Hanne Blank - Virgin: the Untouched History

VIRGIN

The Untouched History

HANNE BLANK

Copyright 2007 by Hanne Blank

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Blank, Hanne.

Virgin : the untouched history / Hanne Blank.1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-719-4

1. VirginitySocial aspects. 2. VirginityHistory. I. Title.

GN484.47B53 2007

306.4 dc22

2006017172

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007

This paperback edition published in 2008

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Westchester Book Group

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

For my mother Shanna Spalding,

my mother's mother Ruth West Spalding,

Eliiabeth Tamny, Heather Corinna, Leigh Ann Craig,

and for each and every virgin, everywhere.

CONTENTS

e

A s I WORKED ON THIS BOOK, I joked with friends that I was going to give it the subtitle Everything You Think You Know About Virginity Is Wrong. Like many people, and perhaps like you yourself, I blithely believed when I began this work that I already knew what there was to know about what I then considered to be a trivial topic. Surely, I thought, my academic and professional work in women's and gender studies and in the field of human sexuality had already told me everything one might need to know about virginity.

How very wrong I was. From the day that I first wandered into Harvard's Countway Medical Libraryspurred by the questions of some adolescents with whom I was working as a sex educatorto look up medical definitions of virginity, my assumptions have been repeatedly uprooted, my expectations confounded, and my prejudices smashed to smithereens. I was vexed to discover that most of the medical textbooks I was looking through didn't even bother to discuss virginity, and those that did rarely seemed to define it. I was also astonished and utterly enthralled by the idea that I had stumbled across a subject clearly related to the human body, one whose existence and importance has been asserted for thousands of years, and yet it appeared, somehow, to have left virtually no trace in the modern medical literature.

I continued to search. A few months later, I conjectured that it was possible there simply was not much to be known about virginity and virgins. I was finding little enough that was relevant, and nothing at all remotely like the comprehensive overview of the subject I was hoping to find. Even though my interests were limited to virginity and virgins in the Western world, it was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if I wanted to read a comprehensive survey of virginity, I was going to have to write it. Given the slim pickings on the library shelves in my initial research, I figured the job wouldn't be too difficult.

On this score, too, I was proven laughably wrong. I began to read the work of a lonely handful of scholars, primarily literary and religious historians, who had looked at questions of virginity during the medieval and Renaissance eras. Their books and articles, without which this book could never have come to be, instantly became my beacons and touchstones. But every time I turned a page of this slender pile of scholarship, I seemed to have several dozen new questions. I rapidly realized that the reason the book I wanted didn't exist wasn't that there wasn't enough information to fill it, but rather that the topic has long been neglected. The information is scattered across numerous fields and disciplines, completely disorganized, and often tricky to find. Virginity's very naturesocially, religiously, physically, and otherwisemeans that it has often been a taboo, uncertain, and sometimes deliberately obscured subject.

Answering my questions about the history and nature of virginity became a task that occupied the better part of four years of my life. It led me on a wildly interdisciplinary scavenger hunt that encompassed specialty libraries in law, medicine, and art; humanities research collections; archives; interviews; museum collections; Internet Web sites; and mountainous piles of government documents from several different countries. I found myself visiting "adult" bookstores to scrutinize their virginity porn offerings and standing in grimy inner-city parking lots taking pictures of pro-virginity billboards. In hot pursuit of information I couldn't find elsewhere, I learned to negotiate (sometimes torturously) sources written not only in foreign languages that I knew how to read, but also in othersGreek, Portuguese, Swedishthat I did not. Swiftly I learned that regardless of the source or when it was written, information relating to virginity is rarely presented in such a way that it is free of bias, superstition, or simply the kind of inaccuracies that often sneak into even academic books under the guise of "things everybody knows." Separating the data from the digressions added its own complications to my work.

My problem, in the end, was not that there was too little information available on virgins and virginity, but too much. To make navigating these sometimes overwhelmingly dense waters a little easier for the reader, I have divided this book into two parts. The first, Virginology, centers on the medical and scientific sides of virginity, while Virgin Culture, the second part, deals with virginity in society and culture. Although I have worked hard to make Virgin: TheUntouched History as inclusive as possible, no single book on the subject can provide a completely comprehensive treatment of this vast subject. Each chapter of this book could easily be a complete book on its own... and, in some cases, several books. If a favorite bit of virginity trivia fails to appear in these pages, or if specific questions about virgins and virginity are not answered here, it's likely not because I haven't encountered said trivia or looked into the same questions myself, but rather because neither I nor my hardworking editors could find a way to make everything fit. Exponentially more information on virginity and virgins exists than I have been able to detail, and much more remains to be found. For the reader who would like to expand his or her experience of this book, however, some of the excerpted material is available on the Internet at VirginBook.org.

What you read there, and between these covers as well, may confuse, distress, and surprise you. Indeed, I hope that it does. Numerous times during my research I found myself cackling at some ridiculous bit of virginity trivia or other, but I was just as likely to end up recoiling in horror, weeping with sorrow and sympathy, or outraged at yet another example of misogynist cruelty justified in the name of virginity. Even more frequently than that, however, I found myself surprised: at the things that hadn't changed in millennia; at the things that had only changed during my own lifetime; at the unsubstantiated projection that often passes for truth where virginity is concerned; and most of all at the things that I'd been told were true that turned out to be demonstrably false. As I mentioned at the beginning of this preface, the subtitle really should, in many ways, have been Everything You Thought You Knew About Virginity Is Wrong.