The Book of Women’s Love recommends the following to restore virginity: ‘take myrtle leaves and boil them well with water until only a third part remains; then, take nettles without prickles and boil them in this water until a third remains. She must wash her secret parts with this water in the morning and at bedtime, up to nine days.’ However, if you’re in a real hurry you can ‘take nutmeg and grind to a powder; put it in that place and her virginity will be restored immediately’.{20} Nicolas Venette (1633–1698), the French author of the seventeenth-century L’amour Conjugal, gave this advice to fake a maidenhead:
Make a bath of decorations of Leaves of mallows, Groundsel, with some handfuls of Line Seed and Fleabane Seed, Orach, Brank Ursin or bearfoot. Let them sit in this Bath an hour, after which, let them be wiped, and examin’d 2 or 3 hours after Bathing, observing them narrowly in the mean while. If a Woman is a Maid, all her amorous parts are compress’d and joyn’d close to one another; but if not, they are flaggy, loose, and flouting, instead of being wrinkled and close as they were before when she had a mind to choose us.{21}
As Hanne Blank argued in her marvellous Virgin: The Untouched History, many of the ingredients listed here are astringents or anti-inflammatories that were thought to tighten the vagina. Although Venette doesn’t list it here, one of the most well-known twinkle tighteners was alum water. In Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) he cites ‘pucker water’ as ‘Water impregnated with alum, or other astringents, used by old experienced traders to counterfeit virginity’.{22} Alum is a class of chemical compound that is used widely today in food preservatives and industry. Insanely, there are numerous websites out there that still recommend alum for tightening the vagina. I will just take this moment to say, dear God, please do not do that to your poor chuff; do your Kegels and keep the faith.
Other than wishing to fake it on their wedding night, another reason a girl would want to pass as a novice is that maidenheads came at a premium. By the eighteenth century, virgins were a lucrative business, and any working girl or madam would know how to fake a hymen for maximum profit. Nocturnal Revels (1779) provides explicit details about women selling their virginity several times over, and quotes the famous madam Charlotte Hayes as saying a virginity is ‘as easily made as a pudding’. Charlotte goes on to say that she sold her own ‘thousands of times’.{23} The eponymous heroine of the original bonkbuster Fanny Hill (1749) tells the reader precisely how virginity is faked in the sex industry.
In each of the head bed-posts, just above where the bedsteads are inserted into them, there was a small drawer, so artfully adapted to the mouldings of the timber-work, that it might have escaped even the most curious search: which drawers were easily opened or shut by the touch of a spring, and were fitted each with a shallow glass tumbler, full of a prepared fluid blood, in which lay soaked, for ready use, a sponge, that required no more than gently reaching the hand to it, taking it out and properly squeezing between the thighs, when it yielded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl’s honour.{24}
Other sneaky tips include having sex during menstruation to ensure blood, and placing a bird’s heart, or a pig’s bladder stitched up and containing blood, into the vaginal cavity so it will ‘bleed’ on cue.{25}
Despite a deeply engrained historical belief in the bleeding virgin, this has never been unanimously accepted by the scientific community. There have always been lone voices of reason who recognised this as a load of cobblers. Physicians such as Ambroise Paré not only denied that virginity could be proven with a hymen, he claimed there was no such a thing as a hymen back in 1573. Since then there have been occasional whispers that the hymen is not quite the certificate of authenticity it is touted to be. By the nineteenth century, these whispers had become an audible grumble. Dr Blundell questioned the value of this ‘mystic membrane’, and Erasmus Wilson stated that the hymen ‘must not be considered a necessary accompaniment to virginity’ in 1831.{26} Edward Foote wrote that ‘the hymen is a cruel and unreliable test of virginity’ and that ‘physicians know it is a very fallible test of virginity’.{27} By the twentieth century, the grumble had become a deafening shout and by the twenty-first century the shouting had been replaced by dramatic eye rolls and exasperated cries of ‘for fuck’s sake! Not this bollocks again!’ The research I referred to at the beginning of this chapter identified some 1,269 studies in electronic databases that research the validity of virginity testing and hymen reliability, and they overwhelmingly reach the conclusion that you cannot ‘prove’ someone is a virgin and hymens tell you naff all about the owner’s sexual past.{28} And yet the myth persists, and women are routinely subjected to pointless and invasive examinations to try and establish their sexual experience.
Today virginity examinations are largely carried out on unmarried females, often without consent or in situations where individuals are unable to give consent.{29} Virginity testing on schoolgirls has been reported in South Africa and Swaziland to deter pre-marital sexual activity. In India, the test has been part of the sexual assault assessment of female rape victims. In Indonesia, the exam has been part of the application process for women to join the police force.{30} But even if you could prove someone’s virginity, the issue isn’t really the examination itself (although it’s bad enough) – it’s cultural attitudes that value women based primarily on whether they are sexually active that are the issue. There is no way of ‘proving’ if someone has had sex by examining their genitals, because ‘virginity’ is not something tangible. The hymen is simply a stretchy tissue inside the vagina, but it doesn’t seal it up like a Tupperware lid. Hymens come in many different shapes and thickness – some bleed when torn and others do not. The hymen absolutely does not ‘pop’ when broken and cannot prove anyone’s sexual history any more than your elbow can. You cannot ‘lose’ your virginity because virginity is an invention, not a physical fact – no matter how sparkly your piss may be.
SEX AND PENISES
Spilling the Beans
Orgasm and Onanism
The female orgasm is often spoken of as if it were a hidden treasure to be found only with the aid of maps, detailed instructions and a packed lunch. The intrepid sexual adventurer boldly sets out, like Indiana Jones, to navigate the mystery of the female body, read the clues, solve the puzzle and choose wisely before drinking from the Holy Grail. The male orgasm, on the other hand, is spoken of in terms of a bottle of Coke: shake it up until it explodes out the end and makes everything sticky. Job done.