Virgin: The Untouched History (32 page)

Into this milieu it emerged that the biggest single obstacle to female sexual autonomy had, for all practical purposes, been overcome. For as long as we have records, women have attempted contraception, often at significant risk. Most contraceptives, historically, have been troublesome, difficult and expensive to obtain, unpleasant or even debilitating to use, and often dependent upon male cooperation. Adding insult to injury, many have been indifferently effective. Then the world changed: following several breakthroughs in the laboratory synthesis of hormones, the first contraceptive pills were released into the British and American markets between 1957 and i960.

The birth control pill had been a dream of contraceptives activists since the beginning of their movement: Marie Stopes stated in 1928 that "the demand for a simple pill or drug" contraceptive would be unimaginably huge. She was correct. The Pill was originally available only to married women, yet by the mid-1960s, approximately a third of married American women and about 25 percent of younger working-class British couples used it. The percentages only rose from there.

The Pill's reliability and the fact that it was mess-free and convenient helped make it popular, but those were not the only reasons it was embraced so quickly by so many. For the first time in history, women could separate sex and pregnancy both literally and symbolically. The Pill did not have to be taken at the time one had sex. The Pill also did not directly involve the genitals. Contraception could happen entirely behind the scenes and on a woman's own initiative.

This unprecedented control was, as Lara Marks points out, not without ironic drawbacks. "By diminishing the risk of pregnancy, the oral contraceptive undermined the powerful psychological weapon women had previously possessed to deny sexual intercourse. After all, men could now argue that as there was no risk in having intercourse why should they not do so. Within this context the pill changed expectations about sexual intercourse. Now sexual intercourse was much higher on the agenda for some couples than other forms of sexual activity, such as heavy petting, which had been one way of avoiding pregnancy."

This insight provides some perspective on the popular perception of a link between the introduction of the Pill and the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While there is no question that the Summer of Love and related events came rather rapidly on the heels of the introduction of the Pill, there is no evidence that suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. The Pill certainly revolutionized contraception and made it possible for women to develop, for the first time, a concept of female heterosexuality that concerned itself more with pleasure than with the prospect of pregnancy. But as historians like Elizabeth Siegel Watkins accurately note, "In the 1960s and early 1970s, demographers focused on the contraceptive habits of
manied
women to document the
contraceptive
revolution, while sociologists surveyed the sexual attitudes and practices of
unmarried
women to study the
sexual
revolution. Journalists combined the two contemporaneous changes and developed the lasting image of the Pill as the symbol of the sexual revolution; scientists and the public accepted and promoted this interpretation of the pill" [emphases in the original].

The Day Virginity Died?

As Gloria Steinem, then a young journalist writing in the pages of
Esquire
magazine, wrote in 1962, "The pill is obviously important to the sexual and the contraceptive revolutions, but it is not the opening bombshell of either one." Indeed, large percentages of unmarried women had for decades, as we have seen, been having sex without it. The firestorm of sexual politics that took place in the wake of the Pill was not caused by the Pill so much as catalyzed around it.

In a time of intense, emotional, and self-consciously political challenge and tumult, sexual politics was only one of the many issues on which the rebellious and radical sought wholesale change. Second-wave feminism, the birth of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the idea of free love, and experimentation with family and household structures among young adults all contributed to a dramatic, chaotic expansion of sexual politics and possibility.

Somewhere in the midst of it all, the pendulum of the ideology of virginity took a hard swing to the left. Increasingly, there was a sensibility that female virginity had finally been stripped of its mystic value and could now be regarded as essentially identical to male virginity, more an event than an attribute. It separated the mature and the immature, but not necessarily in the same way that it traditionally had been understood to do: to many it was now seen as the difference between being "liberated" and being "hung up." To actually be a virgin betrayed one as repressed.
The Sensuous Man,
a popular 1971 guide to the new sexual culture of swinging singles and recreational sex, characterized virginity as "woman's most hideous ailment."

"Liberated" people were supposed to have gotten beyond feeling inhibited in regard to sexual appetite and pleasure. Along the way, more and more women began to insist that female sexual pleasure was just as important as male sexual pleasure. Rather than using romantic commitment and marriage as their sole yardsticks of a successful interpersonal life, some men and women took to gauging personal success on the basis of sexual experience. Intrepid explorers of the new "liberated" ethos experimented with sex independent of marriage or even romantic relationships, with thousands of men and women engaging in what was called "free love" but is more accurately described as merely relatively unfettered sex.

Despite the doomsday predictions of some pundits, this unprecedented and unabashed wantonness failed to cause the end of the world or even the downfall of civilization as we know it. Evolving egalitarian philosophies of sexuality and gender, however, have indeed transformed the way we civilize our sexual impulses, and this very much includes the way we think about virginity. Since the 1960s, the practice of placing social and economic value on virginity has often been dismissed out of hand as an artifact of an obsolete mode of patriarchy, a now-irrelevant throwback to an ignorant time. As such, the idea has appeared to many to have no legitimate place in a sexually liberated, nonsexist culture. "Virginity" could only be useful as a value-neutral term that distinguished between those who had experienced partnered sex and those who had not yet done so.

This way of thinking about virginity had its predictable critics among social conservatives, to be sure. But it also had its detractors among liberals and radicals. Lesbian feminists, notably including Marilyn Frye, took issue with the heterosexual bias inherent in the fashionable denigration of virginity as a social status. A virgin, Frye argued, was a woman who owed nothing to men, whatever her sexual history. Virginity, she argued, was still powerful, but only if it were understood in what she purported was its original meaning of feminine autonomy. (There is no real sense in either Greek or Latin that the words
parthenos
or
virgo
necessarily indicated anything of the sort when applied to human beings; as we have seen, they were primarily used to describe young unmarried women and girls.) Frye was in turn criticized by other lesbian feminists, who sought to rehabilitate the term "virgin" differently, applying it only to lesbians who were, as writer Rita Mae Brown quipped, "penis-pure and proud."

Such radical deconstructions and redefinitions contributed to the general instability of the idea of virginity. This instability has in turn enhanced the sense that virginity must be going the way of the button-hook and the Victrola. Reports of its demise are, of course, exceedingly premature: we are all still born virgins. As a point of social history, however, the anxiety over vanishing virginity is more defensible. If the course of the twentieth century is anything to go by, the ideology of virginity as a stand-in for specifically female virtue and human worth is indeed making its leisurely way to the egress. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift where virginity is concerned, one that neither began nor ended with the sexual revolution, but constitutes a broader, longer revolution all its own.

Pop Goes the Virgin

One of the better ways to gain some perspective on this shift is to look at where, when, and how virgins and virginity show up in popular culture. The virginity-related pop culture of the twentieth century could easily fill volumes, but zeroing in on a quartet of programs—the films
The Rocky Honor Picture
Show
and
Little Darlings
and the internationally popular American television shows
Beverly Hills go210
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
—lets us see some of what has been happening to virginity since the "revolutionary" 1960s, including our increasing tendency, as a culture, to reflect upon virginity itself.

Attracting a cult following from the earliest days of its existence as a stage musical in 1973 London (it ultimately ran for nearly three thousand performances), Richard O'Brien's
The Rocky Honor Show
became
The Rocky Honor
Picture Show
in 1975 when it was made into a film version starring Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry. A send-up of horror and science-fiction movie cliches of the 1950s and 1960s,
Rocky Honor
is also a campy, overblown dissertation on the culture clashes of the sexual revolution. In it, the thoroughly virginal and comically repressed couple Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) become engaged following the wedding of friends, but while driving home from the wedding they become lost in a forest. It is a dark and stormy night, so naturally enough by the conventions of the B-movies
Rocky
exists to lampoon, they end up at the doors of the creepy Gothic castle of the outrageous hypersexed transvestite mad scientist, Dr. Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry).

In the course of things, both Brad and Janet are debauched by Frank, whose mottos are "give yourself over to absolute pleasure" and "don't dream it, be it," but Brad and Janet react very differently to their experiences of sex. Brad remains uptight, tense, and defensive of the conservative morals he espoused at the start of the film, while Janet embodies the virgin-to-slut cliche. She ends up having an illicit tryst with Rocky (Peter Hinwood), Dr. Frank N. Furter's muscle-bound, golden-haired "Frankenstein's monster." In the song "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me," Janet sings to Rocky about having been the kind of girl who had "only ever kissed before" and of having been afraid of the consequences of petting, but then promptly announces, by way of inviting him to bed her, that everything changed when she lost her virginity. "I've tasted blood and I want more," she sings, echoed by two female household servants who voyeurize the whole thing via closed-circuit television, chanting "More! More! More!"

By the end of the film, Janet has been transformed into a joyous libertine who sings that she feels "released" and that her "mind has been expanded." In a parallel stanza within the same song, though, Brad sings "Help me, Mommy / I'll be good, you'll see / take this dream away." Only in the last minutes of the film does Brad cave in to Dr. Frank N. Furter's magical zone of sexual excess. While Dr. Frank N. Furter is ultimately killed by his own extraterrestrial fellows because his "lifestyle's too extreme," Brad and Janet survive. Clad in corsets, fishnet stockings, and stiletto-heeled patent leather pumps, they are left, their virginities long gone and their sensibilities entirely transformed, to scrabble their way out of the wreckage of Dr. Frank N. Furter's destroyed mansion.

As important as virginity and virginity loss are to
Rocky Honor,
it is not too surprising that its extensive audience subculture has adopted the motif. In most of the places where the movie airs on a regular basis—usually on a weekend night at midnight, accompanied by the costumed acting, singing, dancing, and assorted audience participation of contingents of devoted fans who have seen the film dozens or even hundreds of times—first-timer "virgins" are singled out for special treatment. Though the specifics vary widely,
RHPS
"virgins" might be made to wear name tags advertising their virgin status, have lipsticked
Vs
put on their cheeks and foreheads, be goaded to participate in suggestive pantomime, or just be paraded before the more experienced members of the audience before the film runs and they thus join the gleeful crowd who will initiate the next week's crop of "virgins."

A very different sort of virginity-related peer pressure forms the subject of director Ronald Maxwell's 1980
Little Darlings.
Set at a sleepaway summer camp for teenaged girls, this film pits a posh daughter of the old-money set, Ferris (Tatum O'Neal), against the tough, streetwise Angel (Kristy McNichol), who hails from a working-class single-parent home. The predictable storms of adolescent bitchiness and put-downs among the various teen campers eventually lead to an insidiously competitive conversation about virginity. Although most of the girls are lying through their teeth, all but two members of the cabin claim that they are sexually experienced. The only ones to admit to virginity are Ferris and Angel. A wager is promptly lodged as to which of the two girls will manage to lose her virginity first that summer.

Making loss of virginity into a matter for deadly earnest wagering is of course nothing new in the annals of fiction; French writer and military officer Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos's 1782
Les liaisons dangereuses
(converted to the screen on more than one occasion) provides a classic, vicious example of such a bet. What makes
Little Darlings
so remarkable is that the bet involves two teenaged girls, and that the virginities they are scheming to lose are their own. In this movie we see lost virginity not just as an emblem of adulthood but of
cool:
the young women who lie about having lost their virginities do so because they are desperately afraid of being socially unappealing to their peers. It is an extraordinary snapshot of what virginity implied and entailed to women who were of an age to literally be daughters of the sexual revolution.