Virgin: The Untouched History (26 page)

The Puritans

In the United States, the iconic image of settlers in the New World is that of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Resolute members of a profoundly Calvinist version of Protestantism, their resistance to the state religion, their passionate devotion to their own version of moral and spiritual purity, and their militancy created tension and eventually contributed to the outbreak of outright war (the English Civil War) in England. Before the war and especially after it, Puritan believers, and particularly the more hard-line, often sought refuge in places either more congenial to their beliefs or at least less likely to oppose them.

One of these places was the East Coast of North America. Both the Virginia Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were founded by Puritans on the principle that they would attempt to establish in the New World the Holy Commonwealth they had failed to institute in England. In Massachusetts, this plan prospered. In 1648, four Massachusetts communities adopted the Cambridge Platform, instituting a form of government where authority was centered in the "elect," the most upstanding and pious male members of Puritan congregations. The elect served as paterfamilias to their communities just as they did to their own households. The "little Commonwealth" of the Calvinist Protestant family was therefore the essential building block of the larger commonwealth then being carved from Massachusetts's stony soil.

Virginity was a serious issue in both literal and figurative commonwealths. It was part of the proper life pattern for women, as well as a determining factor in the reputation a woman and her family had within these close-knit communities. If an unmarried woman lost her virginity it was a socioeconomic crisis, because it made it unlikely that she would marry. A female-headed household was anathema; only a man could master a household or represent his household within the congregation.

A lost virginity was also an ideological and dogmatic crisis. Puritans believed that just as a wrongdoing on the part of one member of a family might reflect poorly upon the rest, a sin on the part of any member of the commonwealth could draw down God's wrath upon the entire community. Punishment and repentance were necessary in order to escape this fate, for example to have the wrongdoer stand, possibly in stocks, in a public place while wearing a sign that identified the nature of his or her particular sin. Although Puritan punishments often seem unnecessarily humiliating to our modern eyes, the fact that they were public and shaming was precisely the point: justice had to be seen to be done in order to alleviate fears that adequate reparations might not have been made to God.

The very public ways Puritan women were prosecuted for sexual transgressions have led some historians to assume that premarital sex was epidemic in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The truth, however, appears to have been rather different. The work of historian Else Hambleton has revealed that the numbers of women representing known violations of premarital virginity taboos as either unwed mothers or pregnant brides were fairly small. Additionally, the numbers were, at least in the seventeenth century, typically about equal for unwed mothers and pregnant brides: in Essex County, Massachusetts, between 1641 and 1685, 135 married and 131 unmarried women were cited for fornication evinced by the birth of a child.

There were a few important differences between those who managed to marry while pregnant with a child conceived out of wedlock and those who did not. It was not that some were prosecuted and others were not: unmarried women who bore children and married women whose babies were born within eight months of their weddings were prosecuted alike. Nor was it a difference in the nature of the penalty, since fines, whippings, and other punishments were dispensed without regard to marital status. The difference was also not age, since most women involved in fornication prosecutions were under the age of twenty-five and over half were between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Rather, the differences had to do with the ways in which the women had become pregnant in the first place and what this meant for their lives down the line.

Women who were married by the time their babies were born were much more likely to be fully reintegrated into the community, in part because they married the men with whom they shared their regrettable lapse of conduct. As many as three-quarters of unmarried women convicted of fornication, on the other hand, would never find husbands. In this marriage-centric culture, this left them stuck on the fringes socially, economically, and religiously for the rest of their lives. These unmarried mothers were highly likely to have borne children fathered by men who were already married to other women and were far higher in the social and economic hierarchy. They were also significantly older. Approximately 60 percent of the men fined in Essex County fornication proceedings involving unmarried young women were at least twenty-seven years old. These disparities of age and status, to Hambleton, are "evidence not of an affective bond but of a predatory relationship."

Only rarely were any of these men, by definition more important to the community than the girls they impregnated, punished for their behavior. This led to a subclass of women in Puritan New England who lost their virginities to older, more powerful, and, frequently, predatory men, then ended up paying for it for the rest of their lives. Despite the superficial egalitarianism of the way this moral offense was punished in the Holy Commonwealth, with unmarried and married fornicators punished equally under the law, genuine redemption of a virginity lost outside of marriage was reserved for parties of two.

'Although Philip was eager to renew his strategic alliance with England, the marriage was not a prospect Elizabeth was prepared to entertain seriously for a host of reasons, not least of which were Philip's Catholicism and the legacy of British hatred for Mary's Spanish marriage. What this meant to virginity was that it became, almost by definition, brief and transitional. In the Protestant mind, there was no place for the convent, nor for any behavior that smacked of it. The cultural category of the spinster or old maid became prominent in English culture around this time, for there was no longer a functional niche in the society for women who either did not wish to marry or could not find husbands. Indeed, the assumption in regard to women was that, as a 1632 pamphlet entitled
The Lawes Resolution of Women's
Rights
put it, "all of them are understood either married or to be married."

CHAPTER 11

The Erotic Virgin

A virginity taken by a street boy of sixteen is a pearl cast to a swine.

—Walter, anonymous author of
My Secret Life

R
EGARDING ONLY WHAT IS BELOW THE GlRDLE, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an Old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement," Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1745 letter to a friend. In this famous missive, he pointed out that from the male perspective, sex with older and more experienced women had a great deal to recommend it. Recognizing that "the debauching of a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy," and "having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections," Franklin concludes that any man is likely to be better served by a woman of some experience than he is by a virgin.

Franklin's opinions on the subject were doubtless a matter of considerable reflection and experience: he was well known as a lifelong ladies' man. For much of Western history, though, those sharing Franklin's sentiments have been in the distinct minority. For several hundred years—and possibly longer, although it is difficult to document these things in the West prior to the late-Renaissance flowering of pornography—the virgin has been touted as the ultimate erotic experience, a sort of sexual Holy Grail.

In this case as in so many other instances where we appear to be talking about virgins, what we're really discussing isn't virgins at all but what other people believe is true about them. (The erotic experiences and attitudes of actual virgins are virtually never taken into account for the simple, if inaccurate, reason that virgins are assumed not to have erotic experiences or attitudes to discuss.) When we talk about "the erotic virgin," we are not talking about virgins' subjective experiences but about how virgins have been experienced and imagined
as
erotic objects.

Pleasure, Power, and Projection

Why should virginity ever be perceived as sexy? A woman who has not been sexually active is a valuable commodity for genetic, and thus socioeconomic, reasons. In cultures where paternity is the underlying principle of social and economic organization, this is critical. But verifiable paternity itself is much too abstract to be sexy. One might argue that virginity is perceived as sexy because virgins are sexually appealing. But everyone alive, whether ugly or lovely, graceful or lumpen, is at some point a virgin. Nor can we make a reasonable claim that all virgins possess some physical quality that makes them more gratifying sex partners. This is particularly untrue in regard to virginal genitalia, which vary every bit as much as the nonvirginal variety except insofar as the specifics of their experience are concerned.

We come a bit closer to understanding what makes virginity sexy when we consider that virgins are often referred to as being "untouched." What is sexy about virgins is, in a very real way, their unknownness. Any virgin's body can be
believed
to possess specific appealing qualities. There is, after all, no evidence to the contrary. A virgin is a blank screen upon which to project one's fantasies of sex and of virginity itself. No matter how much we intellectually grasp that virgins and virginities are far from uniform, the fact that no one has yet proven
this
virgin to be one thing or the other means that we can fantasize that she is the way virgins are "supposed to be," whatever
that
may be in our minds.

A number of the things we believe virgins are supposed to be sexually are the very same things that are used as evidence in virginity tests. The Talmud, romance novelists, theologians, and pornographers all wax obsessive about the portentous and supposedly invariable tightness of the virgin vagina; it makes perfect sense that medical texts and sex toy catalogues alike offer means of generating said vaginal tightness through methods as diverse as exercises, irritants, and surgery. It is no coincidence that the demurely downcast eyes, chaste demeanor, and earnest ignorance that "prove" a virgin to Tertullian, Albertus Magnus, or William Acton are the very things that arouse the narrator of the nineteenth-century sex memoir
My Secret Life
to bribery, blackmail, and even self-acknowledged, outright rape. The bloody bedclothes demanded in the book of Deuteronomy are a critical part of the attraction for Mr. Norbert, the jaded
Fanny Hill
brothel patron who purchases Fanny's elaborately artificial "virginity" for an extravagant sum.

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 variation 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.