Virgin: The Untouched History (14 page)

The idea has a long history, but its current incarnation is largely the result of the work of Sigmund Freud. The third of three essays in his
Contributions to
the Psychology of Love,
the 1918 essay "The Taboo of Virginity" was for decades considered one of the definitive scientific discussions of the topic of virginity. In this essay, while admitting that our Western ideology of virginity is simultaneously deeply rooted and essentially inexplicable, Freud nonetheless did not hesitate to profess a number of wholly unsubstantiated "truths" about virginity and its loss.

Chief among them—prominently placed in the second paragraph of the essay, so no one could miss it—is the idea that the experience of losing her virginity "brings about a state of 'thralldom' in the woman that assures the man lasting and undisturbed possession of her and makes her able to withstand new impressions and temptations from without." Without so much as a footnote to back up this amazing assertion, Freud takes the notion of female emotional dependency on sexual partners (an idea he borrowed uncredited from the notebooks of his sexologist colleague Richard von Krafft-Ebing) and claims that it is the nearly inevitable result of women losing their virginity. The idea is completely in line with late-nineteenth-century middle-class notions of the proper relationship between the sexes, but the mechanics of this "thralldom" are a classic example of magical thinking. This is Sleeping Beauty's story: the woman is "awakened" into instant and permanent pair-bonding by the first sexual touch of a man.

Freud acknowledged that this hapless, helpless relationship dynamic was not benign. Those who still believe in the existence of this spontaneous, unasked-for bond between virgins and their deflowerers think likewise, and see it as one of the major pitfalls of having sex with a virgin. The flip side of this myth is no prettier. Many a woman has gone into her first sexual experience convinced that losing her virginity would produce an automatic commitment on the part of the man to whom she lost it.

However, as many women have discovered to their dismay, the magic is a myth. Historian Ginger Frost relates numerous occasions where late-nineteenth-century men, arraigned and charged with breach of promise after having seduced women they'd promised to marry, replied with the predictable response that of course they'd promised commitment to get sex, that "all men do." It seems almost superfluous to mention that this phenomenon is by no means limited to the Victorians. Indeed, if there is anything as timeless as losing one's virginity, it may be the empty promises that often precede it: an old Arab proverb laments it with the poetic formula "He promised me earrings, but he only pierced my ears." Whether faced with desperate clinging when one wanted cool independence or dealing with cool independence when one wanted clinging, the former virgin and her partner may both, in the end, view virginity loss as little more than a basket of terribly sour grapes.

But there were other ways that the supposed "imprinting" of virginity loss might, or so Freud claimed, turn into a fiasco. There was a very real risk that a woman would reflexively and inescapably despise her deflowerer for what he'd done. As "The Taboo of Virginity" explains it, such fury is due not to any conscious personal animosity but by the (supposedly) inevitable pain of defloration. This pain was not just physical, according to Freud, although he presumed that women did suffer bodily pain and bleeding. There was also the deeper pain of an inevitable psychic "wound" caused by the destruction of "an organ" (whether Freud meant the hymen specifically or virginity itself is less than clear). The resulting wounded-animal rage could take the form of verbal and physical assaults. Freud reported cases of women who tongue-lashed, physically threatened, or actually struck their husbands after not only the first act of intercourse, but every sex act thereafter. Turned inward, Freud argued, the same fury caused frigidity.

Freud wasn't alone in believing that the wrong first experience of sex, or even the right experience improperly handled, could result in catastrophe. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sex manuals are rife with descriptions of how a husband could cause his wife permanent damage if he bungled the wedding night. Victorian-era writer John Cowan, for instance, warned that a naive bride's refined sensibilities, to say nothing of her delicate constitution, might well be overcome by violent or crass boudoir tactics: "The husband, in the exercise of what he is pleased to term his 'marital rights,' places his wife, in a very short time indeed, on the nervous, delicate, sickly list." Later, British sex education reformers such as Stella Browne and Marie Stopes downplayed the inevitability and permanence of such damage, proposing instead the much more reasonable notion that anyone's first experience of sex can be made better, and the associations they will have with sex improved, if they are given a chance at both sex education and sexual experiences that are unpressured and noncoercive. But even the resolutely progressive Stopes, in her bestselling
Married Love
(1918), could not entirely get away from the notion of the permanently ruinous first sexual experience, relating that there have been "not a few brides whom the horror of the first night of marriage . . . has driven to suicide or insanity."

It took most of the twentieth century for the notion that virginity loss permanently shaped one's sexual existence to fade from the sex manuals and psychology texts, and even now one still occasionally finds traces of it in the literature. As late as 2003, analysts Deanna Holtzman and Nancy Kulish were still hard at work, in an issue of the
Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
debunking the Freudian "vengeful virgin" theory with a curt "we feel this idea of revenge against the deflowerer is an example of a male fantasy projected onto the female." Few if any reputable professionals still espouse the idea that virginity loss gives rise to these spontaneous, uncontrollable reactions, but the belief lives on despite the change in the psychoanalytic party line. A bad first experience of sex, particularly if a woman loses her virginity as a result of rape or incest, is still often popularly touted as the cause of frigidity, inability to orgasm, or lesbianism. (It is sometimes similarly claimed that a bad first experience with a woman can "turn a man gay.") Conversely, in the long tradition of making a disease of female sexual desire, a woman who enjoys her first sexual experience might become a nymphomaniac or a "sex addict," instantly and permanently dependent not on the specific man in question but on the act itself. With the recent resurgence of emphasis being placed on virginity (or "premarital sexual abstinence" as it's often called in today's rhetoric) for teenagers of both sexes, we sometimes find young men turning this mythology on themselves as well, embracing virginity out of fear that if they taste the forbidden fruit, they might not be able to keep themselves from becoming "man-whores."

What all of these beliefs about virginity loss have in common is the idea that there is a deep, core portion of the self that cannot be altered consciously, yet is completely reshaped in an instant by a single sexual experience. Newly deflowered virgins are imagined as the helpless recipients of some sort of automatic imprint, helplessly following in the wake of their own virginity loss like baby ducks following their mother. In reality it's just another manifestation of the fantasy that losing our virginity should by rights leave traces. For better or worse, however, what we generally take away from losing our virginity are only the same sorts of memories, variegated in type and intensity, prone to distortion and fading, as we have of the other memorable events in our lives.

Blood and Pain

No book on virginity could possibly omit a discussion of blood and pain. Considered proof positive of a woman's virginity since the very earliest documents we have on the subject, pain and bleeding have been so strongly associated with virginity loss that we scarcely speak about first-time sex without talking about them. Generally pain and bleeding associated with first-time sexual penetration—if they happen at all—are both short-lived and minor, but this is a very personal and variable thing. While it is true that some women do report intense pain and/or extensive bleeding, it is extremely rare for a physically adult woman's first experience of sexual penetration to result in injuries severe enough to require medical attention. That the physical consequences of virginity loss occupy a sizable continuum has been a known factor for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even the rabbis of the Talmud recognized that not all women's bodies react to virginity loss the same way.

We look for blood and pain in virgins because we attach enormous symbolic meaning to these things. Depending on one's viewpoint, blood and pain can be understood as symbolic of virtue, morality, sacrifice, and even of sacramental covenants and the grace of God. Sociologist Sharon Thompson's research has shown that in telling their virginity-loss stories, some women seem to positively revel in gory (and in some cases clearly exaggerated) details of how much it hurt and how much they bled and suffered. While some cast losing their virginity in the light of romantic sacrifice or "proving their love," others frame it as evidence that sex inevitably makes victims of women or as proof that sexually active women deserve to suffer. Still others cite it as the physical embodiment of all the betrayal and disappointment they felt when they realized that sex wasn't necessarily going to be the be-all and end-all they'd been led to expect. "They almost seem to be scaring each other off," Thompson writes, then adds, in a perceptive alternate take, "or playing dare double-dare."

In a very different interpretation, some evangelical Christian youth educators like Dannah Gresh, the author of the pppular
And the Bride Wore White:
Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity,
draw an explicit connection between the idea of a blood sacrifice, blood covenants, and the blood of defloration to emphasize the ideals of premarital chastity and a sanctified marriage bond. "You see, God created you and me with a protective membrane, the hymen, which in most cases is broken the first time that we have intercourse," Gresh writes. "When it breaks, a woman's blood spills over her husband. Your sexual union is a blood covenant between you, your husband, and God." Gresh wins points for acknowledging that this blood loss doesn't happen every time ("in most cases"), but one can only wonder how a reader might react who'd internalized Gresh's characterization of this spilling of blood, only to discover when the time came that she hadn't bled a drop. Such are the risks of attaching heavy symbolic meaning to a physical phenomenon that may or may not happen.

Whether in the painful bloody first times showcased in romance novels and pornography, the ancestral custom of proving virginity through the evidence of post-wedding-night blood on the sheets, the way young women use their virginity-loss horror stories as an arena for female bonding, or in religiously based interpretations like Gresh's, the message is clear: blood and pain equal virginity loss, virginity loss equals blood and pain. On some level, it seems as if our culture believes that women
should
bleed and suffer when they have sex for the first time. Whether it is framed as a consecration or as a punishment is but a matter of perspective.

From antiquity forward, numerous medical writers likewise noted that it was eminently possible for a virgin not to bleed. It is discussed extensively in Tractate Ketubot of the Talmud, and a range of Greek, Egyptian, Carthaginian, biblical, and other sources on the subject are cited in Robert Burton's 1621
Anatomy of Melancholy.
But if some women bleed and others don't, it rather raises the question why. One fairly common explanation, advanced by writers including seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp, was that women who lost their virginity after they had been menstruating for some while were less likely to bleed because the passages were already accustomed to having substances pass through them on a regular basis. Other writers simply admitted ignorance. The late-seventeenth-century sexual self-help best-seller
Aristotle s Master
Piece,
which remained hugely popular throughout England and America for over a century, was firm in its insistence that an absence of blood was not conclusive evidence of a misplaced maidenhead, and happy to equivocate as to the reasons the blood might not appear:

When a man is married and finds the tokens of his wife's virginity, upon the first act of copulation, he has all the reason in the world to believe her such, but if he finds them not, he has not reason to think her devirginated, if he finds her otherwise sober and modest: Seeing the Hymen may be broken so many other ways, and yet the woman both chaste, and virtuous.

The answer to the question of why the experience of first intercourse is so variable is no clearer today than it was in the seventeenth century. We still don't know exactly why some women experience pain and bleeding along with their first experience of penetrative sex and others don't. We don't, in fact, even necessarily know what aspect of penetration or what part of the anatomy is being affected when pain and bleeding do occur. There are, after all, quite a few possibilities.

Many people simply assume that first intercourse tears the tissues of the hymen, and this tearing is what causes both pain and bleeding. This may be true in some cases, but we also know that not all hymens are equally traumatized by penetration and some are not traumatized by it at all. What kind of hymen is most likely to prove a source of pain? We don't know, and the research doesn't provide an answer. It would seem prudent, though, to surmise that the hymen itself must not be the sole factor in the equation that determines what a woman experiences the first time she is sexually penetrated.

After all, intercourse does not take place between a penis and a hymen. Hymens do not exist in isolation. The hymen is a landmark within the larger landscape of the entrance of the vagina, much in the manner that the frame of a door is a landmark in the larger landscape of an entryway to a house or room. You can't go through the doorway without going through the door's frame, but you also can't go through the door's frame without going through the doorway. The same is true of the hymen and the entrance of the vagina. If the hymen is present at all, it's present as part of the vaginal entrance. It is made of the same types of tissues as the rest of the vagina, and is subject to the same conditions and forces as the rest of it.