Sadly, a woman’s virginity is still highly prized around the world today, a fact which has, in turn, led to the creation of numerous damaging rituals around keeping and proving a woman’s sexual purity that are still in force today. These tests usually involve searching for an intact hymen, or what’s known as the ‘two-finger test’, which checks for vaginal tightness. Countries where this practice has been reported include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Turkey and Uganda. The FGM National Clinic Group states that female genital mutilation is valued ‘as a means of preserving a girl’s virginity until marriage (for example, in Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia). In many of these countries FGM has been seen as a prerequisite to marriage and marriage is vital to a woman’s social and economic survival.’{3} The World Health Organisation estimates that 200 million girls globally have been subjected to female genital mutilation, in no small part to preserve their virginities until marriage.{4}
The idea of female sexual purity being a prerequisite for marriage underpins many cultures and religions around the world. In Indonesia, virginity testing remains a requirement for women wanting to join the army or police force. So-called ‘Purity Balls’ are held all over America, where fathers take their teenage daughters on a ‘date’; she pledges to stay a virgin until marriage and he, in turn, pledges to protect his daughter’s virginity until she is married (presumably with a shotgun and some kind of alarm system). Women can now pay to have their hymens rebuilt for the marriage market, and the hymenoplasty business is booming. In 2016, a South African KwaZulu-Natal municipality introduced an academic bursary for young women who can prove that they are virgins.{5} And in 2017, the Russian Investigative Committee and the health minister, Vladimir Shuldyakov, caused outrage by ordering doctors to carry out ‘virginity tests’ on schoolgirls and to report any found without a hymen to the authorities.{6}
Not only is virginity impossible to prove, it’s also quite difficult to define. We might think that virginity is a very simple thing to understand, but it doesn’t hold together all that well when we start to poke it a little. Precisely what we count as sex for the first time can be more complicated than we might initially think. If two girls have sex, does that count as losing their virginity? What if they used a strap-on? If a heterosexual couple hit first, second and third base, but strike out at fourth in a sweaty, satisfied mess, are they still virgins? Can you lose your virginity to yourself? Does it have to involve penile–vaginal penetration? If so, does that preclude same-sex sex? Is gay pride really a mass virgin rally? How about if a heterosexual couple just have anal sex? Does he lose his, but she keeps hers on a technicality?
Despite considerable research into hymens, many myths still surround them. People still believe exercise and horse-riding can rupture the hymen (they don’t), and Tampax were still reassuring young women that they couldn’t ‘pop their cherries’ (1988) on a tampon as late as the 1990s.
Even the language surrounding virginity is loaded. The concept of ‘losing’ or ‘keeping’ your virginity suggests that once lost, we are all lacking something and no longer whole. It also suggests that virginity is something tangible that we had in the first place. You can metaphorically ‘give’ someone your V-card, but it’s not like they can hang it above their fireplace, or resell it on eBay (although several women have tried).
The concept of virginity is undeniably gendered, and the reason we think we know what we mean when we discuss ‘losing’ said ‘cherry’ (1933) is because we subconsciously understand virginity as belonging to penis-in-vagina sex. This is what is meant by ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. This doesn’t mean that heterosexuality is literally compulsory, but that our cultural scripts around sexuality focus more on heterosexual sex than any other kind: it has become our ‘normal’. Now, this is undeniably cis-gendered privilege, but it is the product of thousands of years of cultural conditioning. It is only with the tremendous work done by LGBTQ activists over the last fifty years that we have begun to create space to discuss alternatives to boy–girl sex at all. But there is still a long way to go.
When anyone is concerned about virginity it is almost always a woman’s virginity. Even the word ‘virgin’ comes from the Latin virgo, meaning a girl or a woman who is not married. Men and boys have never been valued by their virgin status in the same way women have. At various points in history, women have been disowned, imprisoned, fined, mutilated, whipped and even killed as punishment for losing their virginity outside of marriage, whereas funny films are made about forty-year-old male virgins.[18]
Quite why it is female rather than male virginity that has been so rigorously sanctioned is a matter of some dispute, but it is likely all down to paternal legacies. It’s unfair, but in the pre-Pill world, pregnancy out of wedlock was a far more immediate physical and financial concern for the mother than the father; consequently, it was her shenanigans that were scrutinised rather than his. But more than this, in a paternalistic society where wealth and power are passed down the male line, female chastity is heavily policed to ensure legitimate offspring, and that your worldly goods pass to your children (and not the milkman’s). This theory holds some weight when we consider that in the few matriarchal societies around the world, wealth is passed down the female line. In these cultures, female sexuality is regarded very differently.[19]
Today, the most well-known ‘proof’ of virginity test is blood produced from a ruptured hymen. But our ancestors didn’t even use the word ‘hymen’, and certainly didn’t go rooting around inside vaginas like they were digging for buried treasure to find one. In fact, medical texts don’t start talking about a hymen until the fifteenth century.{7} None of the Classical physicians make mention of it (Galen and Aristotle, for example). Greek physician Soranus suggests that any post-coital vaginal bleeding was the result of burst blood vessels, and categorically denied any kind of membrane inside the vagina.{8} Many early texts acknowledge that virgins may bleed when they have sex for the first time, but this wasn’t linked to the hymen. Rather, it was thought that the bleeding was caused by the trauma of penile penetration and was not proof enough of virginity. It was the Italian physician Michael Savonarola who first used the word ‘hymen’ in 1498, describing it as a membrane that ‘is broken at the time of deflowering, so that the blood flows’.{9} After this, references to the hymen and its links to virginity become increasingly common. But just because our ancestors didn’t search for intact hymens does not mean that virginity was not subject to rigorous tests before the hymen became the benchmark for proof of tampering.
The most famous virgins in the Ancient World were Rome’s Vestal Virgins. The Vestal Virgins were priestesses, dedicated to the goddess of hearth and family, Vesta. They were chosen at a young age and had to dedicate thirty years of worship and chastity to the city of Rome and tend the temple flame of Vesta; the punishment for a Vestal having sex was to be entombed alive and left to starve to death.
18
Despite the social emphasis on keeping your flower unplucked, research published by the
19
The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, the Mosuo of Tibet, the Ghanese Akan, the Bribri of Costa Rica, the Garo of Meghalaya, India and the Nagovisi of New Guinea are all regarded as matriarchal societies and all share matrilineal inheritance lines. When property passes from mother to daughter (regardless of paternity), who’s the daddy is of little consequence. The sexual customs of these cultures are far more permissive; unions between men and women are easily dissolved without shame, women are free to have multiple sexual partners, and concepts of adultery, promiscuity and illegitimacy are not known as they are in the West (H. Gottner-Abendroth, ‘The Structure Of Matriarchal Societies’,