Virgin: The Untouched History Read Online Free Page B

West today—an Associated Press report of the tumultuous 2003 wedding of twelve-year-old Ana Maria Cioaba, daughter of the self-proclaimed king of the Romanian branch of the Roma people, generated shocked responses in the news media—but were quite normal for much of our history. Catherine of Aragon was betrothed at age three to Arthur, son of Henry VII of England, and married to him when she was fifteen. Shakespeare's Juliet, all of thirteen years old, is advised by her mother to "think of marriage now; younger than you, here in Verona, ladies of esteem are made already mothers: by my count, I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid." Even today, when average ages at first marriage hover in the mid to late twenties, * matches where a premium is placed on the bride's virginity, like the first marriage of the heir to a throne, often feature a relatively youthful bride. The late Lady Diana Spencer was a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old in 1981 when she became engaged to marry thirty-two-year-old Prince Charles of England; by the time they married and she became Princess of Wales, she had been twenty for all of twenty-eight days.
    As average ages of first marriage for women have varied, the lengths of time that the average woman would have been expected to maintain her transitional virginity have varied, too. Today, with women's ages at first marriages greater than they have ever been, a Western woman who maintains her virginity until she marries can probably, if she marries at the average age for her peer group, expect to sustain anywhere from ten to twenty years of transitional virginity between the time she reaches puberty and the time she marries. When we consider that even the vestal virgins were only expected to maintain their virginity for thirty years, from the time they were consecrated at age six until they finished their term of service at the age of thirty-six, it puts such modern-day commitments to premarital virginity into a most intriguing perspective.
    Then again, a modern Western woman may choose not to maintain her virginity until marriage at all. This option has only quite recently—within the last thirty years or so—become widely acceptable. Even so, nonmarital and premarital sex has still by no means received a universal seal of approval, and many socially conservative groups and religious bodies continue to condemn it. Even the U.S. federal government, despite a long history of not having national policies concerning sexuality (sex-related law is formulated and enforced primarily at the state level in the United States), has in recent years come down forcefully and paternalistically in favor of the old-fashioned ideology of transitional virginity, which holds that any premarital sexual activity is wrong. Beginning in 1996 big-budget federal initiatives to promote and enforce the teaching of what is euphemistically called "abstinence-based sex education"—curricula that teach that virginity is the only appropriate sexual status for unmarried people—have inserted a vociferously pro-transitional-virginity agenda into the curricula of U.S. public schools. This stunning backlash against changing virginity expectations, and the odd and telling isolation in which the United States pursues it, is proof positive that a culture's approaches to virginity may be more emotional and political than anything else.
    Because transitional virginity's end has long been linked with social adulthood, and social adulthood has long been linked to marriage, we have developed an abbreviated ideology of virginity that equates virginity with childhood and loss of virginity with adulthood. But it is, of course, possible to be both an adult and a virgin. Indeed, for roughly the last seventeen centuries, countless thousands of adult women and men have maintained lifelong virginity within the burgeoning monastic institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Reformation permanently destroyed