Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (48 page)

notes t o chapter 1

1. On
   American Pie
   ’s box office performance, see movies.com.
   

2. After a friend tells Jim that having sex feels like having one’s penis im- mersed in a warm apple pie, he experiments with a pie baked by his mother.
   

3. Jim is at first offended, then proud that he was desirable enough for a girl to “use” him. Neither Michelle nor Jessica is sanctioned for taking an unortho- dox perspective, but the fact that Jessica remains celibate throughout the film ef- fectively defuses her pro-pleasure approach.
   

4. In my reading, whether Chris and Heather have sex on prom night is left ambiguous; by the sequel, they are clearly sexual partners. The sequels construct a relatively conservative sexual narrative for Jim and Michelle, as well—they fall in love in
   American Pie 2
   (2001) and get married in
   American Wedding
   (2003). Interestingly, mutual virginity loss solidifies Vicky’s resolve to break up with Kevin before she moves away for college.
   

5. Seidman 1991; Irvine 1994; Rubin 1990; Weeks 1985.
   

6. These meanings are, of course, social creations (see Introduction). On vir- ginity cross-culturally, see Ortner 1976; Schlegel 1991, 1995.
   

7. This brief history is not intended to be definitive or exhaustive; however, it does represent one of the first systematic social histories of virginity loss (as op- posed to sexuality or courtship more generally). In fact, I know of no compre- hensive, carefully documented histories of virginity loss in the United States or elsewhere.
   

8. For two superb histories of sex research, see Ericksen 1999 and Irvine 1990.
   

9. Smith 1994; Zabin et al. 1984.
   

10. These research biases have been alleviated somewhat since the 1970s as scientific studies of sexuality have increasingly begun to include youth of color and (more rarely) lesbigay youth (Ericksen 1999).
    

11. Aries 1985; D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Godbeer 2002.
    

12. Kelly 2000; Bugge 1975; Sissa 1990. Greeks and Romans also assigned virgin women important roles in religious rituals.
    

13. Oxford English Dictionary
    online.
    

14. Bugge 1975.
    

15. I Corinthians I, 7:7 – 9 (Twentieth Century New Testament). Paul de- scribed his own sexual continence as a “gift from God.” Paul’s flexibility un- doubtedly helped win converts from pagan populations (Brown 1988). Other theologians depicted virginity as a precious, God-given “ornament” that “armed the flesh” against incontinence (Methodius 1958, 141).
    

16. According to the
    OED,
    “virgin” originally referred to women, with ref- erences to male virgins beginning around 1300. Kelly (2000) further notes that tests of virginity status also differed by gender. The gendering of virginity stems
    

    in part from the greater potential visibility of nonvirginity in women, due to the unique signals of pregnancy and hymeneal blood, and in part from women’s his- toric status as property transferred from fathers to husbands at marriage (Rubin 1975; Ortner 1976). See also Bugge 1975.
    

17. McInerney 1999, 57.
    

18. Holy Maidenhood
    1991, 228, 240. The anonymous poem was written in about 1225. Elsewhere, the poet invokes a secular form of reciprocation: the “morning-gift” of money or goods customarily “made by husband to wife the morning after the consummation of their marriage” (
    Hali meidhad
    1982, 72); see also (
    Holy Maidenhood
    1991, 416n48). This custom appears to be Anglo- Saxon or Nordic in origin (Foote and Wilson 1970). See also the thirteenth-cen- tury poem, “Love Ron” (Kelly and Leslie 1999).
    

19. Rosenberg 1973; White 1993.
    

20. Augustine 1980, XIII.7.
    

21. Kelly 2000; Payer 1993.
    

22. Chrysostom 1986. The claim that impure thoughts could imperil chastity/virginity resurfaced to inform Victorian ideology about women’s virtue.
    

23. Brownmiller 1975; Dworkin 1987; Vigarello 2001.
    

24. As in the
    Glossa Palatina,
    attributed to Laurentius Hispanus (died 1248), cited by Kelly 2000, 36. See also Brundage 1987.
    

25. Greenberg and Bystryn 1982.
    

26. Kelly and Leslie 1999. Medieval ideas persisted more completely in Roman Catholic areas such as Italy and Spain.
    

27. Harvey 1994, 123n1.

1. Kelly 1999. See Johnson’s
   Song: To Celia (I)
   (1616), Andrew Marvell’s
   

   To His Coy Mistress
   (1650–52), and John Donne’s
   The Flea
   (1633).
   

2. Act I, Scene 1, lines 141–52.
   

3. In Britain, Cromwell’s Puritan rule represented a brief detour from the broader trend.
   

4. Van de Walle and Muhsam 1995.
   

5. Cott 1978. Middle-class opinion leaders in the mid-1700s, novelists Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe among them, actively denounced the sex- ual and other excesses of their social “betters.”
   

6. Kelly and Leslie 1999, 21. The historical record offers little insight into the lives of peasants and the urban poor, who lacked inheritance as an incentive to preserve women’s virginity, but may well have valued it for religious or other reasons.
   

7. Hitchcock 2002, 185. Such sexual encounters appear to have been more acceptable if the man selected partners of lower social standing than himself. Likewise, in France by the mid-1600s, mutual masturbation was popular among unwed couples intent on enjoying sexual pleasure while preserving virginity and avoiding conception (van de Walle and Muhsam 1995).
   

8. Although the American colonists as a group were less secular than their English contemporaries, the Puritans, notorious for their very restrictive stance toward sexuality, were only one of the religious groups to found the United States, and they held little sway outside New England (Godbeer 2002).
   

9. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988. This sexual system was supported by a family-centered agricultural economy, in which children were valued as workers.
   

10. Bundling couples were sometimes also separated by a board.
    

11. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Omolade 1983.
    

12. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988. Companionate marriage also grew in pop- ularity during this period, and young people were gaining greater choice over whom they married (Rothman 1984). Some historians suggest that young people used premarital pregnancy to force marriage against parental wishes (Degler 1980).
    

13. Smith and Hindus 1975.
    

14. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 44. 42. Rowson 1794, 27.
    

43. Rowson 1794, 47.

44. Rowson 1794, 66.

45. Rowson 1794, 80. Contextual cues in the book and contemporaneous historical sources leave little doubt that
honor
and
virtue
encompass virginity, and that virginity, honor, and virtue can all be lost through vaginal sex.

46. Rowson 1794, 161.

47. Rowson 1794, 29.

1. The classic work on female passionlessness is Cott 1978. According to Rothman (1984), passionlessness rather than self-control became the prevailing ideology for women because of the earlier view that women were sexually dan- gerous beings who could not be trusted to control their feelings, although they could deny them. The ideology was also supported by the late-1700s scientific “discoveries” that women could conceive without orgasm and that the sexes were two incommensurate biological entities rather than inverted versions of one another, both of which paved the way for envisioning women’s and men’s sexual natures as natural opposites (Laqueur 1990).
   

2. Davidson 1986, xii. The first U.S. edition of
   Charlotte Temple
   was pub- lished in 1794. The novel’s apparent popularity with working-class women read- ers suggests that the perils it portrayed resonated with less-advantaged White women as well as with their middle-class counterparts. On middle-class beliefs about working-class sexuality, see Rosenberg 1973.
   

3. More pragmatically, this appealing alternative to the image of women as sinful temptresses helped attract new female congregants at a time of flagging re- ligious commitment among men (Cott 1978).
   

4. According to Cott 1978, the other causes predate medical support for
   

   passionlessness. On nineteenth-century medical views on women, see Barker- Benfield 2000.
   

5. Rosenberg 1973. For a dissenting viewpoint, see Foucault 1978.
   

6. Rosenberg 1973, 139.
   

7. Paul Paquin, a late-1800s reformer who denounced tolerance for such practices, quoted in Rosenberg 1973, 140. See also White 1993.
   

8. Brandt 1987.
   

9. Rosenberg 1973, 141; Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948; Lindsey and Evans 1925. Publicly admitting recourse to sex workers cast aspersions on a man’s character and masculinity (White 1993). In contrast to irrevocably “fallen” women, young unmarried men who failed to control their lusts were typically thought amenable to rehabilitation, thanks to the relative invisibility of their sexual indiscretions (lacking hymeneal blood and potential pregnancy) and the fact that they were not morally elevated to begin with (Mumford 1993).
   

10. Rothman (1984, 54) demonstrates the narrowing of the range of accept- able sexual activities over the course of the 1800s, arguing that the new focus on premarital chastity led to the “the removal of intercourse from the range of pre- marital sexual behavior . . . that began with hand holding in church.” Rothman calls this development the “invention of petting,” but evidence from the previous century suggests that the practice of stopping at “everything but” intercourse to preserve virginity was not new. See also Hitchcock 2002, Welter 1983.
    

11. Nathanson 1991. When a woman lost her virginity with her husband, she irrevocably lost her innocence; if she lost her virginity outside of marriage, she also forfeited her moral integrity. Men were legally entitled to break an en- gagement to a woman discovered not to be a virgin.
    

12. Smith and Hindus 1975.
    

13. Greenberg 1988; Seidman 1991; Smith-Rosenberg 1975.
    

14. In the South in particular, the image of elite White women as paragons of asexual virtue depended on a contrast with the purported promiscuity of Black
    and
    of nonelite White women (Hodes 1993).
    

15. Parent and Wallace 1993; Gutman and Sutch 1976.
    

16. In addition to encouraging “natural increase,” slave owners sought to improve their “stock” by such means as denying puny men access to wives. Slave marriages had no legal standing.
    

17. Hodes 1993.
    

18. Omolade 1983.
    

19. Jones (1985) suggests that acquiring property (which could be be- queathed) may have given Black elites additional incentive for promoting stricter sexual norms, especially regarding premarital pregnancy.
    

20. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Dill 1988. The Mexican American popu-
    

    lation created by the U.S. annexation of northern Mexico in 1848 was rapidly outnumbered by westward-bound White settlers, but continued to expand, espe- cially with the institution of contract-labor programs starting in the late 1800s.
    

21. Espiritu 2000. Between 1850 and 1934, nearly one million Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indians immigrated to the United States, most of them men recruited for manual labor in the West. “Importing” Asian women as sex workers was officially prohibited in 1875.
    

22. The competing stereotype of Asian women as servile “lotus blossoms” emerged somewhat later.
    

70. Dreiser 1900, 90.

1. Although many critics initially denounced
   Sister Carrie
   as an affront to conventional morality, within a few years the novel was reissued to “wide ac- claim,” suggesting that middle-class America had begun to acknowledge, if not embrace, the changes taking place (Lingeman 2000, xviii).
   

2. These migrants were disproportionately single and widowed women (Jones 1985).
   

3. Nathanson 1991. These changes were facilitated by the declining need for young women’s help in the home, due to shrinking family sizes and more effi- cient housekeeping technology. Most single White working women lived with family members.
   

4. Peiss 1986; Seidman 1991.
   

5. Bailey 1989.
   

6. Necking was popularly defined as sexual contact above the waist, petting as contact below the waist. Modell (1983) suggests that uncertainty about the degree of commitment implied by kissing lingered well into the 1920s.
   

7. In the mid-1800s, one in ten marriages was preceded by conception, compared to one in four between 1880 and 1910 (Smith and Hindus 1975). Comparable data are not available for Blacks. White youths’ premarital sexual exploration was limited largely by the value on premarital virginity, especially in women, whereas working-class Blacks’ was limited more by parental chaperon- age (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Parent and Wallace 1993).
   

8. The crowded living conditions in which most immigrants lived often meant that children were exposed to parents’ sex lives and that courting took place in public. Native-born critics discounted the possibility that these practices might result from material circumstance rather than inherent depravity.
   

9. White reformers established dozens of institutions for saving girls from sexual “waywardness” and in many states succeeded in raising the age of sexual consent for women from as low as 10 to 14, 16, or higher (Nathanson 1991). Anthony Comstock’s crusade to curtail the circulation of “obscene” literature, such as pulp novels and story magazines, culminated in the passage of a 1873 federal law prohibiting the U.S. postal service from carrying “indecent” materi- als (Beisel 1997). Popularly known as the Comstock Act, this law had the inci-
   

   dental effect of limiting access to information about birth control (Gordon 1974). Efforts to eradicate prostitution bore little fruit until the mid-1910s, when opponents’ focus shifted to eradicating venereal disease (Brandt 1987; Pivar 2002). Neither the White- nor the Black-led movements achieved total suc- cess, nor did their offspring, progressivism (Seidman 1991).
   

10. Social purists opposed artificial birth control on the grounds that it would facilitate men’s extramarital affairs and erode the authority women de- rived from motherhood (Gordon 1974). The increasingly powerful medical pro- fession also opposed abortion and birth control.
    

11. Hodes 1993; Omolade 1983. Lynching raged from Emancipation through the early 1900s. Black women’s activism in this period should be under- stood not as an attempt to mimic White women, although they shared purity crusaders’ belief that women’s innate moral superiority could be harnessed to improve men, but rather as part of a long-standing tradition of working to de- fend and improve life in the Black community (Jones 1985).
    

12. Rothman 1984; Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948.
    

13. White 1993, 9. See also Mumford 1993.
    

14. Omolade 1983; DuBois 1899.
    

15. Faderman 1981.
    

16. Seidman 1991.
    

17. White 1993; Carby 1990. 88. Marks 1924, 6–7.