Chapter Five Multiple Virgins and Contemporary Virginities "Names, names--names don't mean anything! The wildest girl I ever knew was named Prudence. Why, I once knew a girl who called herself Virginia."
Can-Can, directed by Walter Lang (1960)
Maurice Haigh-Wood: "Are you a virgin?"
Bertrand Russell: "Not exactly."
Tom and Viv, directed by Brian Gilbert (1994)
Then it was she who took the initiative, and gave herself without fear, without regret, with the joy of an adventure on the high seas, and with no traces of bloody ceremony except for the rose of honor on the sheet.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
The simple joys of maidenhood
In his 1942 dedication of his Preface to Paradise Lost to his friend the poet and critic Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis remembers a lecture given by Williams at Oxford's Divinity School:
There we elders heard (among other things) what we had long despaired of hearing--a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the poet placed it--and watched "the yonge fresshe folkes, he or she," who filled the benches listening first with incredulity, then with toleration, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity. . . . of those who heard you in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.1
I have read or recalled this anecdote of Lewis' quite often through the years. The first time that I encountered it, in my teens in the late 60s (my Tolkien and Lewis phase: I was reading everything that I could find by both), I felt nothing but rage at what I then characterized as Lewis' oppressive rectitude. Rage, I came to see in retrospect, really masked my disappointment that the promises and delights of virginity extolled in my Roman Catholic education had remained out of my reach. (After all, at my Confirmation, I had chosen to be named for Jeanne d'Arc because I had been taught to admire her chastity and her bravery.) Later, in the 70s, the promises and delights of sexual experience were to prove equally elusive. When I reread Preface to Paradise Lost in graduate school in the 80s, it struck me that I could have used a little less bravery and a little more chastity--and a good deal more enchantment.
Today, and in the context of a scholarly project (which nevertheless has its roots in the personal), I recognize the above story as quintessential Lewis, more revealing of his brand of neo-Platonic Christianity than it is of Williams, of Comus, or of the "old poets." Lewis' point, that a decidedly disenchanted group of young people could find meaning in a lecture in praise of chastity, takes on new resonance fifty-odd years later at the end of the twentieth century, as disillusionment with the 60s sexual revolution as well as the late 80s' response to the AIDS crisis have made abstinence (or, at least, selective abstinence) more attractive than ever. Virginity is enjoying quite a renascence these days. The P.C. term for virgin, according to Cher's friend in Clueless (1995; Amy Heckerling), is "hymeneally challenged." "Is that a bad thing?" asks Cher, and we know that the answer ought to be "no." As proof, a male character on MTV's pseudo-chronicle The Real World maintains that he is a virgin; pop singer Julianna Hatfield says she is as well, and before he got married, Phoenix Suns forward A. C. Greene said that he had always planned to wait until marriage. Such statements are not sad or desperate confessions (as they would have been construed in previous decades), but announcements of a positive life choice.
These days, people not only flaunt their virginity, but reclaim it once it is gone, for virginity is often constructed as subject to revision: some Gen-Xers insist that one can recover one's virginity if one remains celibate for a period of time (though how long it is supposed to take is not specified). "True Love Waits," a fundamentalist organization that promotes abstinence, welcomes back the prodigal virgin--what it calls the "recycled" or "secondary" virgin.2 The Website BAVAM!--Born-Again Virgins of America--publishes a quarterly newsletter, sells t-shirts, and dispenses jokey but serious advice to virgins post- and demi-.3 The Website for the Society for the Recapture of Virginity ("Feeling melancholy? Coffee doesn't taste good in the morning anymore? Then GET IT BACK") advertises that one can revirginize if one wears a "Virginator"-a wristband with a microchip attuned to one's biorhythms.4Spoof that the Society for the Recapture of Virginity is, it represents an important thread in the contemporary tangle of attitudes toward sexuality. These days, abstinence, for a while or for a lifetime, is often constructed not in opposition to sexuality, but as a point on an erotic continuum. (An 80s techno-pop band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, furnished the signature song for hip celibates: "Relax"--"Don't do it.") Those who practice the new virginity, a flexible enough concept to include the born-again virgin, are not necessarily reading (or misreading) Judith Butler. Rather, the desire to revirginize and/or to discount past sexual activity as a "loss" of virginity arises out of a prevailing popular belief that one can reinvent or construct oneself at will. The foundations of this belief can be found in good old American individualism. People magazine has replaced Horatio Alger stories in its chronicling of the newly-rich, the newly-famous, and the newly-reinvented. (Never mind the harsh realities of class and socioeconomic barriers, or the losses people of color and gays and lesbians are now experiencing in the legal arena.) Passing, as white, as straight, has been an option for a long time; why couldn't one pass as a virgin? Who is to know? Who is to say?
The concept of the writable--and revisable--body takes many forms in contemporary American culture. Consider the flexibility and variety in hair styles and colors for both men and women; modern eclectic fashion (albeit often tyrannical, but less rule-based than in the past); the reworking of bodies through intensive diet and exercise regimes; the low cost and easy availability of cosmetic surgery; the spread of tattooing and body-piercing; the visibility, if not the fad, of male cross-dressing and celebrity transvestites; the freedom the Internet has offered to many (captured in the now-famous New Yorker cartoon with the line, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"); the science (and the science fiction) of cybernetics; the public discussion of (though not necessarily understanding or acceptance of) gender difference as existing on a continuum rather than as a binary; the difficulties in fixing racial boundaries (contra The Bell Curve's assumptions--or nostalgia--about discrete genetic pools);5 the ongoing and increasingly more complicated debate about when life begins; medical technologies that call into question such categories as "dead" and "alive." For the most part, popular praxis is not driven by theory, but by consumerist capitalism (and to say so is a theory); nevertheless, theory often takes praxis as its subject, working along a continuum on which the transgressive is located at one end, and the wholly interpellated at the other. Tattoos and transvestites may well be signs of the postmodern times, but they have also been domesticated by fashion. Virginity performed and/or regained may well be evidence of a sense that bodily identities are more fluid than fixed, but it may also be symptomatic of a capitulation to conservative mores and rigid gender-typing, or of a nostalgia for a non-existent, a priori innocence or Imaginary.
In this final chapter, I take up these issues as I turn to the construction of and the anxieties about virginity and its verifications in fin de siècle America. As we shall see, some of the notions about virginity and the testing of virginity that we saw at work in the Middle Ages continue to circulate through both high and low culture today. By saying so, I am not making a claim for an unbroken chain of theories and practices from the Middle Ages to the present. (Though others have done so: for example, before and after Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the media made many a sly reference to the custom of conducting a physical examination of a bride who is about to marry into the royal house, often referring to the practice as "medieval.") However, I do take as my premise that the idea of virginity and its proofs transcends historical bounds: virginity may not be constructed as the same over time and according to place, but it is continually constructed all the same. Though the answers are always historically specific and local, the question of the ontology of virginity remains a constant in Western culture.
Consider the following scenes in contemporary American culture: an X-Files episode exploits the trope of the sacrificial virgin, as teenagers scare themselves with stories about a satanic cult that is rumored to torture and murder blonde virgins as part of their rituals. One blonde young woman blurts: "But how do they know you are really a virgin?" (How do they know you are really a blonde?). Steve Guttenberg says that he is "technically" a virgin in Diner (1982; Barry Levinson). Valeria Golino declares that she is a virgin but "not very good at it" in Hot Shots (1991; Jim Abrahams); Ben Stiller describes himself as a "non-practicing virgin" in Reality Bites (1994; Ben Stiller). "My man is satisfied," says Cher's best friend in Clueless, "but technically, I am a virgin--you know what I mean." Such vignettes from TV and film suggest that contemporary American culture is perfectly capable of imagining/representing virginity as located in the social realm rather than as lodged in the physical body. Virginity is constructed, consciously or unconsciously, as existing at the point at which the body and the social meet and intermingle, resulting in a kind of mixed metaphor or confusion of categories. Verifying virginity is compromised by the possibilities of performing virginity; performing virginity both leads to and is caused by interrogating virginity. By grappling with what it means to be a virgin, one must also come to terms with the fact that virginity is, for the most part, beyond proof. The bar, the either/or of virginity, dissolves in the face of such a paradox.
As we have seen in earlier chapters, virginity was usually inflected as feminine in the Middle Ages; indeed, virginity has served as a primary trait of women in every subsequent age in Western culture. In the early modern period, after heated debate over its existence, the hymen, a real but variable and unstable physiological phenomenon, came to function as the primary sign of virginity from which all others were derived. The signifier hymen has many more signifieds than that of mere physical intactness, and takes on a number of highly-charged meanings as it is constituted within and by the social. The hymen is a sign of difference that reinforces the binaries of "feminine" and "masculine" and is intelligible only within a dominant heterosexual paradigm. Thus I suggest in what follows that the figure of the virgin--female and feminine--often functions as an icon of normative (and compulsory) heterosexual behavior in contemporary culture. Virginity is a concept founded upon a model of sexuality predicated upon penetration of a vagina by a penis (which may or may not result in loss of blood). Yet there are other stories to be told about coming into sexual experience, stories that fall outside the paradigm of heterosexual description and metaphor, and as such, have been rendered as untellable and unreadable. Such narratives and the experiences on which they are based undermine the construction of virginity as feminine and the "loss" of virginity as heterosexual. Gay and lesbian sex questions the importance and "use" of the verification of virginity, and renders visible the illusory nature of virginity as knowable and verifiable. To suppress such stories, to privilege heterosexual virginity, is to shore up heterosexuality and to deny the possibility of homosexuality.
In this chapter, I have chosen to focus on contemporary popular culture because its discursive boundaries are so much more permeable than those of high culture, and because popular culture often includes the set that is high culture, or, at least, its effects, whether full strength, diluted, or transformed. I also want to emphasize the difference between what is available to us for analysis in our own, modern culture and what remains of the Middle Ages for study: the ephemera of gestures, conversation, jokes, rumors, and pictures that variously shaped people's daily lives at court and in courtyard, in town and in country, is almost impossible to reconstruct. Such a study as this, concerned with representations of virginity/chastity and its verifications in medieval culture, can only be partial insofar as the signs and habits of daily life are irrecoverable. However, if I can capture something about the range of attitudes toward virginity and its verifications as they are expressed in contemporary popular culture, then perhaps by analogy I can suggest how multi-dimensional medieval experience of and knowledge about virginity must have been.
Moreover, as a subject and as a phenomenon, popular culture has the potential for breaching the bar between our academic or professional selves and our lived experience. As I was writing this book, friends, students, and colleagues would often ask me what I was working on. When I described this final chapter, saying that I was gathering information about modern myths about verifying virginity, I invariably received the same reaction: the person I was talking to would get slightly embarrassed, and even take on a mildly alarmed look. Was I going to ask her or him for an anecdote? Was I going to disclose my own virginal or non-virginal status? Was I going to get personal? Some would interrupt me and ask about the "sources" I had found, as if documented materials would legitimate my project. Some would hurriedly start listing films, or bits of books, usually fiction, which I should consider, as if such a discussion would steer me away from their private lives.
The group of people with whom medievalists discuss medieval literary texts is relatively small, and the ways in which we talk about them extremely prescribed. We bring many tools and strategies to interpreting such texts, but our experience and personal histories, even if they figure in our readings, are not to be counted among them. On the other hand, a variety of forums exist in which we can discuss the latest bestseller, from conferences to elevator talk. Elevator gatherings prompt anecdotes and reminiscences and allow us to express our feelings in ways that academic talk does not. This chapter is an attempt to bridge the gap between what we recognize as legitimate "evidence" and the evidence of experience. The "texts" that I cite here contain traces of my personal history, of serendipitous encounters with TV, film, and current fiction, and anecdotes collected from the Internet and from friends. As I was finishing this book, I set up a Web site in order to gather current myths about verifying virginity, and a few of the responses that I received appear here as well.6
Having said that, I also want to acknowledge that to take personal experience or anecdote as "evidence" without examining how that experience is constituted and expressed is potentially dangerous and distorting. Joan Scott has made this point most compellingly in "The Evidence of Experience." "It is not individuals who have experience," argues Scott, "but subjects who are constituted through experience."7 She adds: "The project of making experience visible precludes analysis of the workings of [a system structured according to presence and lack] and its historicity; instead, it reproduces its terms."8 Scott quotes Michel de Certeau, who argues that theauthorized appearance of the "real" serves precisely to camouflage the practice which in fact determines it. Representation thus disguises the praxis that organizes it.9
In other words, we may be seduced, as de Certeau says, into accepting the surface "truth" of a given narrative precisely and tautologically because it is represented as a true history. Yet all histories, writ large or small and personal, are shaped and produced by culture. Thus Scott critiques the appeal to experience as evidence, an appeal which she sees as underwriting various histories of difference, as if experience (specifically, gay/lesbian experience) and its attestation is somehow immune from the workings of the dominant ideology that shapes all experience. Scott's critique is precisely where I want to begin in this chapter, for examining how personal narratives about virginity are constrained (and contained) by narrative and cultural convention reveals the degree to which they are driven by a dominant heterosexual ideology--and propelled into the same rhetorical grooves as a result.
Two books, both journalistic in style and popular in intent, illustrate this point extremely well: The First Time: What Parents and Teenage Girls Should Know about "Losing Your Virginity", a series of interviews conducted by Karen Bouris, and Losing It: The Virginity Myth, a collection of first-person narratives edited by Louis M. Crosier.10 Bouris collected narratives from women, both lesbian and straight, in which women reveal feelings of deep shame or embarrassment (such anecdotes are sometimes humorously told), or tell of family abuse and date rape, of experiences that were flat and unemotional or exhilarating and life-changing. Crosier's narratives were written by both men and women, gay, lesbian, and straight. Contributors to both books struggle with defining and recognizing virginity, with attempting to fix the "before" and "after" of the experience. Most conclude that the actual physical "first time," accompanied by the breaking of the hymen, pain, or some other sign, does not always correlate with a sense of themselves as sexual beings. The First Time--which tips its ideological hand in such chapter titles as "Pressure from all Directions," "Just Get it Over With," and "The Romantic Minority"--includes this rather typical story:"I didn't really think sex was a big deal, but it is. . . . last year, when I was thirteen, I lost my virginity to a sixteen-year-old boy I had been friends with for three years. He was pretty drunk, and I had just broken up with my boyfriend and was upset. We went on a walk in the woods and lay down on his sweater. It hurt, and I bled a lot. I regretted it later and wished it had been with someone whom I was really in love with. I felt sad because losing my virginity should have been a wonderful experience, but instead it was meaningless."11
When we compare this to other first-time narratives, a pattern quickly emerges, for such tales usually include the following elements: 1) a description of the partner and an analysis of one's feelings for the partner; 2) a description of the place and time; 3) a description of the actual act; 4) a meditative coda or discussion of the lesson to be drawn from the experience. We find the same elements in more polished, belletristic narratives, such as in Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, in which she recounts the story of her own loss of virginity, supplementing it with stories that her friends shared as she was researching and writing. Wolf's story is more interesting reading than the accounts in The First Time and Losing It, in part because she is a known public figure--a neo-feminist spokesperson to boot. (I found myself voyeuristically entertained by her story, frankly, because she is made--or makes herself--so available for consumption: one may examine her glossy, studio-produced photograph on the inside back cover and freely fantasize about her fifteen-year-old, virginal self.) In addition, Wolf's awareness and exploitation of her own self-fashioning undermines the authenticity, or the effect of authenticity, of her experiences. A much more self-conscious social constructionist than the narrators in The First Time and Losing It , Wolf refers to the "normatively shocking narrative" of female sexual initiation and desire, the often-angry stories that she believes constitute the genre.12 For example, Wolf tells us that, as her younger self rode the streetcar toward her rendezvous, she thought: "this is not the way my fantasies want it to be. It is not a Rod Stewart song."13 (She was thinking of "Tonight's the Night.") Wolf works the tension between needing to particularize and thus validate her own narrative and desiring to aestheticize it for a public audience, between writing a "true" story and the weight of convention that shapes such a story. At one point, she says: "When we made love, it hurt, but only a little. It was nice, but strange. I realize my good luck with every disastrous loss-of-virginity story I hear."14 Her experience of pain, of niceness, is immediately framed within a tradition, as it were, of women's stories about heterosexual intercourse that regularly include references to the initial awkwardness of intercourse, to pain, and, often, to lack of orgasm. These elements are often narrativized as "proof" of virginity in The First Time and Losing It, and have a long history as such. The author of the thirteenth-century De Secretis mulierum, as we have already seen, notes that a lack of pain indicates that the woman is not a virgin. A virgin experiences pain, he says, because the vagina must be "enlarged and disposed for coitus," and because of the breaking of the hymen.15 Pain in particular is a persistent element in loss-of-virginity narratives, true or fictional. In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, for example, Esther Greenwood's first sexual experience is conflated with an experience of pain--and disappointment: "I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin's rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt. But all I felt was a sharp, startling bad pain."16 Wolf's relative lack of pain correlates with her rather "nice" experience, proof that her first lover, Martin--whose most attractive attribute seems to have been his level-headedness--was indeed a "sensitive, respectful teacher."17 Yet for the fictional Esther (transparently Plath herself), her experience of a "sharp, startling, bad pain" functions as a compressed narrative of oppression, emblematic of all the pain that Esther Greenwood had already suffered in her relations with men. Assuredly, many women do experience pain with first heterosexual intercourse, but it is the consistent narrativization of pain that I find so fascinating, especially given the fact that faking pain is a way to fake virginity.
On the whole, though occasionally sad, funny, and/or erotic, the narratives in The First Time and Losing It are not very interesting because they are so conventional. The narratorial "I" drops easily into clichéd expressions of sincerity. Gender difference is often expressed and reproduced through stereotypes: women often discussed their virginity as tied into their sense of self-esteem; many described virginity as a burden. On the other hand, men frequently said that they felt pressured to have intercourse by their peers and through popular macho-guy images. It seems that one of the most intimate experiences of one's life, presumably and potentially the most pleasurable, resists language, falls into triteness and cliché, suggesting the degree to which the experience of virginity is culturally scripted and commodified. Indeed, the Society for the Recapture of Virginity exploits the formulaic nature of virginity narratives at its Web site. One "tells" the story of one's first time by answering a multiple-choice questionnaire: I was a) at my parents' house b) outdoors c) in the back seat of a car . . . the sounds within earshot included a) a dog barking b) television c) a party d) birds . . . and so on. Perhaps the only interesting "first time" narrative is one's own--or one's lover's.Multiple Versions
One way into contemporary American attitudes about verifying virginity is to go elsewhere, to non-Western cultures, and explore how their constructions of virginity have returned to the West as exaggerated and exoticized myth. If we examine the history of Western travel literature and modern ethnography and anthropology (which owe much to travel literature, as these disciplines both deny and acknowledge), we find a good deal of interest in, if not to say obsession with, the sexual beliefs, mores, and practices of other cultures. Alternative sexual practices and their resulting social organizations have held a great deal of fascination for Western observers: the possibilities call into question the naturalness of Western practices and organizations, or, conversely, confirm the superiority of Western culture. The historical veracity of anthropological observations has often not been as important as its usefulness for Westerners. A case in point is Freud and his essay, "The Taboo of Virginity." Predictably, Freud uses "primitive" peoples (of Africa, Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Sumatra) as a foil for the more "civilized" attitudes of his contemporaries toward virginity. Freud begins his essay by saying:
Few details of the sexual life of primitive peoples are so alien to our own feelings as their estimate of virginity, the state in a woman of being untouched [der weiblichen Unberührtheit]. The high value which her suitor places on a woman's virginity seems to us so firmly rooted, so much a matter of course, that we find ourselves almost at a loss if we have to give reasons for this opinion.18
According to Freud's reading of turn-of-the-century anthropology, many primitive peoples place little or no value on female virginity; indeed, they turn the first penetration of a virgin into a ritual in which anyone else but the intended husband takes part: an old woman of the tribe, an elder or priest, even her father. Freud believes that he has identified a mark of civilized society: the high value placed on virginity. Freud projects his own (euphemistic) definition of (gendered) virginity on primitive peoples: a woman Unberührtheit. Yet difference returns as civilized sameness when Freud advances his thesis about the menacing virgin: "with the taboo of virginity primitive man is defending himself against a correctly sensed, though psychical, danger"--that is, fear of castration from a hostile, most likely frigid, woman.19
Freud goes on to perpetuate one of the great clichés about a virgin's desire and the consequences of her first sexual experience with a man:Whoever is first to satisfy a virgin's desire for love, long and laboriously held in check . . . that is the man she will take into a lasting relationship . . . This experience creates a state of bondage in the woman which guarantees that possession of her shall continue undisturbed and makes her able to resist new impressions and enticements from outside.20
Like a duck, a woman imprints herself on her first lover; she remains forever in thrall. If a woman does not so bind herself to her husband, would he conclude that he was not her first lover? Would such "bondage" serve as proof of virginity? Freud does not say. Freud never raises the issue of verifying virginity; rather, he seems to assume that the hymen is the incontrovertible sign of virginity, and that it is always "there" to be ruptured. By universalizing every bride as a virgin (and every virgin as a bride), Freud refuses to acknowledge that a woman may be sexually experienced before marriage.
Freud's observations in "The Taboo of Virginity" (which have their vivid analogues in Gauguin's exotic and erotic visions of Tahiti and the Marquesas) are part of a larger, enduring myth about the promiscuity of various non-Western, non- or pre- Christian societies that anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead studied.21 This myth (since revised and/or amended by later anthropologists) is repeated over and over in popular culture, in, for example, the film South Pacific (1958; Joshua Logan; based on the James Michener novel), and, more recently, in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation set on the tropical pleasure-planet Risa. At the same time, another, contrasting idea about non-Western sexual practices circulates in contemporary popular culture: that elsewhere, in less "civilized" countries, women's sexual activities before marriage are rigidly proscribed, grounds for punishment and death if discovered. In such locales, proofs of virginity are taken to extremes for obvious economic reasons. In "Status, Property, and the Value on Virginity," anthropologist Alice Schlegel correlates the value of virginity with the type of marriage transaction that obtains in a given society; that is, those societies that practice gift and dowry exchange value virginity more than those which do not, even when it is the bride's family that gives the dowry.22 In such societies, "proofs" of virginity are demanded as a matter of course. If so-called promiscuous cultures allow Westerners to take the moral high ground, the knowledge that certain other cultures ostracize and punish sexual transgressions committed by women (commodities in a system of exchange) enables Westerners to congratulate themselves for their understanding and liberality-and to feel superior about their record on women's rights to boot.
Many observations made by anthropologists and others about the centrality of female virginity in various Middle Eastern cultures have trickled down into popular Western culture, there to become a subject for titillation and mockery as well as a rallying point in the continuing vilification of Arabs and Muslims. The story of examining the sheets for traces of blood on the wedding night, apparently an ancient practice among certain peoples of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East, is a case in point. (See the discussion of Deuteronomy 22:13-20 in Chapter One). The bloody sheet is the subject of a tale in The Arabian Nights that actually calls into question its veracity as proof of virginity. In fact, it could be argued that anxiety about ascertaining chastity--that is, regulating marital fidelity-motivates the entire plot of The Arabian Nights. In the frame story, we read how King Shahriyar, after he and his friend Shahzaman are betrayed by their wives, resolves to sleep with a virgin every night and then have her killed. In this way, the King makes sure that his wife will never be unfaithful to him. Sheherazade, of course, interrupts this project, and one of the many stories she tells raises the issue of the proofs of virginity. In "The Story of Qumar al-Zaman and His Two Sons," the Princess Budur disguises herself as a man after her husband Qumar al-Zaman disappears. While in her disguise, events force her to marry the Princess Hayat. Budur spends the wedding night and the next in prayer in order to protect her secret. On the third night, she confesses her true identity to Hayat, and the two stage a fake consummation scene:Hayat . . . got up, and, taking a chicken, slaughtered it and smeared herself with its blood. Then she took off her pants, and cried out. The women of her family went in to her, and her waiting women let out trilling cries of joy.23
which virginity is actually maintained invokes and interrogates the many narratives in which virginity is said to have been "taken." The irony lies in the fact that, if a virgin bride may fake loss of virginity, so may a sexually-experienced bride fake virginity. Moreover, the "consummation" of the marriage and its bloody proof (which is no proof at all), may well begin as a private act, but takes on significance only after Hayat's women witness to the "proof." In Lacanian terms, what was once in/of the Imaginary has crossed over into the Symbolic order, there made subject to the Law of the Father, here actually and ironically represented by the testimony of women. It is a paradox in that there is "nothing" there (the proof is fake) yet there is "something" (still) there--the hymen, or, at least, the blood of virginity.
Contemporary anthropologists, Western and non-Western, as well as Arab women themselves, attest to the fact that in some parts of the Arab world, families still require the evidence of the bloody sheets. Geraldine Brooks, in Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, quotes a manager at a hotel in Baghdad which is a popular spot for wedding parties. He says: "[A]lmost all of them [the new brides] check out with a stolen sheet in their bag, you know . . . Their older relatives still insist on seeing it."24 In their study of the semi-rural town of Zawiya, Morocco, anthropologists Susan Schaefer Davis and Douglas Davis report that public proof of virginity is obligatory at the wedding ceremony. If the bloody sheets or garments are not produced, the wedding contract can be declared void and the bride sent away.25 One of Davis and Davis' informants reports that quite often, the brothers of the bride, knowing that their sister is not a virgin, will "stay close to the bridal chamber to calm or threaten the unsuspecting groom" in order to prevent a public scandal; he adds that he had heard of brides who were known to have had premarital intercourse, yet bloody garments were produced at the strategic moment on the wedding night.26 This informant also describes certain deceptions practiced by husbands-to-be who have already slept with their betrothed, including cutting themselves to avoid public humiliation on the wedding night.27 (As we saw in Chapter Three, in Guillaume de Dole, the mark of female virginity is so unstable that even a man can carry it; here, a man is actually able to fake female virginity.) Davis and Davis report that their informants described the ubiquity of such practices as heavy petting, inter-femoral intercourse, shallow penetration, and withdrawal-that is, sexual activities that would not rupture the hymen.28 One of my Web site correspondents, an Arab man, told me that he has heard about certain Arab women who only have anal intercourse in order to "protect" their virginity.29 These anecdotes attest to a prevailing awareness of the slip between theory and practice, and of the consequences of not adhering to theory in practice.
The motif of the bloody sheets has its current fictional representations as well. In a short story by Egyptian Alifa Rifaat, "Honor," the narrator, Bahiya, tells the story of her sister Sophia, who has lost her virginity to a lover, but is contracted in marriage. The village midwife, bribed with a gold bracelet, promises to come to Sophia on her wedding night in order to "bring some powdered glass to smear" in the girl's vagina.30 The groom takes his new bride into his house, where the midwife waits while everyone gathers outside, shooting their guns off and singing, but quieting so that they can hear "the shouts mixed with pride and elation" from inside. Then the midwife emerges, her face "tensed with joy" as she hands Sophia's father the "bloodstained silk handkerchief and clutched the sweet reward of good news in her palm" (that is, the tip that he gives her).31 As we saw in Chapter One, there are many ways to fake the blood of virginity. Whatever its foundation in actual practice, the use of ground glass in this story gives one pause. Besides causing the necessary blood, the glass seems to serve as a sort of penance for the bride. She is to endure the pain as a punishment. In fact, the use of ground glass ensures that even the groom will have an opportunity to shed virginal blood.Along with exotic tales of harems and eunuchs, these and other stories return to the West as "truths" against which Westerners measure their own beliefs and desires about sexuality and how it should be practiced and organized. However, many Westerners who denounce the display of the bloodstained wedding sheets as a "barbaric" and "medieval" practice are willing enough to accept the theory behind the practice-that public and incontestable proof of virginity is possible and desirable. What is suppressed is the fact that hymeneal blood is not unequivocal proof; what persists is the idea that somewhere, elsewhere in the world, fathers and husbands have a way of ascertaining virginity. Seeking elsewhere--and apparently finding--an answer to the conundrum of virginity further mystifies the workings of culture and how it is complicit in constructing the signs of virginity as invariable from body to body. The story of the bloody sheets and its reception in the West reproduces both difference (culture is variable) and sameness (anatomy, not culture, is universal).
Performing Virgins
Within the semiotics of cinematic sex, intercourse has been represented in an endless number of ways. Some signs, through their very repetition, have now become conventional, including fuzzy dissolves, fades, or unusual cuts. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1953; Fred Zinnemann) immediately come to mind: as they embrace in the shallows, the camera slowly pans outward, until all we see are crashing waves and all we hear is the roar of the surf. These signs and others are parodied in Naked Gun (1988; David Zucker): in a series of MTV-inspired cuts set to the music of "I'm into Something Good" by 60's pop band Herman's Hermits, Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielson) and Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) cavort in the surf, squirt ketchup and mustard at each other, and ride a bull at a rodeo. Other cinematic signs of loss of virginity are more idiosyncratic, but are certainly still readable. For example, in Love in the Afternoon (1957; Billy Wilder), when luminous Arianne Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) and playboy Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) become lovers, the signs of loss of virginity are particularly subtle. Though Arianne/Hepburn appears as virginal at the end of the film as she did at the beginning, we learn that she has had intercourse through several elegant and indirect scenes: when Arianne and Frank first embrace, the camera cuts slowly to a man playing the violin, then to a shut door, and finally to Arianne combing her hair in the bathroom mirror. The process of sexual initiation itself is gracefully elided, but its post-coital sign, the primping ritual, is eloquent enough. (We find a parallel scene in Scream [1997; Wes Craven], at the point at which the camera cuts from Sydney [Neve Campbell] embracing Billy [Skeet Ulrich] on a bed to her dreamily brushing her hair.) In another scene in Love in the Afternoon, Arianne hunts for one of her shoes under the furniture in Frank's suite, from bedroom to living room. Frank, who does not want her to leave, hides her shoe in the pocket of his dressing gown. He embraces her, and Arianne finds the shoe, rapping him teasingly on the head with it before leaving. The shoe, lost, hidden, and then recovered, has a double valence: it not only signifies Arianne's new-found sexuality, but also Frank's "lost" heart. Properly contextualized, any sign is capable of signifying virginity and its presence or absence. (At one point, a man cuckolded by Flannagan tells him: "A girl may look as innocent as the freshly fallen snow and then suddenly you find the footprints of hundreds of men." This remark captures the anxiety that drives the desire for verification in the first place: the signs of virginity are multiple in order to answer to such fears.)
Along with Audrey Hepburn (who managed to appear perpetually virginal in real life as well, even after two marriages and a long-term live-in relationship), Doris Day and Sandra Dee are perhaps the great iconic American virgins of the 50s. (And if Doris Day was the blonde virgin par excellence of the decade, then Jayne Mansfield was the supreme blonde anti-virgin. Both women's images were carefully controlled on screen and off. Hairstyle, makeup, and the cut of a dress were signs made readable to all.) It would be facetious to compare Doris Day and Sandra Dee to the virgin martyrs of antiquity and the Middle Ages, "known" to be virgin through their modest looks, dress, and behavior; however, it is worth noting that, just as Ambrose and Jerome constructed a semiotics of virginal behavior for the early Church, so did the PR machine of 50s Hollywood create their version of the virginal. In what follows, I focus on two films made twenty years apart in which the signs of virginity drive the plot, reproducing a materialized and naturalized version of virginity. A Summer Place (1959; Delmer Daves) and Hair (1979; Milos Forman) may register what a difference twenty years can make, but they also draw upon the same set of assumptions about virginity and its presence or absence.
I first saw the film A Summer Place when I was around twelve, then a few times on cable over the years, and then again when I began this study. I did not understand a good deal of the film the first time that I saw it: I was already pretty sure that teen-age pregnancy was not a good thing, and this film confirmed that fact--though it also suggested that if Troy Donahue were your boyfriend and Richard Egan your father, teen-age pregnancy would probably work out OK. (A Summer Place generated a good deal of controversy when it was first released, though the focus of the attention was on the film's frank treatment of teenage pregnancy, not on the proofs of virginity.) On the whole, I was left feeling rather uneasy at age twelve, and it was only years later that I was able to locate the source of my discomfort in the scene in which Sandra Dee's mother forces her to undergo a physical examination for virginity.
A plot summary is in order: the recently rich, handsome, and patient Ken Jorgenson (Richard Egan), (mis)married to the masculine, dominating, and sexually-repressed Helen (Constance Ford), takes his wife and daughter Molly (Sandra Dee) to the resort hotel where he used to work as a lifeguard on an island off the coast of Maine. He meets his first love Silvia (Dorothy McGuire), now married to a sensitive, aristocratic drunk, Bart Hunter (Arthur Kennedy), who has fallen on hard times and is reduced to running the hotel where he once used to visit with his friends and snub the lifeguard. They have a son John (Troy Donahue).
Ken and Silvia realize that they still love each other, and begin to meet clandestinely in the boathouse. Molly and John fall in love, but Helen, who thinks sex is "filthy," continually interferes. When the teenagers go sailing one afternoon and are overtaken by a storm, they are wrecked on a small island where they must spend the night. When they are rescued and return to the hotel, Helen is enraged. She has a doctor waiting, who examines Molly in order to ensure that she is still a virgin. Helen forbids Molly to see John again. Ken and Silvia's affair is finally exposed, a huge scandal ensues, and the two divorce their respective spouses and marry. Molly, sent off to a girl's finishing school, and John, now at college, correspond secretly. They meet again at Ken and Silvia's beach house and make love for the first time. Molly becomes pregnant. They run away to get married, but cannot because they are underage. They finally turn to Ken and Silvia for help, and all are reconciled.
That Molly is examined in order to determine the status of her virginity is never stated in the film. The scene is set up in this way: the young couple, cold, wet, and wrapped in blankets, return to the hotel. We see them nervously peering up the long front staircase, where Helen glares down at them, an avenging harpy. Molly begins to ascend slowly, never removing her eyes from her mother's. As violins and piano crash discordantly in the background, Helen says roughly, "Come with me," and pulls Molly along into her room. As the camera looks over Helen's shoulder, Helen says, "Here she is, doctor," and we see a dark-suited, severe man rising from his chair in the sitting-room. We are pulled into the room with Molly, and the door shuts behind her. "I haven't done anything wrong," says Molly, her voice rising in panic. Helen says, "Take off every stitch you've got on and let him examine you completely and make his own report." Molly is in absolute terror as the doctor approaches, who says, "Leave me alone with your child; you're being of less than no help." Molly begins to cry: "I want my father . . . I've been a good girl, I've been a good girl," over and over again. We watch as the doctor drops a claw-like hand on her shoulder, and he begins to unbutton Molly's top. She screams, and the scene dissolves to John. He faces his father, who leers drunkenly, asking about what he "did" to Molly.
The scene between Molly and the doctor is Hitchcockian in its menace: it looks like a prelude to a classic rape scene in which the rape itself occurs off-screen. When I was twelve, it was mystifying, inexplicable and terrifying. The subsequent dissolve to John seems to suggest that he is the evil perpetrator of the "rape." Only after, when Helen must answer to a furious Ken, do we get a partial explanation: "obviously I had to find what happened out there. I had to be sure the examination revealed nothing wrong." But again, virginity is not mentioned, though the possibility of something being "wrong" is. Always there as a subtext, the subject of virginity is finally made explicit much later in the film, when Ken says that he doesn't want his daughter to be a "half virgin . . . to just go half way in the back seat . . . is there no completely honest answer I can give her?"
One of my Web site correspondents told a story about returning home one night at curfew and then climbing out the window in order to rejoin the party. She made it back to the house a few hours later, only to find her father running around the backyard with a baseball bat, furiously looking for the boy that he was convinced was hiding in the bushes. He then drove her to the hospital, and demanded that the doctor test her for alcohol, drugs, and the possibility of intercourse. The doctor tried to explain that no such test would be conclusive, and her father finally gave in--on the virginity test, at least. My correspondent said that her initiation into sexual responsibility was very different from her younger brother's, who was laughingly told to "keep it in his pants" one night over dessert.32 Life imitates art in part because of a lack of imagination: our society provides only so many options when a parent must confront the possibility of a daughter's sexuality (and, apparently, a son's as well). Both Molly's mother in A Summer Place and my correspondent's father believe that the physical body can be trusted to give up its sexual secrets precisely because the body can not be trusted; that is, any girl who spends the night with a boy, no matter the circumstances, ought to be suspect. In A Summer Place, a 50s idiom is employed that forces us to read between the lines in order to discover virginity and its verifications; in this real-life anecdote, a daughter and her father are less concerned with representationality, of course, than they are with the exigencies of the situation. However, virginity proves equally allusive in both contexts; like quarks and other theorized particles of matter, virginity can not be examined directly, and so must be approached obliquely. Neither a doctor's examination nor a baseball bat can discover--or recover--something that counts only when it is thought lost. Perhaps allusiveness is the only mode available when it comes to virginity, for one might argue that virginity always exists between the lines, between the scenes, becoming visible only after it is gone-as a nostalgic backward glance, as a present pregnancy. Such allusiveness is not confined to the effects of the Hollywood censorship machine (which in the 50s decreed that even married couples could not be shown sharing the same bed, but only side-by-side in twin beds), but can also be found in more contemporary contexts, as in the counter-cultural film Hair, based on the popular musical of the early 70s.
Long after the 60s had its brief shining moment, Hair purported to tell its story. It never caught on as a mainstream film, but played over and over at art houses where stoned audiences would get high on the music and visual effects. There are other films that attempt to capture the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s (for example, Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1969), but no film quite matches Hair in its portrayal of the transformative powers of music, sex, and drugs. No film could be more different from A Summer Place than Hair; yet, as in A Summer Place, a virgin is found at the center of the story: a Sandra Dee-like deb named Sheila (Beverley D'Angelo).
We first meet Sheila as she rides horse-back through Central Park. She becomes the object of the curious and insolent gaze of a group of hippies. George Berger (Treat Williams), the leader (and marked as the most sexually potent of the group), stares at her and sings, "Looking for Donna, for Madonna, a sixteen-year-old virgin." Seventeen centuries earlier, Tertullian had declared that "every public exposure of an honourable virgin is (to her) a suffering of rape."33 George's gaze is a deliberate, clichéd figuring of penetration, precisely the sort of gaze Tertullian was so anxious about. (George's gaze crosses boundaries of class as well as gender: Sheila is obviously a rich and privileged deb, while George makes a living by panhandling.) As Sheila gallops off, the rise and fall of her buttocks on the horse's rump explicitly imitates the movement of sexual intercourse. "Mounting" and "riding," of course, are common enough metaphors for intercourse: references to horseback riding are central to many a crude joke. There is another allusion here as well, to "accidental" loss of virginity through injury to the hymen. Young girls are often cautioned against strenuous exercise-such as horseback riding and bicycling-precisely because of injury. (As I mentioned in Chapter Two, it was said by her examining doctors that Jeanne d'Arc may have damaged herself on horseback.)
Crashing waves and violins tell us in A Summer Place that Molly (and John, also a virgin) finally have intercourse; in Hair, we know that Sheila has lost (is losing) her virginity through tracking her sartorial transformation from scene to scene, as she exchanges her preppie wardrobe piece by piece for hippie gear and her long, blonde, hairs-sprayed flip turns into wild locks. The "proof" of Sheila's lost virginity is to be located in her outward appearance. Another example of such proof can be found in the film version of Grease (1978; Randal Kleiser) in which bad girl Rizzo (Stockard Channing) mocks Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) by singing, "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity." Rizzo has in mind Sandy's severe ponytail, pastel angora sweater, and white ankle socks. In the final scene of the movie, Sandy transforms herself, and appears in teased hair, heavy makeup, high heels, and tight pants, apparently signaling to Danny (John Travolta) that she is ready for a change in their heretofore chaste relationship.
One of the contributors to the book, Losing It, reflecting on her own loss of virginity, sums up popular lore about the correlation between outward appearance and virginity: "Virgins are pure, kind, beautiful, clear-skinned . . . non-virgins are selfish, cheap, loud, bad-skinned."34 Such an idea predates our mothers' admonishments: recall that the thirteenth-century De Secretis mulierum lists a modest demeanor as a sign of virginity. However, the correlation between behavior and virginity is much older. In Ab urbe condita (c. B. C. 25-29), Livy tells the tale of the Vestal Postumia, who, because of her "pretty clothes and unmaidenly freedom of her wit," was thought to have lost her chastity. She was found innocent, and was told to dress more modestly--and to curb her wit.35 Livy also mentions another Vestal, Minucia, who was found guilty of unchastity and buried alive--she was "suspected in the first instance because of her dress, which was more ornate than became her station."36 It may be a tenuous thread that connects classical ideas about appearance and behavior to modern ideas, particularly as represented by Sheila's and Sandy's metamorphoses, yet the belief that the secrets of the body are to be discovered in dress and speech is certainly a persistent one.
While A Summer Place and Hair employ very different vocabularies for representing virginity and its verifications, both films accept the idea that virginity is a verifiable, testable condition. Even though A Summer Place depicts conflicting attitudes and mores about female sexuality and autonomy, and, through Molly's mother's insistence on a medical examination, locates virginity in the body, both films attempt to work out how the consequences of the body take on meaning--or, more accurately, are assigned meaning--in the social realm. It is finally culture, not nature, which writes the body in these films.Equivocal Virginity
One of the commentators on De Secretis mulierum declares that "when the male and female have sexual intercourse, they should not do it standing up, because then the seed is projected upwards and afterwards falls down, because what goes up must come down."37 This was the same wisdom that I received from my Catholic school girlfriends, who had an altogether different end in mind: vertical intercourse as contraception. Another notion that circulated among my friends was that if one had intercourse with a boy, but was not in love, one remained a virgin. I also learned at Mount St. Mary's that one could verify virginity by looking at a girl's legs, for a virgin's legs met at ankle, knee, and inner thigh. (Years later, I realized that this "test" was the same that teen magazines periodically offered to young girls so that they could determine if they had "perfect" legs--perfect in that one ought to possess three diamond-shaped spaces, the first between ankle and calf, the second between calf and knee, and the third between the knee and the top of the thigh.) Part wishful thinking, part earnest belief, such myths about intercourse and virginity endure for a number of reasons. Such myths suggest that one can be found out, that one's sexual history can be read on the body, exposed to all. As such, these and other beliefs can serve as effective deterrents, particularly for the naive and inexperienced. On the other hand, to believe that one might actually practice vertical birth control or experience loveless sex without loss of virginity has its advantages, if not unexpected consequences. Moreover, one might take comfort in the idea that, since so many tests of virginity tests seem to exist, one could find a way to fake virginity if it were necessary. As we have seen, hymeneal blood is easy enough to fake, either through substituting animal blood or menstrual blood--or performing self-mutilation.
These days, modern medicine has made it much less dangerous to fake virginity. In "Intimate Surgery: The Surprising Answer to Sexual Problems," author Catie Meyer describes surgical procedures for vulvaplasty (removal of excess tissue of the labia minora, which can sometimes protrude beyond the labia majora), mons pubic liposuction, tightening the vagina after childbirth, and hymen reconstruction. One woman interviewed who had opted for hymen reconstruction, Arlene (no last name given, but described as "a successful New York attorney") says her hymenwas ruptured in a junior-high gym class . . . and it's bothered me ever since. I know what you're going to say. All my friends have already said it-"a little flap of skin doesn't make or break a virgin." And I know they're right. Technically, I'm still a virgin. The trouble is I don't feel like a virgin.38
Dr. Darrick E. Antell, who has been performing hymen reconstructions for fifteen years, says that the women who undergo hymen reconstruction
are either victims of rape or have lost their virginity [through non-sexual activity] and would like to be a virgin by every definition. . . . women want hymen reconstruction for the psychological benefits-not to pretend they're something they're not.39
The more cynical reader may find Arlene's and Antell's remarks rather disingenuous. Meyer also describes the procedure: "The surgeon cuts the healed membrane . . . to create a 'fresh' edge. Then it is pulled back over and reattached with dissolvable sutures." Surgically restoring virginity costs around three to four thousand dollars.40 The hymen is now available as a prosthesis.
Such surgery is not just a 90s phenomenon. In The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior, Samuel S. Janus and Cynthia L. Janus describe the "lover's knot," which they describe as a "poignant piece of medical history." Saying that the lover's knot was popular between 1920-1950, Janus and Janus describe this surgical procedure as adding several stitches in the labia of brides-to-be. "On their wedding night, when consummating their marriages, these women would feel pain, and bleed, convincing their new husbands that they were pure and virginal."41 Once again, we encounter the idea that pain is somehow necessary to the construct of virginity. And now, one can actually guarantee it through surgery. The herbs, ointments, and dove's bladder filled with blood of the medieval gynecological treatise may have been replaced by modern medical techniques, but the impulse for going to such lengths has not changed much.
If modern medicine can help a woman fake virginity, it can also complicate the question of virginity. In Chapter One, I discussed a story found in Averroës' Colliget, about a young girl who was impregnated after bathing in water in which a man had ejaculated. One of the commentators on De Secretis Mulierum wanted to know if the woman was still a virgin. The answer was an equivocal sic et non. What follows is a modern analogue:Dear Abby:
I have a problem that is probably unlike any you have ever received. I am a twenty-six-year-old woman who is about to be married. I have never had sex, but when I was 24 years old, I agreed to be artificially inseminated and gave birth to a child for a couple who wanted one, but the woman was not able to have a child.
Now here is my question: Am I still a virgin? My husband-to-be is well aware that I want to wait until our wedding night to make love, so he has never pressured me. I need to know if I am still a virgin.
Yes or NoDear Yes or No:
Since you have never had sexual intercourse, you are still a virgin. If your fiancé is not aware that you have given birth to a child, I suggest that you tell him.42The answer is pure Dear Abby. She expresses no doubt about the ontological status of the young girl in a way that is designed to be most reassuring. At the same time, she displays her command of ironic understatement when she "suggests" that the young woman inform her fiancé about the child.
These anecdotes suggest that the continued preoccupation with female virginity is founded upon the premise, not that it is absolutely verifiable, but that it should be so verifiable. Ultimately, such verification is impossible, and is apparently getting more impossible. It seems that to say that one is "not exactly" a virgin or that one is "technically" a virgin is not so odd after all. "Guilty, with explanation," is one way to plead in traffic court; "virgin, with explanation," seems to be more of an option than ever.Default Setting
TV Guide, hyping a night-time soap opera called Savannah, displayed the three female leads of the show on the cover, labeling them "Victim, Virgin, and Vixen." Even at the end of the 90s, the convenient alliterative phrase is as resonant as ever; moreover, it seems as if the alliteration confers some sort of indisputable reality on these (and only these) categories of femininity. In discussing what she calls "the myth of Virginity," Simone de Beauvoir says that the virgin, "[n]ow feared by the male, now desired or even demanded . . . would seem to represent the most consummate form of the feminine mystery. She is therefore its most disturbing and at the same time its most fascinating aspect."43 Luce Irigaray sums up the cultural stereotype of the female virgin when she writes that, for men,in their system . . . "virgin" means one as yet unmarked by them, for them. Not yet a woman in their terms . . . Not yet penetrated or possessed by them . . . A virgin is but the future for their exchanges, their commerce, and their transports. A kind of reserve for their explorations, consummations, and exploitations.44
Such an image of the virgin may represent masculine desires, says Irigaray, "[b]ut not ours." And if the virgin chooses to opt out of this exchange, this future? To remain outside of the heterosexual relation? She becomes the figure of "the sterile virgin," as Kathy Newman says, "the impotent old maid, the dried-up and ineffectual maiden aunt . . . the poisonous, vampire lesbian teacher or the monstrous female artist."45 These avatars of the virgin have long histories in Western culture, constructed as figures to be feared and vilified and as examples to be avoided.46 On the other hand, the TV Guide virgin is the preferred version, a virgin in a holding pattern destined to bestow her virginity on the right man at the right time. Such a virgin is an advertisement for the proper functioning of the sex/gender system, inspiring women to be her and men to have her. And, I would argue, it seems that she is most visible-and most definitively heterosexual-when her virginity is endangered; that is, when we are forced to contemplate loss of virginity.
The menaced virgin's tale is retold over and again in Western (and world) literature: its form, content, and audience may change, but the motif itself has enormous vitality. I am suggesting that the many and varied textual and visual representations of women under assault-such as the Sabine women raped by the Romans, Agnes threatened by the consul Quintianus, Gwenyver abducted by Mellyagaunce, Clarissa harrassed and finally raped by Lovelace, Fay Wray sacrificed to King Kong, Nell tied to the tracks by Snidely Whiplash (a fascinating displaced image of rape)--help to produce what appears to be an inexorable, inevitable heterosexuality through a series of identifications and counter-identifications. Sexual difference in these tales is predicated upon rape or the possibility of rape, transitively gendered in that it is something that men do to women. (Certainly men rape other men, but such rape must be qualified as "male-male rape.") Perversely enough, it seems that the narrative in which a woman is threatened with rape or actually raped reproduces sex/gender roles. In this story, the menaced virgin functions as a paragon for women and as a prize or reward for men, either for the villain who rapes her, or for the hero who rescues her. As such, the virgin is a charismatic figure within patriarchal discourse, the star of an sensational narrative that asserts and confirms male heterosexual hierarchical prerogatives while attempting to suppress alternative narratives, both of female autonomy and of homosexual desire. In Invisible Lives: The Truth about Millions of Women-Loving Women, Martha Barron Barrett says that: "Because two women together are incapable of the central act [copulation], their existence as lovers has been denied, downgraded to harmless play, or viewed as a perverted obsession."47 Barrett unreflectively accepts heterosexual intercourse as the norm (lesbians are "incapable") while struggling to find different grounds for writing and validating lesbian experience. The fact is, heterosex is "central" only to patriarchy, central to a sex-gender system that privileges (in full force or vestigially) procreation as the ultimate end of sex and sexual pleasure.Representations of virginity, its verifications, and its perils in pop culture are especially interesting because they rely on such a crude set of correspondences and signs. Such representations tend to go unexamined, because they are so pervasive and ubiquitous-in part, the secret of their power to mystify. Consider the role and function of T. V. virgin Donna Martin (Tori Spelling) on Beverly Hills 90210 in its early days. Donna is one of several media virgins, both male and female, who must confront the moral, social, and logistical problems of virginity. A thread running through several episodes of 90210 was devoted to Donna and the fact that she was "still" a virgin. A good Catholic girl, Donna is embarrassed by her virginity, and she and all of her friends discuss her feelings endlessly, supporting her decision to wait until marriage. Donna finally begins to feel proud about her unique virginal status. (It was at this point that the media made Donna/Tori the most famous virgin in T. V. history.) She falls in love with David Silver (David Austin Green), also a virgin, who decides he can not wait for Donna. They break up after she discovers him with another girl in a scene in which his loss of virginity is signified by the camera lingering on an open condom package. Donna then must endure several attempted seductions by a string of types: the fraternity boy who deceives her into thinking that he is understanding and sensitive, the construction worker/musician who deceives her, and so on. She finally reunites with David, and the 1996-97 season ends with Donna telling David that she is finally ready. (The actual consummation happens off-screen, and the 1997-98 season begins by assuming that Donna's virginity is in the past.) In many ways, Donna's predicament furnishes viewers with an opportunity to revisit their own virginal past or to contemplate their post-virginal future. Whatever the emotions attendant upon such imaginings-fear, regret, tenderness, elation-such emotions are validated as normal because they are expected to be experienced within a heterosexual paradigm. Whether we choose the lesson or not, media virgins teach us how to behave according to a script in which virginity is described as something "given" or "lost" or "taken." A virgin such as Donna Martin, blonde, wide-eyed, and innocent (in spite of her hip and sexy wardrobe), is intended to be the object of a curious, titillated male gaze-she would fail as a character if she were not. She and other such virgins are designed to attract male heterosexual interest, which runs the gamut from a desire to conquer and steal to a desire to serve and protect.
Jane Halliday on L. A. Law was another media virgin who became the object of predatory interest. A 50s retro blonde who wore her hair like a helmet, Jane was a lawyer who was also a fundamentalist Christian. Sexual shark Arnie Becker (Corbin Bernsen) "naturally" takes Jane on as a challenge to his powers of persuasion, arranging all the standard arguments against virginity for Jane's and the viewer's edification. In several episodes, Arnie manages to embrace and kiss Jane. We are to gather from these encounters that such caresses begin to weaken her determination; simultaneously, Arnie begins to rethink his promiscuous position, seeing his desires as shallow and selfish. The series ended before this subplot was resolved; Jane remains forever irresolute in syndicated reruns.
The virgin pursued is capable of generating endless plot lines and complications- whether the setting is the ancient Aegean, the Roman court, the medieval countryside, or modern Los Angeles. For example, Donna Martin in love allowed the writers of 90210 to create dream episodes in which she works out her anxieties about her virginity--in one she is dressed in her Confirmation dress; in another, she is mocked by a Howard Stern-like character. Loss of virginity, after all, signals the end of the story--traditionally, within the happily-ever-after of marriage, a detail that is no longer essential to the plot. What matters is that virginity must be kept in play as long as possible in order to sustain interest in the narrative, thus generating viewer/reader pleasure in one direction-and sales in another.
The tale of menaced virginity also has a socializing function in that men are taught that sexual assault and rape will not be condoned. This is the essence of the plot of Richardson's Pamela, in which the heroine finally tames "Mr. B" by her virtuous example. We find a similar plot in play at the end of the TV series, Blossom, when Blossom (Mayim Bialik) had grown up enough to date. One night, she goes out with a young man and they end up in his car. After a few kisses, he puts the car seat down, a clear signal to the audience that he expects sex. Blossom refuses, and he strikes her. She tries to hide her bruises from her father, but when he finally sees them, he convinces her to file charges. The last scene of the last episode follows her out the school door after she tells the boy that she is going to the police. The didactic and worthy lesson is clear enough: date rape, or attempted date rape, could happen to anyone, and should not be tolerated. Doogie Howser is another example of a TV character whose virginity at one point drives the plot, though there is nothing menaced or menacing about his situation. Doogie and his girlfriend, both virgins, are "naturally" attracted to each other; no other alternative is offered except the heterosexual. After much discussion among their friends and family, they agree that they care enough about each other to have intercourse. Part of this discussion involves talk about safe sex (Doogie is a genius kid who earned his M.D. while still a teenager, and so is especially knowledgeable in a sort of infomercial style). Doogie proceeds to turn his adolescent bedroom into a romantic candle-lit setting. However, when the time comes, both decide that they are not ready for sex. This lesson, comforting as it may be for anxious parents and for even more anxious teenagers, assumes what Harriet Malinowitz calls the "default setting" of heterosexuality.48 It seems that both respecting and transgressing the boundaries of the female virgin body are actions and ideologies that attempt to fix identities through biological and social difference, while sanctioning the "opposite" sex as the object of desire. These two distinct and contradictory narratives-one in which female virginity is praised and revered, the other in which female virginity is "lost" or "taken"-valorize heterosex while suppressing gay and lesbian constructions of sex and desire.
Lesbians and gays have inherited the template of heterosexual virginity-imitating it, adapting it, rejecting it in favor of an alternative virginity, or even rejecting the concept entirely, but nevertheless always having to react to the idea of the virgin and what she stands for. "[W]hat exactly constitutes losing 'lesbian virginity,'" says one respondent whom Karen Bouris interviewed for The First Time, "is a debate among many lesbians I have talked with. For me, it is a matter of having oral sex in which both participants give pleasure to each other." Other lesbians she talked to, says Bouris, felt "technically, according to society, they were still virgins, although they were complete sexual beings."49 Many gays and lesbians assert that it is the coming out narrative, not the fact that one has had sex, that is the core of the gay/lesbian "virginity" story.50 For example, in Losing It, a gay man recalls "losing it" with another boy, but says that he was too young for that sexual experience to "count." Now that he is older and identifies as gay, he says that he has had another "first time."51 Another man says: "many people (mostly ignorant) assume that all gays and lesbians are so very sexually promiscuous, yet we can't even lose our virginity!" He identifies the moment that he lost his virginity as when he was with a man he loved, and they were just talking and laughing: "In a wave of warmth, I felt whole . . . as if I would never be alone."52
The relationship of Celie and Shug in Alice Walker's The Color Purple challenges the dominant heterosexual narrative of the virgin and what it means to be a virgin. We know that Celie has had heterosex. Her children are the proof of that. (Celie is a menaced virgin who has been forced to pay a terrible price for her youth and inexperience-and physical unattractiveness.) However, Celie has never experienced sexual pleasure. Shug, upon learning that Celie had never had an orgasm, exclaims: "Why Miss Celie . . . you still a virgin."53 It is Shug who introduces her to the pleasures of the body, lesbian pleasures centered on Celie's "button," pleasures which have nothing to do with a penis. In The Color Purple, "virginity" is reconfigured as a pre-pleasurable condition, as it were; loss of virginity, as initiation into orgasm by another. To imagine virginity and its loss in such a way defies the binarized construction of bodies, sex, and gender upon which heteropatriarchy depends. On the other hand, virginity defined as a condition conferred upon a woman but surrendered to a man shores up such binaries, disallowing the possibility of a scale or spectrum of acts and/or identities, and reaffirms the power of the penis/phallus.
Judith Butler argues that "the gendered body is performative," which "suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality."54 Yet the day-to-day experience of the body as such rarely involves a sense of a conscious performance, but takes for granted the beingness of the body. Culture mystifies performance, resulting in an effect of "ontologizing" the body. Virginity and its verifications challenge such an ontology, making visible the workings of culture that have hitherto remain hidden. As we have seen throughout this book, the female virgin is a vastly overdetermined sign, capable of proliferating meanings in many directions. She has functioned, and functions, as a metonym for the inviolability of the Christian Church, the figure of spirituality sine qua non, the lynchpin in patrilinear cultures, a commodity to be exchanged between men, a blank page on which male desires, sexual and otherwise, are to be inscribed-and, as I am arguing here, the guarantee of as well as the reward for conforming to the heterosexual imperative. The idea of virginity in the Middle Ages was not monologic and therefore unproblematic, but heteroglossic, conflicted, and conditional. The same can be said of virginity at the end of the twentieth century.