This article is about the cultural value and importance of virginity, as a concept. I originally wrote an essay about this topic for my course, human sexuality across cultures.

Why is virginity important?  Virginity has been a constant cultural symbol throughout history with physicians, academics, and theologians alike attempting to describe its cultural and medical importance. For centuries, women’s bodies have not been considered their own, and have been manipulated and controlled by patriarchal societal expectations and beliefs. Through cultural constructions such as virginity, men have been able to retain power over women through both medical and social means. In this article, I discuss the cultural conception of virginity, but I want to acknowledge that this conception is mostly from a western Eurocentric viewpoint. Despite this, there are many conceptions of virginity that supersede cultural boundaries, especially due to the spread of Christianity. Hopefully, in the future, I can do a more in-depth cross-cultural analysis on this subject. Now, let’s jump into it.

Throughout history, women have been consistently recognized as a means of making money for their family. Historically, women weren’t allowed to make decisions as citizens in their own right, therefore, fathers would marry off their daughters to form a cultural and economic bond with another family. This important transaction would be threatened if the husband-to-be did not think his wife, was a virgin. These age-old transactions— which were common well before Christianity— spread the ideology that virginity was extremely valuable. To ensure the financial success of one’s family, it was necessary to assure the virgin status of one’s daughter through physical tests. The consequences of a non-virgin daughter would often be fatal. In fact, if it was discovered that a woman lost her virginity before her wedding then she had committed the crime of “whoredom” which was a crime against her father’s household (Blank, 2007).

The need to control women’s bodies can be categorized under the term ‘Biopower’: the power to control and regulate the bodies of a population and to control what is natural (Foucault). This age-old desire to control women’s bodies is seen with the discovery of the hymen in the 16th-century by Vesalius, a Flemish anatomist, and physician (Encyclopedia Britannica 2017). Bleeding caused by the breaking of the hymen during intercourse is seen as the ultimate marker of virginity. The desire to control women’s bodies and their virginity status in particular, can be observed with the emergence and increasing popularity of hymenal reconstruction surgeries in the last 20 years. Women often obtain this surgery to follow wider social norms, such as remaining a virgin until marriage. The desire to have socially acceptable genitals can also be seen in genital reconstruction surgeries on intersex people, who often have a mix of both male and female sexual organs (Planned Parenthood N.D.) For example, some people regard surgery on intersex children as necessary for those children to be able to fit in culturally (Kessler 1998: 48). These surgeries are not always medically necessary— meaning the child is usually not in immediate danger, similar to hymen reconstruction surgeries. With hymen reconstruction surgeries, the goal is to attain ‘purity’; with genital reconstruction surgeries, the goal is to ‘normalize’ genitalia— both of which reinforce social constructions of the body through medical practice. These procedures often become a social necessity, allowing those who undergo surgery to avoid potentially violent responses from those around them.

Throughout the medical history of virginity, women were often separated from their body, with their value being placed solely on their purity and virginity status. At various times in the medical history of women, there has been the mechanization of women’s bodily processes, allowing doctors to see the woman’s body as a machine to be fixed as opposed to a whole human. This sense of alienation and fragmentation of self has always been prevalent and is clearly seen when one’s virginity is contested. For example, in cases of virginity testing, the woman’s verbal testimony is considered inadmissible and only her body is allowed to give testimony (Blank, 2007). This allows doctors or physicians to compartmentalize the woman in their minds, separating her body and mind. Instead of listening to the woman, doctors often examine any physical signs of virginity while listening to input from the men in the woman’s life.

While the medical history of virginity has evolved and society’s knowledge of hymens and other virginity signifiers have developed, the eroticism of virginity remains prevalent in Western cultures. Throughout history, virginity was not necessarily seen as sexy. Instead, virginity was seen as a desirable trait for a potential partner, as it ensured paternity as well as the purity and goodness of a woman. It is difficult to find the origin of the sexiness of virginity, mostly due to the wide variety and differentiation amongst virgins. The eroticized nature of virgins can be tied to the misconceptions within the medical field about their physical attributes. For example, for many years— and still to this day— many people believe that virgins uniformly have tighter vaginas, are demurer, and will bleed when they have sex for the first time. Furthermore, pornography makes it easy to identify reasons why men may find virginity sexy.  The desire to be with someone who hasn’t been touched is also just as much a part of the allure of virgins. Therefore, a man who takes a woman’s virginity is seen as being a victor, because virginity is perceived as a difficult prize to be won. Furthermore, the sexiness of virginity is inextricably tied to the patriarchy and man’s desire to control women. Women are not only supposedly changed after they lose their virginity, but the way their virginity loss is described differs vastly from men. Women are not seen as active participants in their sex lives and are instead seen as conquered or mastered, while men are seen as the master. The dichotomy between how virginity loss is perceived for men and women highlights the patriarchal power structure which puts men in a position of sexual power over women.

Ultimately, the patriarchal nature of society has allowed for the physical and social control over women and their bodies. The medical construction of virginity and the discovery of the hymen has been used as a method to physically prove the virginity of women, ultimately sealing their fate within their social circles. The emphasis on the physical characteristics of virginity has also effectively separated women from their bodies in many medical situations. Additionally, the eroticism of virginity has affected how women, whether they choose to lose their virginity or not, are seen in society. The eroticized nature of virgins allows men to see women as a “thing” to be conquered, enabling these men to perpetuate the patriarchy which prioritizes male sexual power and male entitlement. The definition and treatment of virginity have changed over time, and while virginity is still a very abstract concept, it has meaningfully impacted the way western society constructs its way of life with regard to medicine, religion, and culture.

Sources:

Blank, Hanne. Virgin: the untouched history. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008.

Florkin, Marcel. "Andreas Vesalius." Encyclopædia Britannica. November 16, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andreas-Vesalius.          

Martin, Emily. The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Parenthood, Planned. “What is Intersex? Definition of Intersexual.” Planned Parenthood. Accessed December 08, 2017.  https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation gender/gender-gender-identity/whats-intersex