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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
My poor editor. I didn't realize, until I printed it all out and sent it to him, that my original manuscript for Virgin: The Untouched History was a thousand and one pages long. Shortly he managed to convince me that a thousand pages of virgin book was probably about six hundred pages more virgin book than most people would be willing to buy or read, if for no other reason than that thousand-page books tend to cost an awful lot and strain the wrists.
"But what shall I do with the stuff I'm taking out?" I wondered, while I busily condensed and cut material in order to shorten the book. There was so much good material there, information I wanted to share with readers.
The answer was this.
These excerpts are selections from the original draft of Virgin that were later cut in the interest of length. Think of them as being like the extras on a DVD -- some deleted scenes that appeared only in the director's cut.
Pre-Order
Your Copy of Virgin: The Untouched History!
Chapter One: Like A Virgin?
Chapter Three: Hymenology
Chapter Five: The Virgin and the Doctor
What happens when doctors decide to surgically create the "perfect" hymen?
Chapter Six: The Blank Page
Can a doctor determine whether a woman is a virgin by looking at her hymen? The research says no.
Chapter Seven: Opening Night
What do women who lose their virginity "the wrong way" do for our understanding of what virginity is and how it works? Court cases from Victorian England provide some answers.
American teen magazines depictions of virginity loss and those from other countries are often worlds apart -- find out what's so different.
Chapter Eight: In A Certain Way Unbodily
Chapter Nine: Heaven and Earth
The medieval Church often complained of
"female trouble"
when it came to the consecrated virgins who populated the convents of
Europe and the British Isles. These three excerpts look at
how
monastic virginity was denigrated by both its enemies in the
Church as well as by members of the general population.
Excerpt
One: Periculoso
Excerpt
Two: "The Scum and Vomit of the World"
Excerpt
Three: "Why I Can't Be A Nun"
Chapter Ten: To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
When Europeans came to colonize the New World, they brought their cultural customs and preferences -- including their attitudes about sexuality, women, and virginity -- along with them. Learn about the part that virginity played in the colonial era of the North American mid-atlantic region and the very different role it played in conquistador colonization of South America.
Chapter Twelve: The Day Virginity Died?
Punishing women for losing their virginity didn't stop when the middle ages ended: well into the twentieth century women were punished and even institutionalized or imprisoned for having sex, dating men their families disapproved of, and even hanging out in Chinese restaurants.
Throughout the modern age, movies have been a popular venue for telling stories about virginity, as in the case of Ronald Maxwell's 1980 film Little Darlings.
Bonus Chapter! Male Virginity
For various reasons -- primarily that it was (pardon the
pun)
odd-man-out in a book which, like the issue of virginity itself has
always done, concerns itself primarily with women -- I chose to cut the
entirety of the chapter I had written about male virginity. Instead I
am publishing it here in its entirety, divided into sections
for
easier reading.
Male
Virginity: A Contradiction in Terms?
A Male
Hymen?
Every Sperm is
Sacred
Evangelical
Equality
Consider
the Eunuch
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames