| What do you do when you’ve got an extra vat of the rendered fat of virgins lying around?
Well, if you were a Northern European thief in the 18th century who believed in folk magic, you’d use the fat to whip yourself up a candle and light it to make yourself invisible in order to rob a church. That’s just one of many wacky Virgin Heritage Moments you can enjoy in Virgin: The Untouched History by author and historian Hanne Blank, who jokes that she wanted to call her book: Everything You Know About Virgins is Wrong. "For example," she tells me over the phone from her home in Baltimore, Maryland," the whole idea that a doctor can tell whether or not a woman’s a virgin or that the [integrity of the] hymen provides some ironclad proof." In fact, says Blank, "hymens run the gamut," from thick and resilient to thin and fragile, making them easy to pop in a myriad of ways and therefore lousy indicators of whether or not a young woman has had intercourse.
Blank’s curiosity about virgins was piqued five or six years ago when she was helping out a friend who founded scarletteen.com, a website devoted to educating young women about sexuality. Blank found herself responding to questions like: if someone felt me up and I let him stick a finger inside me, am I still a virgin? "I’d say, ‘You know, that’s really a tough call,’" Blank tells me. "As far as I knew there wasn’t some master technical definition out there."
She decided to see what was out there on the subject and starting poking around medical school libraries where she, in fact, found many definitions, most of which contradicted one another. After four years of research, she’s no closer to a definition but she’s put together a comprehensive summary of the western world’s obsession with virginity through the ages.
Why such a fuss over something that doesn’t even ruffle a feather in the animal world?
"As far as we know, there are no animals that have been observed to favour a virgin when it comes to choosing a mate," explains Blank. "[Humans] seem to be the only ones that care." That’s because papa squirrel doesn’t give a shit about passing on his stash of acorns to his offspring. It’s known as the paternity-property hypothesis in biology and anthropology circles, explains Blank. Basically, when men became landowners, they needed to know who their kids were so they could hand down their property. The easiest way to keep track was to start fresh with a verified virgin and do your damnedest to make sure you were the only one having sex with her.
Of course, determining a girl’s virgin status isn’t so easy, as Blank mentions. Which is probably why we’ve come up with some pretty cockamamie ways to prove it. Like the Gitano people of Spain who throw a big party the night before the wedding and have an elder woman in the village supposedly pop the girl’s uva — a grape-like sack full of fluid in the girl’s vagina – with a handkerchief-covered finger so she can present the fluid-stained fabric to the girl’s mother as proof of her virginity.
"Here is a ritual that involves a part of the anatomy that doesn’t even exist as far as western medicine," says Blank. "Which made me realize that we make stuff up, because it sounds good and supports our beliefs, in this case, about virginity. Then we keep doing and tell ourselves that this is the way it is."
And old habits die hard. A few thousand years after this whole virginity thing became an issue, we’re still obsessed with whether a girl’s done it or not (with guys, we just make funny movies about the fact that you haven’t done it yet). I think it’s time to move on, no? "We don’t go from all or nothing when it comes to acquiring our sexual knowledge," Blank suggests. "It’s a gradual process. The notion that there is this on/off switch [from pre-virgin to post-virgin sexual being] is very facile and not very helpful."
So, now to the young woman who asks, "Am I still a virgin?" Blank responds, "Do you want to be? Because no one can tell if you are or you aren’t unless they’ve had sex with you," she explains. "It’s really up to you how you want to present that information or not. It’s your own affair."
For more information about Virgin: The Untouched History, go to VirginBook.org. |
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