Virgin: The Untouched History Read Online Free Page A

century C.E., we have developed precious little terminology with which to describe the variety we perceive.
    The only phrase the West generally uses in this capacity is the nineteenth-century French term demi-vierge, which roughly translates to "half-virgin." Currently we might, at least in the United States, use the term "technical virgin" to mean more or less the same thing, someone whose life has not been entirely devoid of sexual experience, but who retains some claim to the virgin title by virtue of not having yet crossed some particular experiential threshold, typically the penis-in-vagina one. The demi-vierge or technical virgin, though, accounts for only one of the possible types of virginity. For many others, we have no words at all.
    This odd lack of vocabulary speaks volumes. We no longer live in a society in which the most important thing one could know about a woman was whether or not she was owned by her father—unmarried and presumably virginal—or by a husband, and thus presumably nonvirgin. But our culture has been profoundly concerned with just those things for most of its history, and it shows. The minimalist vocabulary we've inherited in regard to virginity, and the limits it puts on our ability to discuss virginity and virgins, is a legacy of past priorities.
    This does not stop us, however, from recognizing that different sorts of virgins and virginities exist. At a minimum, Western culture today recognizes four major modes of virginity, with every individual example of a given mode constituting inevitable variations on the theme. The first, default virginity, parallels the first class given by the estimable Albertus Magnus: we are all born virgins. Children's lack of active sexuality is expected and taken for granted, so much so that we find it odd to refer to children as specifically being virgins. They are, as Carl Jung put it, presexual. Despite evidence that some aspects of active genital behavior begin quite early (many children self-stimulate their genitals; fetuses have even been observed stimulating their own genitals while still in utero, thanks to ultrasound technology), we still think of prepubescent children as not yet being sexual beings.
    But eventually adolescence hits, and with it come flash floods of sex hormones, the fast-growing shrubbery of facial and pubic hair, the dangerous curves of breasts and hips, and the unmistakably messy evidence of fertility signaled by first ejaculations and menstrual periods. When the body becomes physiologically sexually mature, we lose the luxury of imagining that the individual is not a sexual entity. This is the point where virginity really begins to count for something.
    The most common postadolescent form virginity takes rests on the assumption that eventually, people will become players in the game of sex, and specifically that they will take part in the enormous generational work of creating new families and bearing children. For if this is to happen, virginity cannot be perpetual, but only transitional. This is precisely what virginity is for most people, a transitional state that bridges the end of childhood and the assumption of full social adulthood, a passage that has often been embodied by marriage.
    Transitional virginity has not always been the most highly regarded form of virginity in the West—under Christianity, in fact, it took a distant backseat to the vowed virginity of nuns and monks until after the Protestant Reformation—but it has always been the commonest one. The average ages at which people have married have varied widely over the course of human history. Although there have been certain periods of time over the last 2,500 years during which it has been common for at least some women not to marry until they were over twenty, it has been more common for women to be married off as adolescents, often very close to the time they begin to menstruate.
    Child betrothals and adolescent marriages are a source for scandal in the