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Virgin: The Untouched History

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A billboard in Baltimore used to read, "Virgin: teach your kids it's not a dirty word." That it could be thought of as a dirty word, and that social forces might pay good money to change this concept, illustrate part of the ambivalent feelings our society has toward virgins and virginity. The ambivalence, at many levels, is exhaustively examined in _Virgin: The Untouched History_ (Bloomsbury) by Hanne Blank. An independent historian (with some books of erotica to her credit), Blank says that she was working as a sex educator and wanted to find authoritative sources on virginity. Despite the medical, historic, religious, and social implications of the subject, she found few. "Even though my interests were limited to virginity and virgins in the Western world, it was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if I wanted to read a comprehensive survey of virginity, I was going to have to write it." Her book is indeed comprehensive, and it is scholarly but far from dry, as she examines the surprisingly complicated topic of what a virgin is, and tries to make sense of why the subject has been on our collective minds for so many centuries.

Just defining what a virgin is is a tough exercise. And it isn't just a philosophical or verbal one: "It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die." The confusion is shown by Augustine, who said that if a virgin resisted rape, then she was still a virgin after rape. The defining emphasis on a potentially procreative act, rather than any other canoodling, isn't because of any inherent biological cause, but seems to be due to social factors, like a father's valuing his daughter's virginity as a bargaining chip in matrimonial negotiations No other animal besides ourselves seems to recognize or value a condition of virginity. Sometimes the explanation given is that humans are the only animals with hymens, but this is not true; lots of mammals have them, and they have hymens that are useful in, say, sealing out water, or only opening up when the female is in estrus. No animal besides ourselves pays the hymen any attention, and this is despite that the human hymen serves no function. There is no accurate test for virginity, although many have been proposed, from the supposedly physiological to the downright superstitious. "The simple fact is that short of catching someone in the act of sex, virginity can be neither proven nor disproven. We cannot prove it today, nor have we ever been able to." Just to show how patriarchal is the interest in such tests, there is always one form of evidence that is universally considered inadmissible in the matter: the woman's own verbal testimony.

"Of all the countries of the developed world," writes Blank, "the United States is the only one that has to date created a federal agenda having specifically to do with the virginity of its citizens." Our federal government is attempting to establish virginity as the only proper sexual status for its never-married citizens. That young people should abstain from sex is the basis of millions of dollars of federal programs; that they do not abstain, and never have, is obvious but makes no difference to those with a pro-virginity agenda. Usually such agendas come from religious groups. Funding, for instance, goes to a program called Free Teens USA, which is run by people with strong ties to the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The church maintains that any sexual activity outside of marriage is an abomination, and Reverend Moon has advocated that a woman who is threatened with rape ought to kill herself rather than undergo extramarital coitus. Less extreme religious groups may advocate virginity, but the results are poor. Abstinence programs do not reliably lower risky sexual behavior. When the Centers for Disease Control did research into programs that were supposed to reduce such behavior, none of the programs that were successful were centered on abstinence. (Since then, the CDC has discontinued such research and removed the results from its website, and its recommendations for contraception have been replaced by statements of official support for abstinence and abstinence only.) Blank's book is not a polemic, but her enlightening historical review of western attitudes to virginity would be good reading for anyone making governmental policy about our virgins. It is also a call to remember the long confusion of historical definitions and attitudes, and that "losing one's virginity" is probably not one physical, emotional, or psychological event, but a process of sexual development that is different for everyone and ought not be oversimplified as one coital act.

I have been looking forward to this book with vivid interest, since I have studied the subject myself in the context of sociobiology and given it more than a passing thought. The author divided her book in two main sections, the first being devoted chiefly to the bio-medical aspects of virginity, the second to its cultural and religious aspects. Both parts are well written and read sometimes as a thriller on a fascinating subject. Since the author limited herself to the Western history of the subject, she can hardly be blamed for incompleteness, but the result is, as a consequence, somewhat biased.
Some examples. The Greek word 'hymen' means 'membrane' in general, but Hymen is also the Greco-Roman god of marriage. I have always found the learned question whether there is a link between the two highly prosaic, but the author seems to agree with the view that there is no relation. Yet, the mytho-poetical transformation of empirical data often splits the meaning of words into different spheres of significance. So, for Hippocrates epilepsy was merely a process within the brain, whereas it was a 'holy sickness' in Greek religion. Hymen, the god, and hymen, the word, both have roots in Sanskrit culture. Such loose ends get lost in a study which limits itself to the Western history only.
The original manuscript of the book had about 1000 pages which the publisher wanted to be reduced to less than 300, so it is hardly amazing that only a selection of the enormous amount of material in the medical literature is included in the publication. The author concentrates on the final 'discovery of the hymen' by Vesalius, but its existence was still denied afterwards, not only by Paré. There was a real ideological 'battle of the hymen', with an obvious division between conservatives, sceptics and libertines. This highly relevant battle, with philosophical parallels, is not adequately expounded. The conclusion of the first part of the book is that the hymen does indeed exist, but has no discernible function, so that its significance in culture is a malleable social construct void of any fundament in human nature. The name Havelock Ellis is mentioned by the author, but his viable conjecture concerning the biological function of the hymen gets no attention at all.
In line with the idea of Havelock Ellis the conclusion of the first part of the book could have been that the probable function of the hymen is to form a barrier against weak, unfit suitors, thus being valuable underpinning for a careful selection of partners in the dialectics of human courtship. This conclusion would have made a real difference for the second part of the book, since it would support a certain conservative concern with virginity. Then the last paragraph, just before the epilogue, wouldn't be a politicised diatribe against conservative campaigns in favour of traditional sexual morality, but probably have been a lot more constructive (without being less critical of patriarchal prejudices).
In spite of this ideological bias I admire the author for having delved into this perennial topic and come out of the mines with a lot of relevant material. She deserves honour for being at the helm of this maiden voyage into a fascinating, almost untouched history. There is much more material to be gathered together, both in the Western world and outside of it.The author considers her book to be a first journey and she is rightly confident that, in spite of our changing culture, 'virginity and virgins will continue to matter profoundly to us all'. There is a selected bibliography and an index. Read this book with an open and critical mind!

As someone interested in history and anthropology, I found this book to be fascinating. In nearly every section I found information I wanted to pass on to someone else. I didn't necessarily agree with all of it, but that's what critical reading is for! I would highly reccomend it to anyone who wants to know more about the social, political, biological, mental, etc. impacts of virginity--whether academically or for leisure.

I absolutely loved this book and couldn't put it down. I'm a history and gender studies major, so this is perfectly suited to my interests. The author discusses patriarchy, religion, the importance of virginity, virginity tests throughout history.

I highly recommend it!

Virgin is not all encompassing, but it does whet one's appetite and awareness of the material without being boring. I did not feel like I had to muck through long, science-filled passages; this book is written in a very easy to follow style.

The book is divided into two parts: one on the biological aspects of virginity, the second on the cultural (mostly Western) aspects. Each part is divided into several chapters and each chapter is also broken up into subtitled sections, which makes the book great for casual reading, as well as for taking breaks and pondering the material or looking up unfamiliar terms for those who are reading this academically.

I really enjoyed the book because I want to know more about reproductive issues concerning women. Remember awareness is the first tool to making the world a better place!

The bottom line (no pun intended) is that the only reason virginity is valuable to men, as a commodity, is because they don't want to be with women who have the experience that would enable them to critique their performance. Consequently, men have made a religion or a cult or a fetish (and in some cases laws) out of this one male fantasy, based on their own sense of inadequacy or desire for control and ownership, that has resulted in untold suffering for women and children, world-wide, for millenia. Religious and government-enforced virginity results in women being judged only on their value as sexual objects. The discussion of it has become as tiresome as the reality, but hopefully not as futile.

The author complains of the limitations of space several times in the book but nevertheless can digress into what feels like too much of the minutiae of medieval politics. There are some interesting insights, such as how the distrust of (women's) sexuality and the body by the Catholic Church made the Protestant Reformation seem more practical. Ultimately the story is really about women and how their virginity was valuable in marriage, which many argue has for most of history been an economic rather than a romantic or religious institution.

I wish that the author had either written an exclusively European cultural history, a modern political cultural analysis of the U.S., or a cross-cultural analysis of virginity around the world. This book felt like it put some of those elements together but in an unsatisfying way. Reading a book like Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers made me realize how an author can cover in a small volume a topic that intersects with both history and science in an engaging way. Virginity is a potentially interesting subject but the book doesn't quite live up to its potential.