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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Bonus Chapter: Male Virginity
A Male Hymen?
Because male virginity has never been much of an issue, nor has it ever been particularly highly valued by Western culture on the whole, the tests that developed to determine female virginity never existed for men. The whole idea of testing a man’s virginity seems ludicrous to most of us, in fact, for the simple reason that we’ve inherited an ideology of the body in which both men and women can participate in sexual acts, but only women’s bodies are imagined to be changed by doing so. But is this really true? Are there other ways to think about it, other possible paths that our Western past might’ve taken in terms of how we think about men’s virginities? Is it even possible to imagine ways that the male body might be changed by sex that are similar to the ways that the female body is purported to be?
South African indigenous culture provides us with an interesting take on these questions, and a fascinating alternative to the way mainstream Western culture thinks of the physical aspects of male virginity. Virginity testing is an important part of tribal culture for several South African peoples, with tests being conducted as frequently as once a year on unmarried youth of both sexes. Signs of male virginity, which the tribal examiners claim white doctors either ignore or have simply not learned to interpret, include a “white lacy skin” within the foreskin, a taut and difficult-to-retract foreskin, and the presence of a particular vein that is visible in the penis of virgin but not of sexually experienced males. Reggie Khumalo, a representative of Isivivane Sama Siko, an organization that promotes and teaches South African indigenous cultures, has been interviewed in the Durban Mercury newspaper as saying that these and other signs, such as the way in which a young man urinates (urine that sprays is considered a sign of virginity, whereas a coherent stream would be a sign of its loss) and even the color of the skin of his knees (darkened knees mean lost virginity) are readily observable tattletales.
Fascinatingly, Mr. Khumalo’s “tell-tale signs” of male virginity are kissing cousins to many of the things that, as we’ve seen, were believed to be tell-tale signs of female virginity in various parts of northern Europe at various points in the past. The idea of a distinctive membrane is obvious in its correlate, but as we’ve seen in chapter six, the sounds, duration, and flow characteristics of urination were a common “test” of female virginity in early modern Europe. As for the darkened knees Mr. Khumalo claims are the result of sexual activity, perhaps we can see them as something of a correlate to the change that supposedly takes place in the neck and throat when virginity is lost. Spending time putting weight on one’s knees while thrusting in intercourse (assuming, one supposes, the missionary position) certainly might darken them temporarily, perhaps even with bruising or friction burns that might take a while to fade. It would be in keeping with the motif of attributing permanent body change to sexual activity to generate the fantasy that sex would darken the knees permanently.
One might well wonder whether these South African traditions of virginity testing are directly related to the earlier European versions with which they seem to have so much in common. Given the information we have currently, it’s impossible to say. It’s not impossible that missionaries and colonial authorities brought these ideas to South Africa. Then again, it’s not impossible that the notions evolved there on their own, just as they did in Europe. When it comes to the loss of virginity, people the world over have a tendency to be more imaginative than realistic, and it isn’t uncommon for sexual myths to evolve very similarly in very different parts of the globe.
One of the few other claims of a physical sign of the loss of male virginity is at least somewhat more grounded in documented medical case history, if not necessarily any better-accepted by the mainstream. One of the “old wives’ tales” of the medical profession, rarely found mentioned in the literature, is the notion that the frenum, the “bridge” of skin between the foreskin and the underside of the penis just behind the glans, is in some ways the equivalent of a female hymen.
Anatomically speaking, this is incorrect. The frenum is not analogous to the hymen in either position or formation. However, in a small number of uncircumcised men, minor injury to the frenum has been observed as a result of rapid, rough, or simply unaccustomed retraction of the foreskin, which pulls and stretches the frenum in the process. This can happen during intercourse, but can also happen from other sources of friction and traction, including masturbation. Since the frenum and foreskin are both typically reasonably elastic (except in cases of phimosis, a condition in which these tissues are so inelastic that retracting the foreskin is difficult or impossible), and since many uncircumcised men do have regular experience with retracting the foreskin while washing and masturbating, it is probable that such injuries, if they are to happen at all due ot a somewhat short or inflexible frenum, will happen well prior to a man’s first experience of sexual intercourse.
First intercourse-related frenum injuries do happen, though, and a few physicians, notably the author of a 1958 study entitled “The Frenum Praeputii and the Defloration of the Human Male,” have--sometimes laughably, from our current point of view—made much of them. The psychiatrist author of the aforementioned article, one F. Grewel, goes so far as to invoke the Freudian spectre of castration anxiety as an insidious result of such injuries:
“When this important organ, this source of masculine pride, is menaced, fear and anxiety arise. The ‘patients’ are afraid to consult a doctor and await with tense fear the further development of the trauma. The speedy recovery allays their fears and may contribute to faith in the invulnerability and recuperative powers of this organ. But before this this this this this this this this this reassurance is reached their fear restrains them from consulting a physician and they are confronted with the patent possibility of castration.”
While such wild-eyed fears may indeed arise for some men who experience these tears to the skin of the frenum, the relative absence of discussions of these injuries in the medical literature would seem to argue that it is a relative rarity for such injuries to be perceived as significant enough to be reported to doctors. This is not surprising. As with the minor vaginal lacerations that may accompany first intercourse for women, minor injuries to the genitals typically heal with great swiftness (as Grewel alludes) due to the excellent supply of blood to the tissues. No man experiencing such an injury need realistically worry about losing his penis due to what is, essentially, a very superficial laceration of a tiny bit of skin.
Are Grewel’s assertions overblown? Certainly, and no less in his attribution of such injuries to “defloration” than in his Chicken Little predictions of castration complex. But such an overwrought take on such a miniscule injury is absolutely in keeping with how much of a muchness has historically been made over the similarly minor and non-lifethreatening lacerations suffered by many women during their first experience of sexual penetration.
In the final analysis, though, perhaps the biggest single difference between vaginal traumas and injuries to the frenum resulting from intercourse is that it surprises us that a penis might be injured by intercourse at all. As the saying runs, when the headline reads “Man Bites Dog,” it really is news. In the popular imagination, the penis is supposed to be the cause of such virginal wounds, not the recipient. The vagina and specifically the hymen, on the other hand, are virtually required to be not only injured when virginity is lost, but torn, broken, and destroyed.
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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