Books
Biography
Blog
Where to
Find Me
Media kit
Clippings
Read online
FAQ
E-mail list
Contact
Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Ten: To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Some countries have addressed their inherited ideologies of virginity more directly and openly than others. In Central and South America, a very different approach to exploration and colonization led to a very different sensibility where virginity was concerned. This sensibility was based not only in a semi-official policy of mestizaje (racial/ethnic mixing) but also in Catholicism and a lengthy tradition of mostly functional, if sometimes precarious, co-existence of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Indeed, as South American countries like Brazil finally divested themselves of colonial governments and began to form their own national identities, virginity was seen as a sufficiently important issue that virginity-related law constituted a thriving and controversial branch of study and legislation in the newly-independent nation's legal code.
This distinctively southerly approach to virginity in the New World began with the first flush of European contact. Where English Protestants had come to the North American shores primarily in search of a physically welcoming place to found settlements where they could live according to the lights of their religious beliefs, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and settlers were in it for the money and the glory. The difference in their approaches to the New World is summed up neatly in the difference between the words "settlement" and "conquest."
This is difference was quite apparent in their sexual attitudes toward the land and people they encountered: the Iberian conquistadors were openly and regularly sexual with indigenous women, including by rape. Even in the earliest expeditions, a sensibility that the European male was entitled to sexual access to the people of the places where he had achieved physical access is quite transparent. An account written by Michele de Cuneo, an aristocratic Italian who was on board Columbus' second Caribbean voyage in 1493, is unabashedly salacious in its graphic description of the kidnaping, beating, and ongoing rape of an indigenous Caribbean woman:
"While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with my desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores."
The application of conquistador sexuality was a common feature of Iberian invasion. In some cases, the sexual relationships were welcomed, either because the men in control in the indigenous cultures knew that granting sexual access to their women would buy some ability to negotiate with the Europeans or, probably more rarely, because the women themselves desired it. In other cases, the sexual interactions were a tool of conquest, pure and simple, raping the new country and its people into submission, as described by Franciscan friar Joseph Manuel de Equia y Leronbe, who in a 1601 inquest into the 1598 conquest of the New Mexican pueblos reported how Spanish soldiers would call out "Let's go to the pueblos and fornicate with the Indian women... only by such treatment are Indian women conquered."
Sometimes, too, what began as a case of relatively willing sexual interaction ended in bloodshed when the Europeans determined to take far more than their fair share. Columbus' settlement on the island of Hispaniola (an island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), left behind on his first voyage, had been destroyed and all his European settlers killed by the time he returned on his second trip, an act of vengeance by indigenous men who were fed up with the Europeans' abuses, including their abuse of native women. It was also not unheard-of for indigenous peoples to simply give up and flee when they got news of approaching Europeans, lest their women fall victim to the informal—none of the commanders of conquistador forces are known to have directly authorized it, and some are known to have directly prohibited it—regime of sexual violation that accompanied the arrival of the Europeans.
As in the case of North America, early interactions between European men and indigenous women like Michele de Cuneo's helped to set the tone for later violations. This was true not only of Spaniards, but of the Portuguese and Italians. Early sixteenth-century Portuguese invader Pero Vaz de Caminha wrote in great detail about the genitals of indigenous Brazilian women, explaining that the women whose genitals he and his party examined did not seem to become embarrassed by it. Even the relatively circumspect Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci had something to say on the subject:
"The women as I have said go about naked and are very libidinous; yet they have bodies which are tolerably beautiful and cleanly. Nor are they so unsightly as one perchance might imagine, for, inasmuch as they are plump, their ugliness is the less apparent, which indeed is for the most part concealed by the excellence of their bodily structure. It was to us a matter of astonishment that none was to be seen among them who had a flabby breast, and those who had borne children were not to be distinguished from virgins by the shape and shrinking of the womb, and in the other parts of the body similar things were seen which for the sake of modesty I make no mention."
The message was clear: indigenous women were sexually different from European women, in fact, their bodies were more sexually ripe. Therefore they could, and perhaps even should be treated differently with regard to sex. In any event, the Europeans could use them sexually without guilt, since their bodies were such that it was impossible to tell the virgins from the nonvirgins.
For these Europeans, sex was often part and parcel of conquest. They sought not only to conquer a virgin land—which happened, inconveniently, to have not a small number of people already living in it in well-developed settlements and cities—but its virgin women. In the Ajusco manuscript, an unusual chronicle of the Spanish conquest of Mexico written by indigenous Central Americans rather than by the Spaniards, we find that the Spanish preferred to take the married women they found most beautiful and also the girls who were as yet unmarried and known to be virgins. Some of the records kept by conquistadors, too, indicate that the Europeans were given virgin women by preference as gifts. The right to take indigenous females as servants or slaves was also considered part of the legitimate reward for those who did the ugly work of fighting to conquer the new territory: seeking virgins who could serve them as concubines and with whom they might additionally procreate and build up a European (and optimally also Christian, through the offices of the many missionaries who accompanied the Europeans) presence in the freshly-conquered land.
Rape and sexual imposition, as has proven true around the world in many ages and times—just since the 1970s, human rights organizations and the United Nations have documented the use of organized rape as a weapon in places as varied as Pakistan, Cyprus, Peru, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Uganda, Tibet, Serbia, Rwanda, and Sudan—make superbly effective tools for humiliating, subduing, punishing, and controlling a subject population. They also make for a particularly insidious means of conquering that population, literally from the inside out, by impregnating the women of the conquered people with children fathered by their military overlords.
But even when a sexual relationship between a conquering male and a subject female appears to have been relatively consensual and voluntary, the nature of the relationship is never simple, as in the case of Doña Marina, also called "La Malinche," shows. One of twenty indigenous women who was given as a tribute gift to the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés when he arrived in the Yucatan in 1519, she became Cortés' interpreter and, although never his wife, the mother of his son. Although indigenous peoples have sometimes seen her role in assisting the Spanish to take over the Aztec empire as traitorous, we can also easily see her as a victim of circumstances who merely did what was necessary to make the best of the situation in which she found herself.
Even the responsible manner in which a minority of the conquering Europeans dealt with the results of their sexual indulgences complicates the picture. When European men left bequests of money to pay for dowries and even education for their mestizo children, it was because they understood these children to be among their personal responsibilities as paterfamilias. These Roman Catholic men were playing by the rules of the patriarchal system they brought across the ocean: the children of an indigenous woman belonged to the European man who fathered them, to be reared, educated, dowried, and married according to their fathers' wishes.
It is little wonder that the descendants of these unions between Iberian Europeans and indigenous populations had a complicated and lengthy process of emerging from colonial existence into independent nationhood. Carving out single national identities for populations whose pedigrees are not merely plural (the history of some countries also included enslaved Africans who also contributed to the mix much as they did in the United States) but tinted as well by rape, subjugation, and rebellion was no simple matter. In addition to concerns about economics, global competition, and the vagaries of technological and material modernity, assuming nationhood, for Central and South America meant simultaneously coming to grips with a fraught, multilayered heritage of sexual ideology. Enthusiastic Catholicism and its culture of sacred virginity, several hundred years of an aristocratic ruling class for whom female honor was (just as it was for the same types of people in the American South and back in Europe) a very serious matter, and the knowledge that individually and together, they were hijos de la chingada, a derogatory way of saying "bastards of the woman who has been fucked," the woman who has been raped, all became issues with which these newly-minted nations had to reckon.
In Brazil, as Sueann Caulfield's intensive studies have shown, all of these things and more became part of the nationbuilding process in the development of and controversy over laws regulating and defending virginity. "Imperial and republican jurists believed that the history of civilization was marked by ever greater respect for the equality of individual citizens and state protection of women's honor," Caulfield writes, going on to note the troublesome incompatibility between protecting women's honor and regarding women with any sort of political or social equality.
But these two principles were nonetheless vital to the way Brazilians wanted to see themselves as people and as a nation among nations. For the better part of fifty years, between the fall of the monarchy in 1888 and the beginning of the Vargas era in 1930, jurists, forensic physicians, politicians, and everyday Brazilians struggled to define virginity and its importance in Brazilian culture and life.
In the most immediate sense, what the Brazilian virginity laws were intended to do was to provide a means of redressing offenses against those men who might injure a young woman's honor and expect to get away with it. (The most typical penalty was a court-ordered shotgun wedding.) Like the breach of promise suits of nineteenth-century England, they gave women and their families—working-class and middle-class specifically—a venue for recourse in a situation that otherwise left them feeling powerless and socially humiliated.
In these laws, we see what is held up as a distinctively Brazilian and utterly "natural" scheme of honor, honesty, and gender. Both a family's honor and a woman's rested on her "honesty," her chaste conduct and premarital virginity; no such family or individual "honor" adhered to male behavior. A woman's "honesty" was perceived to rest on her willingness to live by the standards of conduct imposed by her family and community and her ability to tolerate the watchful and judgmental eyes that constantly scanned for possible breaches of conduct. But as the laws evolved and changed, and the climate of legal and medical "modernity" around the world likewise shifted to embrace the empirical model, the emphasis for proof of violated honor shifted from the more anecdotal reports of women and their families to the seemingly scientific, and thus seemingly trustworthy, reports of physicians.
This move was meaningful beyond the obvious prioritization of physical evidence over witness testimony. Putting the burden of proof on the findings of doctors was also a bid to give the controversial business of placing such importance on virginity—there were many critics, early Brazilian feminists among them, who felt strongly that these laws were backward and bankrupt—a glossy veneer of cutting-edge technological veracity. Additionally, using science (or something close to it) helped obviate the problem of establishing clear legal principles and definitions for things like "honor," and "honesty." When a physician examination could be called for instead, matters were much simpler.
A main result of this focus on the medico-legal side of virginity was the accumulation of a substantial, if not necessarily complete or comprehensive, body of research on the human hymen, much of it published with the explicit intent of helping to correct the "errors in the scientific notions" of other gynecological writers. The high rates at which people resorted to the lost-virginity laws meant that large numbers of young women came under the scrutiny of these forensic medical specialists, and this afforded a scope to the Brazilian research that was unavailable to European and other specialists. One of the latest and best-remembered forensic gynecologists to write on the subject of the hymen in Brazil, Afranio Peixoto, based his 1934 study Sexologia forense in part on the 2,701 hymens he examined between 1907 and 1915.
What Peixoto and some of his colleagues discovered through all these examinations, ironically, was what has already been revealed in chapters three, four, and six of this book: that even the best-trained and most observant physicians cannot reliably diagnose virginity. "Complacent hymens" and variability of morphology, as well as the possibility that damage to the hymen might be the result of something other than sexual penetration, were not the only things that made gynecological examinations untrustworthy. The examiner's technique as well came under question, as did the examiner's possible use of irrelevant criteria such as the texture of the breasts or labia in making a judgment. Peixoto and numerous colleagues including Agostinho de Souza Lima condemned what they called "hymenolatry," castigating judges who continued to demand hymenal proof of defloration for upholding an anachronistic standard in the process of prosecuting an anachronistic crime.
In some ways, they need not have worried. The world at large—not just the Brazilian world—was changing at a blistering pace, and women's roles in that world were changing as fast as anything. The political, philosophical, social, and economic transformations of the twentieth century were underway, and soon the world in which Brazilians could speak confidently about shared notions of family honor and female honesty would fade into something that seemed like an idealistic reverie. The increasingly large place of women in the workforce, women's growing sexual autonomy, and the impact of ideas like feminism and egalitarianism all combined to create an environment in which, as judge Nelson Hungria put it in 1937, "modern girls have participated actively at the vortex of daily life, spreading out into offices, public buildings, and commercial establishments."
This worldliness, and removal from "the vigilance and discipline of the family," as Hungria put it, cost them "that feminine reserve that was their greatest enchantment, and constituted, at the same time, the inhibiting force of shame." For good or ill, a historically complex, deeply symbolic, hard-fought ideology of virginity was being swept out from under Brazilian feet by the tides of the twentieth century and being replaced by something new, untested, and unsure... but surely not, as history repeatedly reminds us, without leaving distinct traces behind.
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