christ and solidified during the fifth century C.E., around the time of the death of the inimitable St. Augustine. To understand the nature of this shift, its incredible momentum, and the inestimable degree to which it changed Western civilization, we must know what preceded it, what virginity was and meant to the ancient world.
Unearthing Ancient Chastities
We think of chastity as a kissing cousin to virginity, a state of sexual abstinence, celibacy, and purity. We frequently think of it as being an aspect of religious belief, and also tend to consider it an expression or embodiment of a particular sort of morality. When we read the fifth-century-B.C.E. Greek lyric poet Bacchylides' statement "as a skillful painter gives a face beauty, just so chastity gives charm to a life of high aims," it makes immediate sense to us. It fits our notions of what the word "chastity" means, the type of people we assume would seek it out and practice it, and the kind of lifestyle we think such people would lead.
So it comes as something of a surprise when we discover that for Bacchylides, as for the rest of the pre-Christian world, chastity did not mean celibacy at all. Nor did it necessarily mean sexual abstinence except for certain brief periods. Ancient-world chastity was just as likely to be a matter of physical health as it was of spiritual fitness.
For Roman citizens, marriage and procreation were often legally required in the name of the state, neither optional nor truly voluntary. The same pertained in much of Greece. This was a world in which virtually everyone married and virtually everyone begot or bore children. It was also a world in which men of the elite (and the elite are the only ancients who had the means and the material wealth to leave behind historical documents, and are, therefore, the people whose history we know the most about) commonly had not only wives but concubines, and slept not only with them but with
heterae,
or courtesans. They were, as landowners and slaveowners, also entitled to have sexual access to the bodies of the people they owned. For a man, confining sexual activity to the marital bed was scarcely mandatory. Simply keeping it within the household would do admirably. In Greece, though less commonly in Rome, a man's sexual activity might also include liaisons with adolescents of his own sex. As they grew up, boys learned to become part of the "old boys' club" of the elite ancient Greek world through intense, loving, and often sexual relationships with older men who were their mentors, champions, and friends.
What, then, did a person of this era consider "chastity" to be? The Greeks had a word for it,
sophrosyne,
a quality of temperance characterized by self-knowledge, maturity, and control. Discussed at length by Plato and praised in Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics
as the primary characteristic of the sought-after middle road of personal conduct,
sophrosyne
was the ethical and spiritual force that would cause a man not to eliminate his various passions—hardly a moderate's move—but to discipline them, consciously limiting himself to those actions and activities that most contributed to the general good.
This general good was both social and physical. Sex was an integral aspect of the life of the body, and everything that affected the body could also affect health. It was common for men to consult physicians to discover what kinds of imbalances might exist in the humors of their bodies. On doctors' advice they would tailor their sexual activities as well as their diets, exercise, massage regimens, and work and bathing habits. Pythagoras, for example, counseled celibacy during the summers, for he believed that the humoral heat of sex combined with summer weather might overwhelm the system and cause illness.
Ancient authorities sometimes counseled periods of temporary celibacy, but this did not mean that more celibacy would be better. Quite the contrary: Hippocrates, Rufus of Ephesus, Galen, and other medical men were adamant that insufficient sexual activity in both men and women could lead to illness due to
plethora,
an overabundance of moist humors that would clog the body and weigh it down. Finding the right balance between sexual heat, loss of semen (women as well as men were believed to produce and ejaculate semen), and the tendencies of one's individual body could be tricky.
Neither sex nor ejaculation was seen as problematic, in and of itself. Indeed, a Roman boy's first ejaculation was something to celebrate, both within the household and at the annual March 17 festival known as the Liberalia. Frequency and timing of sex and ejaculation, on the other hand, were issues with which a man who wished to be healthy and wise had to grapple. Not enough and one might succumb
to plethora-,
too often and one might become enervated and withered. Getting the balance right was the key to exceptional health. Such health was even reputed to affect the body in visible ways: Aline Rousselle relates that chaste men were believed to be taller and stronger than men who were too profligate.
Women, too, were expected to be chaste. Their chastity was a bit closer to what we today think of as chastity, namely premarital celibacy followed by married monogamy. An adulteress could be killed, potentially even by her own father, for disgracing herself and the houses to which she belonged. But at the same time, women's sexual desire was a recognized aspect of life in the ancient world. The women of Aristophanes'
Lysistrata
complain just as loudly and long about their heavy loins and unmet desires as do the men from whom they're withholding their sexual favors. Women's sexual needs were such an uncontested reality to Jewish thought that the rabbis of the Talmud protected women's sexual interests by delineating the frequency with which wives had the legal right to demand sexual satisfaction from their husbands.
Medical opinion seconded the perception that sex was important for women. Contemporary medical theory held that women's reproductive systems and overall health benefited from regular intercourse and the salubrious effects of keeping the uterus regularly moistened with semen. Without active sex lives, women could fall prey to potentially fatal illnesses
like plethora
and "suffocation of the womb," better known as hysteria. Sexual pleasure was also acknowledged as beneficial. A couple would draw closer to one another and increase the harmony in their relationship through
charis,
a sense of gracious trust and affection born of mutual intimate delight.
A chaste woman of the ancient world, in other words, did not shun sex. Rather, she indulged in it with her husband in a manner befitting her class and upbringing and demonstrating the quality of
sophrosyne.
For both women and men, the various aspects of unchastity, such as excessiveness, decadence, and lack of self-discipline, were to be shunned. But at the same time, complete celibacy or adult virginity were considered physically harmful, philosophically extreme, and socially bizarre.
Virginity Before Christianity
Whether dictated to do so by law, pressured to do so by tradition, or merely out of personal inclination, virtually everyone in the ancient world who was eligible to marry did so. In the patriarchal cultures of the early Mediterranean and Adriatic, marriage was (as it still is in preindustrial societies) a means of expanding one's household, of bringing in new blood, and of providing for the future. Because provable paternity was important, so was the virginity of brides, and the honor of entire families was often bound up in whether or not the daughters who left them and the brides who entered them went to their bridal beds as virgins.
It is likely that most of them did, but not necessarily because each individual woman had an enormous personal investment in doing so. Rather, it was just what was done, part of their culture. Also, the framework of daily life would have made illicit premarital affairs logistically difficult for many, although not necessarily impossible. Men and women of the ancient world had largely separate physical and social spheres, including, in many socioeconomic brackets, largely separate working lives. Additionally, we have to recall that women of the time were usually married off quite young by our standards. Roman brides might not even have begun to menstruate yet, while Greek brides tended to be a few years past menarche.
Premarital virginity was also encouraged by the extraordinary penalties that one could incur by losing it. Under the Roman Empire,
stuprum,
or sexual impropriety, with an unmarried young woman was considered equivalent to adultery. If the young woman had been a virgin and it appeared that her seduction was consensual, half of the property belonging to both parties would be confiscated for good. If she could prove rape, which then as now was a very big
"if,"
only the male would be penalized. Murder was also a common Roman punishment for premarital sexual transgressions. High-caste fathers, in fact, retained the right to murder their daughters for adultery even after their daughters were married, and killing their daughters' adulterous lovers fell within their legal rights as well.
In Greece, too, murder was not an uncommon response to a daughter's unauthorized virginity loss—Giulia Sissa, in her monograph
Greek Virginity,
mentions a case in which an Athenian archon, upon discovering that his daughter had been "ruined," fed her to a hunger-crazed horse. Additionally, the law provided for a punishment even more socially radical than the economic sanctions that penalized
stuprum
in Rome. Under Solon, Athenian fathers who discovered that their unmarried daughters had been seduced or impregnated were obligated to disown them, to treat them as "a body that had become foreign," revoking their daughters' citizen status and making them slaves. It was the single circumstance in all of Solon's legal code in which a freeborn Athenian could be forced into slavery.
To an Athenian of that period, this punishment would have made sense. A daughter's premarital loss of virginity, in the explicitly patriarchal ancient world, constituted both a shameful lapse of control on the part of the family and of the girl herself, and a property crime against her father. As a part of the paternal household, daughters literally belonged to their fathers, just as wives belonged to their husbands and slaves to their masters.
Unlike slaves, however, daughters and wives could not be sold. A daughter's primary worth, both to the paterfamilias and the society at large, was that she could be given in marriage. The right of the father to give his daughter away was not the metaphorical handing over we understand it to be today, a role for a beaming dad sharing a special day with his daughter. It was very real and legally binding. A great deal might hinge on a marriage: power, land, reputation, and riches, perhaps even war and peace. A daughter's marriageability itself hinged on virginity. Without it, the rest was out of the question. No longer reproductively pristine, her body was no longer of use in the exchanges of the social economy of the elite. Her value became literally whatever her body was worth as utilitarian human clay.
But what of the women who started out as utilitarian clay—the slaves, serfs, and servants? We might well wonder whether, without the issue of dynastic marriage to make virginity seem so vital, the virginity of these women was still perceived as having value. The answer is a qualified yes. We have little to no direct evidence from these women themselves, but what we do have is a legal paper trail. Rape laws have often drawn distinctions between the rapes of virgin and nonvirgin women, as well as between the rapes of women of high status and women of low status. It is to these laws that we must look to find out how the virginity of low-caste women compared to that of their elite sisters in the eyes of the ancient world.