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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter One: Like a Virgin?
As an example of the difficulty in creating watertight definitions of virginity, we can look at this excerpt from a typical modern-day definition taken from a May 1983, sexuality advice column by Elizabeth Rodgers in the popular American teen magazine Seventeen.
Technically,
of course, the word virgin means a male or
a female who has never had sexual intercourse. But some girls have
written to Seventeen to ask if they were still virgins because although
their boyfriends 'penetrated' them, the boys had failed to achieve
orgasm. When a penis is inserted into a vagina—for however
short a time and regardless of whether the boy or girl experiences any
pleasurable feeling or sensation—then the girl becomes, once
and for all, a nonvirgin (as does the boy, if it's his first time).
Other girls, worried and upset, have written letters explaining that
their boyfriends had put a finger into their vaginas and then, in an
effort to get the girls to 'go all the way,' had insisted that the
girl's virginity already was 'busted.'
...Unfortunately, for centuries, a majority of men have believed that a
man will always meet with 'resistance' when he attempts to penetrate a
virgin, that the experience for the woman is always painful, and that
the woman will always bleed slightly (from the breaking of the hymen).
...There is, then, no way a boy can tell the physical difference
between a virgin and a nonvirgin. A doctor can tell by examining the
condition of the hymen, but a boy can rely only on the apparent
innocence or sexually knowing manner of a young woman.
In this excerpt, which totals less than a third of the article, Rodgers gives eleven possible ways—variously implied, stated, endorsed, and dismissed—to define virginity. First, she establishes "sexual intercourse" as the sine qua non of virginity. In the very next sentence, though, she demonstrates that this simple and straightforward-seeming definition really isn't. There are, as Rodgers allows, different ways that "sexual intercourse" might take place, and different trajectories the act might follow. As it transpires, "sexual intercourse" wasn't really what Rodgers meant at all. What she really meant to define as the sex act of record, the thing that makes a virgin into a nonvirgin, is the insertion of a penis into a vagina, her second definition.
But Rodgers proceeds to elaborate, and we might well wonder why. What purpose is served by her laundry list of things that, to this writer's way of thinking, fail to end virginity? The answer appears to be that there are a number of other things that other people might, although inaccurately in Rodgers' view, regard as definitive of virginity loss, including male orgasm during penetrative sex, penetration of the vagina with a finger or fingers, the "busting" of virginity, vaginal resistance to penetration, bleeding, and the "breaking" of the hymen. Because some people would consider Rodgers' rejected definitions to be perfectly reasonable and acceptable, Rodgers feels the need to negate them each in turn. Complicating things further, Rodgers also identifies virginity as something that doctors can diagnose and laymen cannot, and simultaneously as something that can be determined, if perhaps not entirely reliably, from the "apparent innocence or sexually knowing manner of a young woman."
We are left with the sensation that perhaps the lady doth protest too much. After all, aside from her bully pulpit as journalist, what makes Rodgers' preferred definition the right one? What evidence does she provide to convince the reader that her criteria better or more reasonable than the ones she rejects, or for that matter, than Helkiah Crooke's, Albertus Magnus', or Saint Augustine's? Rodgers offers no rationale because there isn't one. The only thing that Rodgers' definition has to recommend it is that it is, in a certain utterly mechanical sense, the lowest common denominator of heterosexual penis-in-vagina intercourse, the thing that is most frequently understood by the phrase "having sex." But in the end, what really makes the case for Rodgers' definition is simply that she says it is so.
I use this example not, by any means, to single out Elizabeth Rodgers for special criticism. She is only one of countless writers to do more or less the same thing in their attempts to define virginity. But it is an excellent example of the way that definitions of virginity tend to be both circumstantial and incomplete. Each attempt to pin virginity down as a generic seems to generate exceptions and rebuttals born of experience with the specific.
At the same time, however, definitions of
virginity do tend to rest in a sense of consensus. This consensus, this
weight of tradition and history, is a vital piece of the puzzle.
Creating a consensus, or deriving a consensus opinion, is a social
activity. It is exactly this sense of communal social decision-making
that lends Elizabeth Rodgers' statement clout: after an initial false
start, the definition she is the definition that has indeed served as
the lowest common denominator of virginity and therefore one that we
can not only agree with but imagine other people agreeing with too.
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