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Virgin: The Untouched History
Frequently Asked Questions

If you have a question about Virgin: The Untouched History that is not answered in this FAQ, please feel free to email virginbook at virginbook dot org and we will attempt to provide you with an answer.  We regret that we are unable to provide any assistance with determining whether you or anyone else is or is not a virgin (to find out why we can't help with that, click here), nor can we provide referrals to medical, legal, or other resources.

Go back to the overview of the book.

Q: Why write a book about virginity?

A: While doing some research on women's sexuality, I found myself needing some information about virginity. I started trying to research it and rapidly discovered that there was very little information easily available on the subject, and that there was a particular lack of good historical and medical information about virgins and virginity. Basically, the book I wanted to be able to read did not exist, so I decided to write it.

Q: Are you a virgin?

A: No.

Q: Isn't it strange that someone who isn't a virgin has written a book about virginity?

A: No one seems to think that in order to have something worthwhile to say about primates, Jane Goodall should be a chimpanzee. 

One need not be a member of the population one is studying in order to study it, or to be insightful and knowledgeable in that regard. It's also worth remembering that everyone—no matter who they are or whether or not they are sexually active—has some experience with virginity, because virginity is a status that all human beings share for at least some portion of their lives.

Q: Are you married?

A: I am privileged to be in a wonderful life partnership with a loving, successful, and fantastically intelligent man with whom I have shared my life and household for over a decade. In some states and countries, this would qualify me as being married under common law.

Q: Do you have children?

A: No. My life partner and I are congenitally infertile. We have not yet decided whether or not we wish to add children to our family via adoption. We have many fabulous kids in our lives because of our friendships with their parents, though, and we deeply enjoy spending time with our young friends and their parents.

Q: What does your family think about your work?

A: My family is very supportive of what I do, including my partner and my partner's family. I am very lucky to have a large extended family of smart and thoughtful people, several of whom—including my maternal grandmother, who is in her eighties—read parts of this book when it was in progress and provided me with a lot of feedback and support.

Q: When/how did you lose your own virginity?

A: I was in my late teens, as is typical for women in my age group, when I began having sexual interactions with other people. However, I do not associate having lost my virginity with a specific instance of penis-in-vagina intercourse because that did not play a part in my early experiences of sexual activity.  I considered myself to be a non-virgin well prior to the first time I engaged in penis-in-vagina intercourse.

Q: What makes you qualified to write a book about virginity?

A: The same things that would make me qualified to write a book about, say, needlepoint or the cotton gin or the history of dentistry: a combination of inclination, academic training, and experience as a researcher and writer.

My training as an historian qualifies me methodologically to do research on virtually any topic in the realm of the humanities. My training as a writer qualifies me to write about it. With many years' experience and involvement in women's and gender studies and a great deal of experience as well in working as a sexuality educator, I have long been interested in researching and writing about topics that have to do with the intersection of history, sex, and gender.

For my work on virginity specifically, I was named the 2004-2005 Scholar of the Institute for the Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, Towson University, and I have taught on and spoken about sexuality topics at numerous colleges and universities including Tufts University, University of Minnesota, West Virginia University, Johns Hopkins University, and Virginia Commonwealth University as well as for television documentaries made for Canadian and British television.

Q: How do you define virginity?

A: I try not to. Because I wrote a book about it I have had to come up with a loose definition, which is roughly this: virginity is a state of human sexual existence in which the individual has as yet not participated in sexual activity with a partner or partners. 

But as I discuss in the first chapter of the book, defining virginity is a very complicated problem with a lot of built-in vagueness and uncertainty. The reason that I use the loose definition I do is that I am not personally interested in telling someone else what kinds of sexual activity "count" for them to lose their virginity and what kinds don't. I think that this is something that each individual person needs to think about and decide for him or herself, just like each individual person needs to think about what virginity means to them in the first place. It is my hope that Virgin: The Untouched History will help give people perspective on these kinds of issues.

Q: Am I still a virgin if I did [specific sexual activity]?

A: Since there is no uniform standard for virginity, and definitions of virginity have been a subject of controversy for literally thousands of years, the only way to answer that question is to ask one: Do you feel that you are, or should be, considered a virgin, given the experience you have described?

This may seem like a non-answer, but in reality, there are nearly as many definitions of virginity as there are people who have tried to define it. Various people at various times have argued that, for instance, oral sex, anal intercourse, same-sex sexual activities, vaginal penetration with a penis but without male orgasm, and even penis-in-vagina intercourse using a condom do not constitute "having sex" or "aren't real sex" and therefore one can do those things and still be a virgin.

On the other hand, various people at various times have argued that, for example, any penetration of the vagina at all, even with a tampon or by a doctor in a gynecologist's exam, made a woman no longer a virgin. Or that even having sexual thoughts would make someone no longer a virgin. Given this history, there is no cut-and-dried answer to the question "am I still a virgin if I did such-and-so?" It's a decision you are going to have to make for yourself. Reading Virgin: The Untouched History will help give you the background information you need to help you figure it out.

Q: Am I still a virgin if I was a victim of sexual violence ?

A: Again, there is no uniform standard for virginity, so there is no firm answer that I or anyone else can give you.

St. Augustine argued that virgins who were raped remained virgins because the spirit, which could not be violated by a physical force from the outside, was more crucial to virginity than the body, which could. However, many legal definitions of virginity have rested on the simple fact of penetration, and not made any allowances for whether that penetration was consensual.

Arguments have ranged both ways for literally thousands of years. The best answer I can give you is that no one else has the right to tell you if you are or not a virgin based on a history of sexual violence: only you can make that determination, and you have the right to make it on whatever basis makes the most sense to you. Perhaps reading Virgin can help give you some perspective on how you feel about different definitions of virginity and how they might be applied to you or someone else in your situation.

Q: Is it abnormal to be a [insert number here]-year-old and still be a virgin?

A: No, it is not abnormal to be a virgin at any age. Just because it is common for people to begin having partnered sex in their late adolescent years does not mean that it is "abnormal" if you don't. Uncommon, perhaps, but not really "abnormal." Some people are virgins their entire lives.

Q: How can there be a history of virginity? Hasn't virginity always been the same?

A: There can be a history of virginity in the same way as there can be a history of food. People have always eaten food. But people have not always eaten the same kinds of food, or cooked their food in the same ways, or had the same feelings or attitudes about food. Sometimes people have used food in religious worship, other times not. Sometimes people have used food as a form of medicine, but not always. The existence of food in people's lives has remained constant, but all the ways in which we interact with that food socially and culturally and physically have been prone to change as cultures have changed. Virginity is much the same. We have had a concept of virginity for as long as we have documents to describe it, but we have not always had the same feelings or attitudes about it, dealt with it in the same ways, defined it identically, or dealt with it in the same ways. These are the kinds of topics that are dealt with in Virgin.

Q: Why is your book limited to discussing only the Western world?

A: I chose to limit my study to the West for several reasons, the biggest one being that I assumed correctly that even if I limited myself to Western culture, I would be working with a topic that was so huge as to be all but unmanageable anyway. This has turned out to be the understatement of the last several years. As it is, I was unable to include huge amounts of material due to the need to keep this book to a manageable size. There is a lot more out there, even just in the West, than what is covered in Virgin.

Additionally, covering non-Western cultures would have required me to be conversant in the cultures, histories, literatures, and languages of all the other parts of the world, and while I do speak and read languages other than English, all the languages with which I am conversant are Western languages. I simply do not have the background to deal with Japanese, Chinese, Farsi, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit, the wide range of African languages, indigenous South American languages and cultures, and so on, and it would be the work of several lifetimes to acquire it. I do hope that what I have done with Virgin will help spur people who do have the academic and cultural background to do similar studies in other cultures to do so. I hope they do, because I'd love to read about it.

Q: Do all cultures deal with virginity the same way Western culture does?

A: No. Anthropologists have observed many different cultural patterns in which non-Western cultures and subcultures address the issue of virginity. Westerners cannot assume that everyone else in the world looks at virginity the same way we do.

Q: What is your religion?

A: I am a Jew and as such, I think of my own religion as an ethics-based monotheism. I am however an avid scholar of comparative religion and happily talk shop with, and in many cases attend worship with, other monotheists.

Q: What are your religious views in regard to virginity?

A: I believe that human beings have a moral responsibility to conduct their affairs in a manner they see as being maximally ethically sound and minimally potentially harmful.  This includes their sexual conduct.

There are many potential circumstances in which it would be both ethical and minimally (or not at all) harmful to begin one's experience of partnered sexual activity. I do not believe that G-d has decreed that there is one and only one set of circumstances in which it is ethical and proper for human beings to begin their partnered sexual experience.

At the same time, I do not believe that this means that there is no ethical or moral baseline for sex or for first sexual experiences. Rather, I believe very strongly in human beings' ability to use their G-d-given capacity for free thought and rational decision-making to help them determine whether or not sexual activity is ethically right for them (and their potential partners) in their specific situations.

I do believe that for some people, not participating in sexual relationships allows them to devote more energy to their relationship with the Divine. Although I do not personally ascribe any particular holiness to the state of virginity, I do believe that for some people who are drawn to it, the state of virginity may be a useful tool that assists them in achieving a state of greater spiritual enlightenment.

Q: What do you have to say about the Immaculate Conception?

A: I think it's one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts in Catholic doctrine. It's astonishing how many times I hear people identify Jesus as the Immaculate Conception because according to Christian belief, Jesus was conceived without sexual intercourse. This is not what "Immaculate Conception" means or is.

The Immaculate Conception, according to Catholic doctrine, is Mary, who the Church holds was, through a miracle, conceived immaculate—free of the taint of Original Sin, which all other human beings bear from the moment they are born—so that she would be an appropriately spiritually and morally pure vessel to bear the Son of God. Her virginity is only part of that overall purity. According to the tenets of Catholic doctrine, if Mary had only been a virgin and had not also been the Immaculate Conception, she would not have been sufficiently pure to play the role that she did in bearing Jesus because she would still have been tinged with Original Sin.

So, what I have to say about the Immaculate Conception is this: I really have nothing to say about it at all, because it has very little to do with virginity and I am not a Catholic theologian.

Q: Are you pro-virginity, or against it?

A: This is like asking whether I'm pro- or anti-rain-falling-from-the-sky. Every human being is born a virgin. There is nothing to be for or against. It is an utterly ordinary state of human existence, and one which each of us experiences. Virginity exists. It just is.

Q: Okay then, Ms. Smartypants, so are you in favor of people prolonging their virginity, for instance until they marry, or are you against it?

A: No aspect of sexuality is one-size-fits-all, and that includes virginity. For some people, prolonging their virginity until they die is the right thing to do, the decision that is most organic to who they are and who they want to be. For others, it's becoming sexually active at 15... or 35... or 55... or whenever the time comes in their lives that they feel it is appropriate and right for them to begin having partnered sex.

For some people, that day never comes, and that is really perfectly fine. There is no reason that anyone ever must engage in partnered sex. There is nothing wrong with you if you do, but there is also nothing categorically wrong with you if you don't. Those whose religious or other beliefs make them feel that they would do well to prolong their virginity until they are married should, in my opinion, feel free to behave according to the courage of their convictions.

Those who do not share those beliefs, however, need not do likewise. It is possible to be ethically and responsibly sexual without being married. Millions of people (myself included) are not legally or religiously married and have ethical, responsible, loving, and happy sexual lives.

Q: Isn't the whole concept of virginity just a tool used by the patriarchy to oppress women?  Will your book disprove the myth of virginity?

A: Virginity is a construct that has been used, in a variety of different contexts and ways, by both women and men for a very long time in the service of controlling both female and male sexuality. While I agree that virginity has been disproportionately applied to and expected of women, often in repressive/oppressive or otherwise damaging ways, the history of virginity on the whole is very complex and even sometimes paradoxical.

Women have often been oppressed by virginity but they have also sometimes been liberated by it. There are many myths and mythologies where virginity is concerned, and certainly my book spends a great deal of time looking at those myths and mythologies and teasing out their ramifications and deeper meanings. But the assumption that virginity is always necessarily oppressive or negative is in itself one of these myths.

Q: How can you tell if a woman is a virgin?

A: You can't. No one can. You can ask her politely and believe what she tells you. But there is no better way. There is no known method of determining virginity that is completely reliable.

Q: How can you tell if a man is a virgin?

A: See above.

Q: Can virgins get pregnant if it's their first time having sex?

A: Yes. Women can become pregnant any time they have penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse without contraception, if they are in the appropriate (fertile) portion of their reproductive cycle. It does not matter whether it is their first time having sex or their five thousandth, what matters is whether there is a fertile egg available and sperm that have access to that fertile egg.

Q: Do virgins always bleed the first time they have sex?

A: No. This goes both for male and for female virgins, in case you were wondering.

Q: Is it true that having sex with a virgin can cure sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS?

A: NO. When a person infected with a sexually transmitted disease of any sort has unprotected sex with a virgin, the result is likely to be that there will now be two infected people instead of only one. 

Having sex with a virgin is not a cure for anything.  It will not take an infection away.   

Q: What are your feelings on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)?

A: Since FGM is not typically practiced in the West, I have not considered it as a topic in this book, which deals with virginity within the West.

To the extent that FGM has anything to do with virginity, which is a question that must be answered individually for any specific culture or subculture that practices FGM, it is possible that my book may help shed some light on whether FGM can ever be an appropriate response to virginity concerns. However, not all cultures that practice FGM consider it as being an explicitly virginity-related practice.

Personally, I feel that forcibly and/or nonconsensually performing surgeries on healthy bodies is a fundamental violation of both human rights and medical ethics. I do not support such procedures in any form.

Q: Is it true that sex is better with virgins?

A: No. Neither being a virgin nor being with a virgin is a guarantee of good sex. It is only a guarantee of having sex that includes a virgin.

Most people, and most researchers, say that sex tends to be perceived as better and more enjoyable when partners are in a good communicative relationship with one another, when they are able to voice their needs and desires and have their partner be responsive, and where they feel a certain degree of emotional as well as physical security or at least a lack of immediate insecurity or worry. Virginity has very little to do with any of this, and in some cases may make it more difficult to be as communicative, or to feel as secure or unworried, as one might ideally prefer.

Q: Is it true that virgins' vaginas are tighter than other women's?

A: No. Just as not all men's penises are identical in shape and size, not all women's vaginas are identical in shape and size. The vaginas of women who have not had partnered sex are not necessarily any different than the vaginas of women who have. There is no magical quality about the vaginas of virgin women that makes them categorically smaller, tighter, narrower, or better than the vaginas of any other women. The human body doesn't work that way.

Q: Where exactly is the hymen located?

A: The hymen, if one is present, is located just at the entrance of the vaginal opening, at the point where the vagina opens into the vulva space. A normal hymen does not cover the entire vaginal opening but has one or more openings or orifices to allow for menstruation and other normal vaginal discharges. Hymens can appear in a number of different shapes and sizes. Not all hymens are alike.  Diversity is normal.

Q: I have heard that some women simply don't have hymens, is this true?

A: It's possible, although not terribly likely, that any given baby girl will be born without a perceptible hymen.

The incidence of girls being born without hymens has been estimated by some researchers at approximately 0.03%, or 3 in 10,000. It is reasonably likely that any given woman who thinks she may not have a hymen does have a hymen but has simply never perceived it. Because hymens tend to be small, unobtrusive, and to have very few nerves or blood vessels in them, many women simply are never aware of having one and thus assume that they must not have had one. Not being aware of one's own hymen (or whether or not one has one at all) is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about. There is no reason that the average woman would be aware of it as anything special or distinct from the other tissues in that part of the body.

Q: I've heard that some women break their hymens unintentionally, like by riding a bicycle, and so they don't bleed when they have sex for the first time. Is this true?

A: The only accurate answer to this question  is a definitive maybe. Not all women experience either pain or bleeding when they are sexually penetrated for the first time, but this has little to do (as far as anyone knows) with whether or not the woman has had previous experience with things like bicycling or gymnastics.  

There is considerable evidence that the claims that athletic activities that involve spread legs or sitting on a saddle that goes between the legs, such as bicycle or horseback riding, can cause virginity to be lost are actually a relic of Victorian hysteria about women engaging in such "immodest" practices.  Bicycle riding, particularly, was believed by 19th-century physicians to damage women's gynecological health and to be sexually stimulating besides.  It seems that some of these unproven assertions about bicycles, gymnastics, etc. have simply been passed down unquestioned.

In truth, the medical literature shows that there are cases in which blunt object trauma to the vulva can sometimes traumatize the hymen.  But very little is really known about how common this might be, and nothing whatsoever is known, scientifically speaking, about how likely it might be to occur because of any given athletic activity.

Q: Is it true that a doctor can restore  virginity?

A: Plastic surgeons are capable of performing two types of hymen reconstruction surgeries, hymenoplasty and hymenorraphy. Whether this restores virginity is a matter of debate. Not everyone agrees that the hymen is what defines virginity. So it is unlikely that people will agree on whether or not simply having a structure in one's genitals which approximates an "intact" hymen constitutes virginity, either.

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