I interviewed Hanne Blank some time ago about her book Virgin: The Untouched History, but only this week have I had a chance to read it. It is what it sounds like, a history of that elusive female quality that has been the centerpiece of female virtue for , well, a long damn time, as long as we’ve had a patriarchy that has benefited from the concept of virginity as a tool to control women. The history of it—from the ancient world that put a monetary value on it to the Catholic world that treated it as a high religious calling to the Protestant world that viewed it as a pre-marital state that was transient but nonetheless mandatory—is fascinating, but where Blank really stands out is in her analysis of how virginity is a concept (and therefore elusive) but has been treated throughout history as a thing, and therefore somehow detectable through methods other than “asking a woman her damn self”, which is out of the question, since that invests in women the authority to label and thereby control their own sexuality.
This picture I’ve linked above is a perfect example of the conundrum of virginity. It’s contextualized as a physical thing that you can actually give a man, but also it’s just not a thing you can give a man. As Blank explains, even in the moment of “giving” a man your virginity, you’re more technically presenting him with an opportunity to destroy something that doesn’t exist except as a cultural concept that’s not easily defined. To make the entire fundie obsession with virginity even creepier, all the talk about giving your husband your virginity means, “Give your husband a chance to feel that he’s had this highly sought after sexual experience that is marked not by its difference from any other, but the uneasy similarity that people put a lot of effort into covering up.” Hymens are hardly definitive. Some cultures (llike the Spanish Roma, who have an elaborate ritual that seems to extract basic vaginal secretions that all women have) insist on completely different definitive tests. Tightness is a silly test, because that has more to do with your genetics than your virginity. The obsession with virginity is a direct result of the fact that it’s more myth than fact.
The abstinence-only crowd shows how confusing the issue is if you care about such things as virginity. Since virginity has traditionally been defined as lost only to penis-in-vagina intercourse, a lot of abstinence-only pledgers do things like have oral and anal sex in order to stay within the letter of the pledge. Can someone who’s been fucked up the ass but not the vagina really lay claim to the ideal of the naive, “pure” virgin untainted with sexuality? If the bride in the picture has maintained her technical virginity by never having PIV intercourse, but has had anal and oral sex with two dozen men and women, is she more or less “virgin” than a woman who’s had PIV intercourse once for two minutes at some point before her wedding night? To address the problem, a lot of abstinence-only proponents have been defining back what sexual activities are acceptable, finally concluding in the most Bible-thumping of communities that it’s best if a couple hasn’t even kissed until they’re legally wed, just to be on the safe side.
The image above also shows how the concept of objectification has been bastardized to mean “a woman being sexually attractive or showing skin”, when it should mean “reducing someone to an object”. That image is as sexually objectifying as anything Playboy magazine has ever run, since the image literally reduces a woman to a fuckhole whose value is based, like a car’s, on having low mileage. The only way it could get any worse is if you were checking her teeth before signing off on the wedding. Blank focuses on virginity as a way to ensure paternity to explain its initial value as a patriarchal tool, but it’s definitely persisted because it gives men all sorts of ways to control and lay judgment on women, and as she shows in the book, it’s often been the cover story for simply terrorizing women into submission. Because there’s no such thing as virginity, outside of the vague concept in our heads that varies from person to person, declaring someone to not be a virgin when she should be has been a handy way to arbitrarily punish women. It also helps the task of objectifying and dehumanizing—since virginity is contextualized as a thing, but it’s not actually a thing, we tend to look at the woman herself as the thing that gives thingness to virginity.
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I’m in the middle of the book. I find it as fascinating as you say, but the terrible editing is a barrier to getting through. Every point Blank makes, she repeats a few pages later. I’m trying to figure out how to read only every other page.
We keep trying to push our modern sense on a practice rooted in agricultural and survivalist notions. Virgins are disease (STD) free, a concern in pre-modern times. Virgins are top dollar property, worth the purchase price…ever pay more for lesser merch? Virgins don’t compare you to Bob, Larry, or Bonnie..keeps the man from losing it and killing you.
Virgin means no sex, of any kind. You are purchasing a human brood mare and a virgin is the best for breeding purposes. In an ag community that would be understood and accepted because surviving is more important than female (or male) fulfillment.
“You are purchasing a human brood mare and a virgin is the best for breeding purposes.”
Uh, no, it really isn’t. If someone is a virgin, you have no idea if they’re going to be able to produce children or survive childbirth. If your sole concern in a spouse is “can they breed?”, you’re going to want proof that they can, in fact, breed. Ideally, you’d want the proof of a healthy child that was fathered/birthed without incident or prolonged delay. It’s not as big a deal in a culture where you can dissolve a marriage without having to jump through too many hoops, but you’re still likely to be out at least a portion of the bride-price or the dowry.
In a culture where you only get one at a time and good luck trying to get rid of one before they die, it’s setting yourself up for disaster. I can’t really imagine a farmer or a herder willing to buy an animal that they could only afford one of for the next several years that wasn’t of proven fertility. If you guessed wrong, you’d be ruined.
You are purchasing a human brood mare and a virgin is the best for breeding purposes.
No, you’re purchasing a human extension of your own ego and one who’s never seen a cock bigger than yours is the best for soothing purposes.
Working with the car analogy:
If you are a virgin getting married, you are essentially buying a car w/o seeing how it handles or if you like it. You might want to see what else is on the lot, take a few for a test drive, research a bit and see which one is best for you. See what features turn you on, which do you prefer- low mileage or broken in? High maintenance or dependable?
Or instead of committing to buy, you may want to lease…
Or you may decide that you don’t want one at all…
There- see how easy it is to objectify MEN and sex from a woman’s POV?
“You are purchasing a human brood mare and a virgin is the best for breeding purposes.”
Well yes, but a brood mare that you know is chaste and a virgin (from the watchful reports of family and the village) will more probably produce only your spawn, exclusively, with no taint of disease or disputable lineage.
In agricultural societies where land was at a premium, the uterus had value in that it could guarantee, presumably, an heir to the land and keep the patriarch’s line in power. Also, more sons means increased longevity of the name as each son may then take a piece of land of their own and also fight to gain more. The patriarchy who has charge of more sons of course would presumably control more of the village and the land.
More daughters would mean more bargaining for land and in some societies a dowry. But even in the simplest sense, the daughter as transferred willingly to the young man to own for himself, is a way for the young man to gain access to the family and also allows the patriarch a more expanded patriarchy under his control. The Old South is a perfect example of this.
Keeping the daughters and the wife ‘chaste’ was of prime importance as each had a specific role in upholding the property structure of the patriarch and also of ensuring the proper health and obedience of the offspring.
A woman with a history might lead to claims by others to the offspring (no DNA testing) as a history leads to the conclusion that she’d just as soon sleep around like she had before. Doubtful lineage might cause conflict of who has rightful title to land.
Its about the uterus, it all springs from there, the woman as an individual doesn’t even enter into it as she does not exist in the patriarchy.
As incorrect as Mold’s extension of the analogy is, it does bring up another (ironic) point.
Just as “The obsession with virginity is a direct result of the fact that it’s more myth than fact,” (awesome line, btw) it’s also a direct result of the fact the patriarchy keeps trying to treat women as something we are not.
A brood mare, after all, can be locked up. It’s not really practical for most husbands to keep their wives literally locked up, even if they want to or if it is legal. Aside from the whole having opposable thumbs and being smart, there’s also the fact that wives are needed to do more work than just breed, and that work tends to necessitate a certain amount of physical freedom. Literally locking women - or horses - up requires a certain amount of income, and not everyone has it.
So, to make up for the fact that it’s problematic at best to keep wives locked in sheds, we instead make up all these laws and customs about what they can and can’t do in order to keep them in a different kind of pen. The requirement that brides be virginal is part of that.
So yeah, virginity is valued because the patriarchy often treats women like brood mares, but it’s also valued because we aren’t brood mares, so the patriarchy has to come up with different kinds of tools to keep women in line.
wives are needed to do more work than just breed, and that work tends to necessitate a certain amount of physical freedom. Literally locking women - or horses - up requires a certain amount of income, and not everyone has it. - Mickie
I’m trying to remember which society it was (I think it was in ancient Persia), but I remember learning in school about some society where women in rich families were essentially locked up, but in poor families, since they needed women’s labor, there was in factor quite a bit of equality between the sexes.
A woman with a history might lead to claims by others to the offspring (no DNA testing) as a history leads to the conclusion that she’d just as soon sleep around like she had before. Doubtful lineage might cause conflict of who has rightful title to land.
There is an ancient weirdo folk belief that is still apparently operative among some animal breeders that a female animal retains some of the characteristics of every male she’s ever been bred with. IOW, if you once bred your ewe to a ram that turned out to be a bad line, you then run the risk that all of her other lambs — even those sired by a different ram — will have the bad characteristics of that bad ram. So you have to be very, very careful what animals you breed together.
And, yes, until about 60 years ago, this was believed of humans as well. Actual (supposedly) scientific books told of cases of widows who remarried and gave birth to children that looked exactly like their husbands who had died three years ago and not like their current husbands. So, clearly, it was very important to only have sex with the “right” people since you would retain the imprint of every man you ever had sex with. And it was also clearly important to keep control of your daughters’ sexuality, since you didn’t want them cheating a future husband by having another man’s child three or four years into the marriage.
It’s not a great book, but Bram Dijkstra’s Evil Sisters is a great reference for a lot of these bizarre beliefs that are not nearly as ancient as we’d like to believe, and they show up in books by people like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read (a long time ago in a women’s studies class) that late colonial rural communities in what would soon be the United States of America were not nearly as virginity-obsessed and pathologically anti-sex before marriage as their descendants (or urban people of their era for that matter) for a couple of reasons: 1) If a woman had sex before marriage and got pregnant, that meant she (and the guy, naturally) weren’t infertile, 2) the extra person would come in handy in the fields anyway and might ensure that more people survived the next outbreak of TB or cholera. Basically, what the book (I’ve long forgotten the name) said was that the emphasis was placed waaaaaaay more on fertility and reproductive potential than on virginity (which served no functional purpose) and that the most common response to pregnancy outside marriage was to make the couple marry, not to shame either of them.
Has anyone else read something similar?
Mold, it’s a mistake to assume that all social customs had a useful and functional purpose, and then work backward to figure out what it might have been. (Especially when you have to retrofit, for example by assuming that ‘virgin’ means ‘no sex of any kind’.)
Jabuka, probably depends on what community. According to Blank, the Northeast areas primarily populated with Puritans took virginity very seriously—if you had sex before marriage, you were taken out in the town square and beaten severely, whether you married the man or not. Infanticide was apparently a severe problem in the colonies, because bearing a child out of wedlock meant that you were basically cut off from the community and left to starve to death. Hawthorne’s portrayal of the mistreatment of Hester Prynne (though honestly, he doesn’t seem to see it as the great injustice we would see it as) is actually a mile version of what many women in her situation had to endure.
Mold, most anthropologists think the obsession with virginity is linked to certain kinds of patriarchal economies, particularly anything where your eldest son inherits everything. You can’t guarantee that a virgin bride’s entire lifetime of child-bearing is yours, but you come close to guaranteeing that her first baby is. Which is good enough in some societies, at least enough to explain the obsession.
But reading this history makes me think that virginity’s prime function in a patriarchy is to establish value in women that can be traded. You “give” your daughter in marriage to another man to make an alliance with him and his family, and there has to be some way to say that this daughter is valuable in a way that other women maybe aren’t. Virginity became that thing; it’s almost kind of arbitrary. It’s the same kind of reasoning that makes a car less valuable the second you drive it off the lot.
You know, there’s a rough test to determine if virginity is more about ensuring paternity vs. it being more about setting an economic value on a woman. If it’s the former, women’s financial independence probably wouldn’t have that huge an impact on the emphasis a culture puts on virginity, because men still have a stake in not raising the children of other men (in the strict biological resources-allotment sense, though there’s other reasons men might be okay with raising another man’s children). But if it’s about setting a price on a woman that is useful in economic bartering, the promotion of women from objects to be owned to human beings who participate in the economy themselves, you’re going to see the emphasis on virginity fade away, because women aren’t commodities anymore. The latter is happening, so I think that’s pretty good evidence it’s more about controlling women than ensuring paternity.
Wow,
Love the comments and insights.
Breeding follows bloodlines, hence our obsession with aristrocrats and celebrities. If you can’t breed, your line dies out.
Small villages mean you likely know lots about your spouse and so does everyone else.
Sometimes in poverty all you have is your pride-see Muslims, gangbangers, skinheads, etc.
I never got the virginity thing either, when I actually think it. Sex is not something you give away, it’s something you share, it should be at least. The next time I write some naughty ‘first time’ fanfiction or smut, I’m going to use an analogy along the lines of ‘bringing into bloom’ for both parties, and not yee old traditional ‘deflowering’.
The latter is happening, so I think that’s pretty good evidence it’s more about controlling women than ensuring paternity.
You seem to think it’s an either/or — it’s a both/and. The fact that you control women by insisting it’s to ensure paternity isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
As with so many of our fucked-up issues, this is something that traces to the Victorians, when the middle classes started imposing their morality on everyone else. The aristocrats only cared that the firstborn son was the putative father’s; the lower classes really only cared about having enough people around to do the work. It was the middle classes who insisted that virginity was special and magical. The fact that they then looked back to the beginning of agriculture to assure themselves that they were right is what confuses the issue because, as with so much of Victorian “science,” they saw what they wanted to, not what actually existed.
Oh, and since I’m ranting about the Victorians, I should mention that most of the Quiverfull stuff is easily traceable to them as well. Aristocratic and middle-class women in France were controlling their fertility by the mid-1700s with primitive diaphragms and they thought that English women were extremely strange for insisting on having huge families of 10 or 12 children when they certainly didn’t have to. French women were having three or four children on average in the mid-1800s, IIRC.
Rich vs Poor use of women.
In the later periods of Ancient China (the centuries leading up to the 19th), the feet of girls were bound to make them more appealing to men who can afford to keep a wife who can’t farm. Their feet are bound until their toes fold under their soles. Confucian fucktards tolls this as virtuous submission to the authority of the patriarchy that women would do this to their daughters.
(In one essay I read about the history of child abuse and the use of children as poison containers, footbinding was cited as a major reason for a decline of the Chinese civilization, because it broke the trust between mothers and daughters, and the daughters themselves grow up to be psychotic mothers to all their children.
The History of Child Abuse
by Lloyd deMause
The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html
Hurt women, hurt everyone, cripple the children, cripple the future.)
Virgins don’t compare you to Bob, Larry, or Bonnie - Mold
How much of the virginity fetish, including the double standard for men and women, is just this?
I can’t speak really from any experience, but, while I imagine that some women are probably “better in bed” than others, in the end, even if the woman is “lousy in bed”, so long as the man is not too nervous or otherwise not in a state to get-off, the man will get off.
OTOH — based on even less personal experience since I’ve never been a woman — it makes a great deal of difference to a woman how good a man is in bed, doesn’t it? So I would imagine that a man who is very insecure might selfishly want a virgin simply because she really can’t compare him to anyone.
Moreover, “the first time is always bad” might not even be a bug of virginity but a feature. If an insecure man has sex with a virgin and she didn’t like it much … well, then it doesn’t reflect on his skills in bed, but rather “well, it’s always bad for women the first time”. Having sex with a virgin is maybe less pressure on a man, so you can imagine that certain insecure men would tend to value such an experience.
*
BTW … I can’t stop thinking about that picture. Could they have been any more explicit without showing bloody sheets? Almost everything is white except that big, bright red ribbon and bow … wow! talk about explicit content. This picture ain’t safe for work, is it?
The ultimate wedding gift - an awkward, inexpert, and possibly painful hour or so. I think I’d rather get a toaster.
In all seriousness, how on earth do they expect two virgins who have been taught that sex is bad and dirty and shameful all their lives to suddenly start having a wonderful sexual relationship? It doesn’t make sense. I would think that by that point you would be so alienated from your body that you wouldn’t know what would feel good, much less how to ask for it!
There were a fair number of those primitive agricultural cultures where people didn’t marry until they were pregnant, precisely because it was important to know that the couple could have children.
Mrs Nice Guy
how on earth do they expect two virgins who have been taught that sex is bad and dirty and shameful all their lives to suddenly start having a wonderful sexual relationship? It doesn’t make sense.
The answer is, they don’t. and it’s a good thing, too–otherwise, every family would have 10-15 children. If birth control is not licit, then sex has to be rare . . .
And guess who is going to be blamed if the first time isn’t magical? The woman. If you aren’t a virgin before marriage, you’re a slut to them. But if you don’t deep throat, take it up the ass and do all you can and more to please your man from the first night on, you’re a frigid bitch and it’s your fault if he cheats on you. That’s how these fundies think.
So, ‘good girls don’t’ and, well, ‘men are pigs’?
The bizarre idea that women have some ‘jewel’ that needs to be protected with voodoo and superstition and men aren’t held to the same standards is just daft… Well, but what makes total sense when the subject of religion is concerned…
Matrilinial geneological bookkeeping would probably eliminate the focus on virginity…You know for sure who the mom is, and it no longer matters so much who the father is. I think this is more common in hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies (anthro majors may want to weigh in).
Breeding follows bloodlines, hence our obsession with aristrocrats and celebrities. If you can’t breed, your line dies out.
This is a tautological statement. Actually, I take it back…It sounds like it out to be true, but it really isn’t. If you, personally, can’t breed, but a sibling does, your “line” continues. Our obsession with aristocrats is the presumption that their bloodline is somehow special.
The ultimate wedding gift - an awkward, inexpert, and possibly painful hour or so.
Not just that, but you’ve just married this person, you’re never going to have sex with anyone else again in your life, and you had damn well better enjoy the sex, and it had better be the best fucking thing that ever happened to you, because where will you be if it isn’t? Way to create a mood.
The ultimate wedding gift - an awkward, inexpert, and possibly painful hour or so. I think I’d rather get a toaster. - Betsy
Except, remember that the gift is being presented to a guy who probably doesn’t care how awkward or inexpert the woman is, ‘cause he’s still gonna get off (or at least that’s how he figures). And some guys really are jerks who don’t really care how painful it is for the woman.
Remember, the whole mindset of the virgin fetishists is very sexist, so in order to “understand” the point of it, you need to understand it from a very sexist point of view that “it doesn’t matter if it’s awkward for the woman; indeed if she’s sacrificing her own pleasure and comfort for him, that means it’s more of a gift, doesn’t it?”.
Although I think rea has an interesting point.
“The ultimate wedding gift - an awkward, inexpert, and possibly painful hour or so.”
The only way it lasts an hour is if they pray for spiritual guidance for 1/2 hour before doing the nasty.
He blows his in 5-10 minutes and they “cuddle” for another 20mins before calling it a night…
DAS, in support of your position, Blank quotes a Biblical marriage manual that explicitly states that women suffer and bleed during virginity loss to cement their role as the submissive, sacrificing one in the three way between themselves, their husband, and god. It’s stated in such a way that it’s clear that if you don’t suffer and bleed, you’re probably fucked up somehow and not going to be a good wife.
Outlier,
The bloodline thing comes from our human crossbreeding to obtain desirable characteristics, like purse dogs. Not too useful in the wild. Line can be the human, the familial, or the individual.
In this area (quite rural and isolated–lots of redheads and deaf) one can see the human lines, the lines of families (think of Kallikaks), and the individual (for some reason there are hordes of dopplegangers here..most have more than a passing resemblance to a 1960s drug dealer)
Yes, it is a small population without validity to the greater human gene pool. However, since the pool is for wading the recessives pop up more readily. As far as cross-breeding…lots of signifiers within the school district that are mentioned in the literature for incest
This reminds me of a satire one HK author, Pen-something, wrote…about how a girl who broke up with her boyfriend because he enjoys the relationship more than she did, therefore it’s unfair, even though she enjoys it too.
Some people rather that they get to get themselves sick on ALL the cake, instead of sharing, because if the other person is happy, than they don’t get to be the winnar.
Interesting Note:
There are plenty of people who fetishize virginity because they like the idea of being the person who ‘introduce’ someone to something wonderful…OR, be the person who have the perfect first time. Stuff like that gets written a lot…in romance novels and on fanfiction sites. Usually by girls about themselves, but also increasingly by girls who giggle about being the one to ‘make a man’ out of boys. In this context though, /nobody was saving it for marriage/! Long term relationship maybe, but, not marriage. Not necessary OTP either, girls are writing friendships with benefits now, and people who find their one true /love/ in their middle ages and definite not as virgins.
Oh-oh-oh, in those stories, the virgin is not ‘the gift’, evar. Where the girl is the virgin, she gets to come first, and where the boy is being written as a virgin, premature ejaculation. So boys with a virgin fetish, it’ll probably be more fun your first time than if it was the other way around. Such are teh expectations.
Good insights by everyone, especially DAS. I think having nothing to compare to is a big factor. I think men who are misogynists (which I interpret as “scared of women”) are much more likely to be obsessed with virginity. A lot of men I know do not want to sleep with virgins!
I also think the virginity fetish may be somewhat of a “past performance = future results” deal because there was some interest in ensuring that heirs were actually of the bloodline. I guess the thought is if a woman could keep her “technical virginity” in her teenage years, when the hormones are the highest she would be more likely to not stray in marriage?
To me sex is too variable to think of it in terms of mind-blowing pop music orgasms. Some women like it rough and some don’t. Some like men, some like women.
The question is more one of value. Paying new car (wife) prices for a used car (wife) is pretty distrubing. In a culture where women are property, this is important.
re: bleeding
The hymen can be gradually stretched rather than broken. In fact, if you are an older woman, the hymen could have retracted on its own so it’ll be awkward but not necessary painful. Knowing this makes me all the more squicked by fucking creeps who prefers them young and in pain.
On the sexuality of women;
http://www.the-clitoris.com/
It says clitoris, but other parts are plenty covered too. Topics ranging from female ejaculation to detailed labeled diagrams featuring the vulva. Back in sex ed, I had to label diagrams of the uterus, but the vulva was very much skipped and I had very little clue what to call stuff down there before I found the site.
Oh, I think you’ll really like this website.
Here is a de-mything look at the hymen, what it is;
http://www.the-clitoris.com/n_html/hymen.htm
“During the early stages of fetal development there is no opening into the vagina. The layer of tissue that conceals the vagina at this time usually divides incompletely prior to birth. The size and shape of this opening or openings varies greatly from one girl to the next. There are girls who do not have a hymen at birth, as the tissue divides completely while they are still in the womb.”
“Only about 50% of teens and women experience bleeding the first time they have intercourse, so blood stained bed sheets are not a reliable indicator of prior virginity. The hymen of some women tear on more than one occasion. There are even hymen that are elastic enough to permit a penis to enter without tearing, or tear only partially. This is usually true only if the dilation first occurs very gradually with fingers or other objects over an extended period of time. Virginity is a spiritual attribute, not a physical one.”
http://www.the-clitoris.com/n_html/virgin1.htm
Working with the car analogy:
Louise,
My sister used that analogy to her fundie coworkers in Oklahoma to explain why she wouldn’t be too upset if her daughter wanted to slut it up as a teenager/young adult, so long as she was sensible and careful (one woman apparently was seeking advice on what to do about her teenage daughter). It didn’t go over well at all.
Well, Amanda is now my mom’s favorite blogger.
She’s a teacher, 37-year vet in the Chicago Public Schools, and though Health is not her role, she constantly has one-on-ones with her students along the lines of: “Just because you’re not experiencing penetration doesn’t mean you’re not engaging in sex, and it also doesn’t mean you’re not doing something potentially risky. If you have more questions, talk to the health teacher or your parents.”
Here’s a direct quote: “I wish I could tell them that getting fucked in the mouth doesn’t mean they’re still virgins.”
I am so sick and tired of this kind of argument.You can focus entirely on the ethical implications Amanda raised without going all “Libruls have better fuck hur hur” with it. You’re really treading the line between you and the folks you revile, right now.
I do think a lot of the virginity emphasis, especially the way it’s sort of grinned away on the man’s side, is about the man’s uncertainty of his prowess.
If your wife has nothing else to compare it to, you can be confident she can’t make comparisons.
Oddly enough, this might be a reason why fundies are so warped about depictions of sex onscreen. Which is usually either very bad, as in violence and clearly unhappy results, or, and here’s why this upsets them more; it looks like a lot of fun.
There’s your comparison. And it might not make the fundie man feel confident.
“You can focus entirely on the ethical implications Amanda raised without going all “Libruls have better fuck hur hur” with it. You’re really treading the line between you and the folks you revile, right now.”
Sorry to offend you, Petey, but the fact is that screwing, like just about everything else humans do, is a learned behavior that takes skill and experience to do well.
I would hardly hold myself up as an expert, nor do I necessarily believe that liberals automatically have better sex.
I’m just agreeing with the basic premise that to expect two actual virgins to suddenly become sexual experts simply because a minister said “I now pronounce you man and wife” is simply absurd.
Betsy’s comment made me laugh and I thought I’d throw in my piece. Having been raised in a very conservative christian church that has (to this day) a huge emphasis on staying virginal, I can relate to the idiocy of that mindset all too well…
“You can focus entirely on the ethical implications Amanda raised without going all “Libruls have better fuck hur hur” with it. You’re really treading the line between you and the folks you revile, right now.”
It’s not so much a “libruls have better fuck” moment and more a “what the hell do you expect if they’re both virgins, both have a heaping helping of sex-phobia, and they think it’s supposed to hurt her” moment. It’s rare for anyone’s first time to be superawesome even if they’ve done everything but, know what to expect, and are with an experienced, attentive partner. Throw two ignorant/misinformed, young, nervous virgins in bed together, and you’re probably going to get about what MikeEss described, only with a side order of guilt, shame, and physical discomfort.
I mean, I had a friend in high school who confessed that she felt guilty about how she wanted to be a virgin when she was married, but she wanted her husband to have had a little experience. She didn’t want to go through with a first time where they were both floundering in completely new territory, but she felt weird about wanting “damaged goods*.” This was a girl who was intelligent and well-read, from a non-fundie family, who attended a non-batshit church, and had been through sex ed that wasn’t great, but it wasn’t abstinence-only. That was ten years ago. I wish I could be more surprised by the new popularity of Christian counselors who specialize in unconsummated marriages.
*Not how the term she used, but it sums up the idea she was articulating.
Virginity became that thing; it’s almost kind of arbitrary. It’s the same kind of reasoning that makes a car less valuable the second you drive it off the lot.
I started thinking about the car thing while reading your post. The thing is, there’s an actual good economic reason for it, with cars– asymmetric information. The logic is that if you’re selling the car, there’s a better than average chance of something wrong with it, so you won’t get a good price, so you’re not likely to sell the car unless there’s something wrong with it, so, vicious circle.
Was trying to figure out if the same logic applies to virgins in some bizarre way. I got this far: if you treat women like commodities, you have to negate their sexual desire and assume the only reason they have sex is in exchange for something. Financial security, usually. And the thing about someone who’s had sex before with some other guy, and is now having sex with you, is that she didn’t get the financial security she was looking for previously. So she’s been tried and rejected before. And if she wasn’t good enough for that other guy, she won’t be good enough for you! It’s not hard to see how virginity becomes a signal of how “valuable” a woman is then. And how dangerous it becomes to get perceived as a slut, someone who’s been serially rejected, someone with no value at all…
Social ecology major here (anthropology/sociology) and yes, hunter/gatherer and horticultural societies, by and large, put no premium on virginity at all. Or if they did, it was for the upper classes - in many Polynesian societies, chiefly girls were expected to be virgins whereas commoner girls had a great deal of sexual freedom.
Marjorie Shostak relates that the Ju/hoansi have no word for “virgin.” There are, or were, plenty of others which distinguished “grown woman” from “young girl” but had no concept of “virgin” as such.
Also, Albion’s Seed relates that among back-country (Appalachian) women something like 90% were pregnant on their wedding day. This region drew their settlers from Scotland and the north of England where premarital pregnancy was the norm rather than the exception.
And they pay lip-service to the idea of male virginity, but breaking that rule is low-risk, low penalty.
Is it just me, as a non-American, or is there something about American thinking that puts “law” above “society”? That is, formal sets of rules rather than fuzzy collective decisions about what is the right thing to do.
(Though I get this feeling more from the RIAA–the USA has explicit “fair use” clauses in copyright law, and the RIAA will sue anyone, while the UK has no such protection, and the RIAA-equivalents here don’t bother wasting effort on small cases.)
Looks to me like a chocolate box, and prompts me to note that I’ve had more chocolate than sex.
We’ve had two births in the family recently and another announced pregnancy. All three couples lived together before marriage, and the pregnancies began between immediately and a few months.It suggests that current practice may be that marriage is sometimes the announcement of the choice of having kids.
(I’ve also got two married nieces who aren’t having any, at least not yet. Nonetheless, it can be a clue.)
Yes.
I mean, it isn’t just you. We Americans definitely have a pettifogging legalistic mentality.
“I mean, it isn’t just you. We Americans definitely have a pettifogging legalistic mentality.”
I always figured it was the result of the kinds of Europeans who came over to become proto-Americans. The strong christianist streak, which typically emphasizes “do as we tell you and don’t think for yourself”, seems to lead to rigid laws/rules and enforcement of laws/rules, rather than understanding and flexibility in the face of new/unusual situations.
We may celebrate the idea of the autonomous individual, but we expect those individuals to play by the rules, regardless of whether they make sense or not…
This is why, contrary to conventional wisdom, engaging in premarital sex is more important and beneficial for women than for men.
Not every man makes female pleasure a priority. It is good for a woman to know whether her significant other cares about her pleasure before making a commitment.
This does not necessarily mean that a woman needs to have multiple partners to have a satisfying sex life in marriage. There is no reason that she can’t be happy with her first. However, she will benefit from knowing what she’s getting before making the commitment.
The “wait until marriage” crowd makes a concerted effort to lower everyone’s expectations of sex in marriage.
According to most of these writers, sex is primarily emotional for the woman. Physical pleasure for the woman is seen as nice, but not necessary. Since women aren’t supposed to have any physical needs, sex is all about how they should satisfy their husbands.
Likewise, the man is made to feel guilty about his sexual desires. Sex is still dirty, but it is permitted in marriage. Men are taught that sex is something that a man needs, but a woman isn’t really interested in, meaning that men are being taught that their sexual needs are an imposition on their wife.
Furthermore, according to some of the more conservative authors, if a married couple enjoys frequent sex, then there is something wrong with the couple. Their relationship is built on “lust” not “love”, since sex shouldn’t be that important.
Needless to say, these attitudes do not make for a healthy sex life. Likewise, with such skewed attitudes about sex in marriage, is it any wonder that so many in this crowd start to look elsewhere after a few years?
The christianist streak of the proto-Americans is a large part of this, especially considering how many of them put a strong emphasis on Biblical literalism.
The dominant meme of the Protestant reformation is that the clergy cannot be trusted, only the Bible. Likewise, judges who would interpret the civil law in a manner that is best for society as opposed to the literal text of the law are also distrusted. This is why when the right wing talks about “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench” it is so effective at motivating their base.
Of course, this isn’t just a Protestant idea either. When large numbers of Catholic immigrants came to this country after the Civil War, they did not trust the Protestant majority who was ruling the country. What the Catholic Church said was to take priority in the life of a Catholic, and there is no debate in the Catholic Church (at least none that an ordinary Catholic can take part in) This changed somewhat in the 1960’s, first with JFK, and then even more with Vatican II, but Rome did not like the results and wants to roll it back. However, the old ideas still persist. (I would say that about 90% of the ideas of the anti-choice movement come straight from Rome.)
Finally, since both the Calvinistic tradition and the unreformed Catholic tradition (especially in Ireland) put a strong emphasis on man’s sinful nature, there is no particular reason for mercy. Everyone is deserving of unlimited punishment (i.e. eternal damnation) at all times. Therefore, the law cannot and should not be merciful. It makes perfect sense to sentence a teenager to 10 years in prison for oral sex with another teenager; It makes perfect sense to bring child pornography charges against a 17 year old when he has naked pictures of his 16 year old girlfriend; Life in prison is a perfectly appropriate response to a career petty criminal, etc. Since God’s wrath is unlimited, and His law (which is rather arbitrary) is written in stone, then in the minds of many, the justice system should act the same way.
This give me an opportunity to recommend possibly my favorite author these days.
Go read “Virginity” by Witold Gombrowicz and then everything else by him as well.
I had a book by Bernard Baylin in a History seminar about the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution or some such title (really low on time right now) which stressed how seriously the Revolutionary/Constitution-Framing generation of leaders took Whig political philosophy; I argued in my critique of the reading that we should look as well to ideology emerging from the real living situations of British Colonial America as well. Besides the way that a legalistic mentality might have emerged from Puritan ideology (and let’s not forget that a lot of the American consensus would have come from Virginia and other Southern colonies as well) and from Lockean philosophy (which might also be traced dialectially back to Calvinism), we should bear in mind that a lot of distinctly irreligious Founder/Framers still contributed to this mindset. Modern US partisan politics took its definitive form from the Jackson era and the “Whig” (= by then covert Hamiltonianism) reaction to it; the Jacksonian Dems were very much against established religion, including banning religious holidays for Federal services and mandating postal service on Sunday. Yet they too represented I think a very big step toward modern US legalism.
I’d say the decisive thing is that we are close to 100% capitalist in our mentality, and the norms of the corporate rich have pretty much laid the groundworks for legalism, but I am out of time for now alas…maybe I’ll go to the library today.
It suggests that current practice may be that marriage is sometimes the announcement of the choice of having kids.
Judging from my family and friends, that seems pretty accurate. Some people waited a few years, but the stated reason was almost always that they wanted to have kids and preferred to start with that legal relationship.
Here in New England, you can find very easily (say, at the Concord Historical Society museum on the wall) examples of how 18th-century rural Northeasterners were a) hving premarital sex, b) weren’t ashamed of it, in the fancy calligraphy and embroidery plaques they made to put in their homes showing all the important family dates, including - Wedding, and Birthday of First Child.
I don’t think it only took 6 months back 200 yers ago…
And the late famous naturalist Gerald Durell describes in his memoirs of growing up in little Greek fishing/farming towns in the ’30s how it was not only okay, but *expected* that a bride be “showing” on her wedding day - how else would a couple know if they could have kids?
Which is also borne out in medieval sources from rural villages in England in the 1300s - small towns’ community elders are known to have not bothered with the “mandatory” fines for fornication, when it was teens out in the haystack. (See the Gies’ book Lifein a Medieval Village.)
Even in the old aristocracy there were provisions for “legitimizing” children born out of wedlock so that the (male) bloodline could continue. (Not to mention pretty much every surname beginning with “Fitz”)
Maybe we should think about virginity fetishism as a cargo cult — something that looked much like it served a very specific purpose for the narrow slice of a few cultures that required it, but now the people who adopt it understand neither its original purpose nor the context required to make it “work”. Hijinks ensue.
As a male friend pointed out to me recently - the trouble with having sex with virgins is they’re not very good at it - especially not the first time!! Beauty Queen’s on the other hand sure know how to eat yogurt seductively.
Is it just me, as a non-American, or is there something about American thinking that puts “law” above “society”? That is, formal sets of rules rather than fuzzy collective decisions about what is the right thing to do.
I’ll echo Mark’s yes.
Also, especially related to matters of sex, sexuality, gender and all that, the USA’s European ancestors were smart enough to boot the Puritans out when they did.
I apologize if this has already been said, but tightness is silly b/c it has more to do with degree of relaxation than genetics or virginity. If I’m stressed, my vag is going to clamp shut.
But nobody is asserting that you pick that kind of marriage and it makes you a sexual ninja. There seems to be a hidden argument that what’s really important is being good in the sack, and that since inexperience precludes this, then the sort of conservatives who choose this route automatically set themselves up for unhappy marraiges.It just seemed as if this is where you were heading, and I can guarantee that this is how a lot of conservatives are going to see it.
Now, in my experience, sex with someone usually starts out great, and if you have a good relationship, gets incredible. You do need good sex, it’s important, but since it’s IMO more dependent upon other aspects of the relationship than upon how many notches you already have on the bedpost, this entire line of inquiry is a red herring, and Amanda’s original line of argumentation is much better.
“But nobody is asserting that you pick that kind of marriage and it makes you a sexual ninja.”
If you’ve never heard a proponent of no-sex-before-marriage insist that it’s the only way sex will be really meaningful, fulfilling, special/magical, etc., consider yourself lucky. If you’ve never heard the other side of that saw–that if you have sex before marriage you’re unlovable/used-up/disgusting and the sex itself is empty, draining, and dangerous–then you might want to leave that cave on Mars and take your fingers out of your ears.
Re: sex and marriage a couple hundred years ago.
Check Laurel Ulrich’s book or documentary A Midwife’s Tale. I’ve seen the movie but not read the book (yet); the movie, at least talks about how pregnant young women were nothing out of the ordinary or to be frowned upon, but marriage was expected before the kid was born.
Amanda, you have a good point that virginity has “has been treated throughout history as a thing, and therefore somehow detectable through methods other than ‘asking a woman her damn self’, which is out of the question, since that invests in women the authority to label and thereby control their own sexuality.” And yet, when a woman knows that she has higher market value as a virgin, and may have none, or even be in danger as a non-virgin, she has every reason to be less than fully honest. The same considerations apply to asking a man his damn self if he’s ever taken it up the ass, don’t you think?
As for whether an obsession with rules and casuistry is more an American thing than not, the Talmud and its associated traditions, and Roman Catholic scholastic philosophy, did not originate in America as far as I know.
“it’s IMO more dependent upon other aspects of the relationship than upon how many notches you already have on the bedpost”
I have to say that, in terms of comparing virgins to people who’ve had one or two sexual partners, I seriously disagree. It took probably two or three years of consistent sexual activity for me to really start to feel comfortable with sex, and really the most important thing was getting a few notches on my bedpost (not just 2 or 3 years of monogamy).
This was pretty much at the core of one of my early long term hetero relationships — he was the only guy I’d been with, and he was really good at manipulating me into thinking that all his personal sexual peccadilloes were The Way It Is. This control wasn’t confined to the bedroom, either. It was the main instrument in turning a strong and confident young woman into a nervous little bunny rabbit who would never question him about anything.
To me, this is the central benefit of female virginity in a patriarchal culture. When you can control women’s sexuality, you can really warp her sense of herself. And it’s much harder to control the sexuality of someone who is experienced enough to know what’s what.
The opponax, I have had a similar experience. Also, the pressure to be a virgin when you marry means that I bent over backwards, and put up with a lot of shit I wouldn’t otherwise have put up with, because he was my first.
Thanks to contact sports, my hymen split when I was 14, way before I first had sex. Oops. I guess they would have stoned me back in the day.
Nah, there were tons of ways around the blood-on-the-sheets dilemma back in the day… The real problem would be if you’d lost your hymen actually having sex, which wouldn’t be something you could just ask your granny or a midwife for advice on.
There’s an interesting bit in Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries where one of the characters sleeps with the boy she really loves just prior to her wedding to the guy her parents have arranged for her, so she tries to cut herself on the inner thigh in order to produce the necessary blood. She cuts her new husband’s testicles instead!
On the other hand, though, I’ve always wondered if half the reason for enforced physical inactivity (corsets, purdah, foot binding, etc) didn’t have the added bonus of preventing anything that might result in the premature breakage of Teh Seal. Like Daddy keeping his action figure in the original packaging, because it will be much more valuable that way…
“Like Daddy keeping his action figure in the original packaging, because it will be much more valuable that way…”
One daughter, mint-in-box, best offer…
Mold: You keep using those words…and stringing them into entire paragraphs.
I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
promiscuous reader,
the point isn’t that women will lie about being virgins. we have and we do, our culture demands it. but because virginity doesn’t exist, what difference does it make if she lies about it? “i want you to have a special thing that i can never see or prove that you own.” “well OF COURSE i have it.”
same with asking a man if he’s had anal sex. i can’t *fathom* a situation when such a possibility would actually matter so what reason has he to tell me that he has in fact done it?
Jabuka: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read (a long time ago in a women’s studies class) that late colonial rural communities in what would soon be the United States of America were not nearly as virginity-obsessed and pathologically anti-sex before marriage as their descendants
You are not wrong. i did a research paper on virginity for my Psych of HumSexuality class (some 20 years ago) and the record was one of moderate tolerance.
Promscuity was frowned on (the couple who had a child at five months of marriage was fined 9 schillings, but otherwise not hassled. He was [after some other pecadillos, including masturbating onto the meeting house wall on a Sunday; fined five schillings] named town constable), but sex was seen as a part of a healthy marriage, and the proverb that, “A new bride can do in six months, what take a cow, or countess, nine,” was well known.
Bundling (the habit sharing a bed, with a barrier to prevent sex) was a widely practiced behaviour, and the barrier was far from truly effective.
No small part of that was that famers, understand how sex works. It’s not a mystery to their kids. In the age it was also believed, by many, that unless a woman was enjoying the sex, she couldn’t conceive (some even held that absent an orgasm, she would be infertile).
The obsession with virginity was an upper class concern. If one didn’t have lands and properties, titles and honors, to pass along/preserve; if one had no dynastic interests to be protecting, then strict adherence to abstinence before marriage wasn’t as big a deal.
People also married later in life than we tend to think. Most men not being in a place where they could afford a wife/household, until they were about 27, and most women being about 24 when they accepted an offer.
There’s a whole lot of other stuff, not just in US/British culture (it was a wide ranging paper).
In the age it was also believed, by many, that unless a woman was enjoying the sex, she couldn’t conceive
Sadly, I know conservative folks in the modern day US who still believe this, to the tune of thinking abortion should not be available even to rape victims, because if a woman is truly raped she obviously couldn’t get pregnant.
I see someone beat me to mentioning bundling. We will note that chastity was preserved by a plank dividing the bed, and the solemn understanding that never, ever, ever would the teenagers involved, I dunno, put it down…
I get the impression that, pre-modern times, virginity was important because controlling access to the Tunnel Of Love was the only way to ensure paternity. Always a critical issue for land-owners.
In modern times it seems to be conservative parents getting really really squicked at the idea of their precious little girls doing the nasty.