Virgin: The Untouched History Read Online Free

that the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere were simply wicked and lacking any sense of sexual morality. From such encounters, Europeans frequently derived the belief that virginity was an attribute of being civilized, which was to say Christian, European, and white.
    All these things are part of how we in the West understand virginity to exist and function even today. They are part of our virgin heritage. Our way of thinking about virginity and virgins has been changing quite a bit in the past century or so, but much of the age-old ideological paradigm we have inherited in regard to virgins and virginity remains sturdy and strong. The case of Rosie Reid provides an excellent demonstration of the slow and mixed ways that change comes to the ideology of virginity. When the eighteen-year-old University of Bristol student created a scandal in 2004 by deciding to sell her virginity to the highest bidder in an online auction to help pay her educational expenses, neither she, the men who rushed to place bids, nor the numerous news organizations that covered the story seemed to find it at all incongruous that Ms. Reid billed herself as a virgin while simultaneously making it clear that she was a lesbian involved in a long-term sexual and romantic relationship with another woman.
    It did not seem to occur to anyone reporting on Reid's story that perhaps her virginity was already a thing of the past. There was no discussion of whether Reid and her lover might have engaged in vaginally penetrative sex using fingers or sex toys, as hundreds of thousands of women who have sex with women have done throughout history. The condition of Reid's hymen, so often considered a definitive parameter of virginity in our materialist and medically oriented age, was never brought under question in news reports. Whether her body had ever been "opened" did not seem to be on anyone's mind at all, although it would have been very much on the minds of the Greeks. Nor did anyone care whether Reid had ever experienced either sexual desire or orgasm, both of which would have mattered greatly to medieval theologians and physicians.
    Instead, an authoritative silence told the world that Reid's lesbian sexual experience was not considered valid. All that mattered to either the journalists or the many men who placed bids in the hopes of gaining one-time sexual access to Reid was that she had never been penetrated by a penis. The sum total of what defined virginity in Rosie Reid's story was the insertion of a penis into a vagina, an exclusively heterosexual action performed by a biological male on a biological female. What Reid sold, and the ultimate winner of the auction purchased, was nothing more or less than a tangible confirmation of the ideology that a woman is not sexually "real" in her own right, and that it takes a man and his penis to make her so.
    Virginal Variety
    Rosie Reid's case raises many fascinating questions, not the least of which is how we might characterize the variety of virginity she, as a sexually active lesbian, might have represented. If we accept that Ms. Reid was in fact a virgin prior to the successful sale of her virginity (having paid ?12,000—roughly $14,500—for her maidenhead, we can at least assume that the man in question believed she had one to sell), what kind of virgin was she?
    To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, there's a virgin born every minute. But not all virgins are alike. No matter how much stock we put in the whole canonical penis-in-vagina factor, we are extremely unlikely to perceive Rosie Reid's virginity as being the same as the virginity of a nun, an eleven-year-old girl, a thirty-year-old career woman, or an elderly maiden aunt. Just as Albertus Magnus did in the thirteenth century, we also notice and acknowledge that virginities and virgins come in different types and modes. Strangely, though, although we have been recognizing different types of virginity and virgins since at least the second