Touched for the very first time

[bibliogramma]

Virgin: The Untouched History, Hanne Blank

There are lots of words in English for people who have just started to do something – neophyte, initiate, beginner, tyro, newbie, and so on. But in general, there aren’t that many words for people who have never done a specific thing.

Except, of course, for sex. The sexual status of people – and women in particular – has been so important in almost all human cultures that we have a specific word to discuss the person who has not had sex: virgin.

Mind you, even this seemingly simple definition is open to a great deal of interpretation, for the line between the kind of sex that causes one to cease being a virgin and all the other kinds of sex there are is both culturally and personally defined, and can vary widely. As Blank notes in the first chapter:

By any material reckoning, virginity does not exist. It can’t be weighed on a scale, sniffed out like a truffle or a smuggled bundle of cocaine, retrieved from the lost-and-found, or photographed for posterity. Like justice or mercy, we can only determine that it exists at all because of the presence of its effects – or side effects.

There has been a great deal written over the years, primarily by religious philosophers and moralists, about the spiritual importance of virginity to one’s spiritual state and prospects and the consequences of losing it in an unsanctioned manner, or consorting with those who have. Medical practitioners and natural philosophers have written about the ways of determining virginity – or lack of same – as a physiological state. Social historians and cultural anthropologists have written about how virginity – be it defined spiritually, socially or psychologically is viewed and responded to in various societies.

What Blank has done, however, is rather different, for all of these writings, which tend to assume, if nothing else, that there is a state of virginity, that it is clearly defined and verifiable (at least among women) and that everyone knows what that state is. Instead, Blank writes about virginity as a socially constructed concept in and of itself. What does it mean, how is it constructed, what do we believe about it, why does it matter to us, why is it almost always about women’s sexual status, and how such a uniquely personal circumstance has become such a public consideration for so many.