Why should we be concerned with virginity?
A few years ago, a few people, who were at that time all at Nottingham Trent University, including myself, started ‘the virginity project’. Although the research subsequently shifted to issues around teenage sexuality, there always remained an urge to return to a more fundemental theoretical quest to get to grips with for this rather illusive and ill-understood term. Drawing on inspiration from sources as diverse as Luce Irirgaray and the Catholic Church, this quest should takes us well beyond facile commentary on virginity pledges and chastity rings, and force us to consider some fundamental issues surrounding the body, the subject and the question of ‘otherness’. I would like to know who might be interested in this and might be able to contribute. Below are merely three reasons why I think virginity is relevant today:
1. From a theoretical point of view, virginity reveals the ambivalence of body-boundaries and undermines the concept of the unity (integrity) between body and subjectivity. Virginity signifies lack, the loss of which marks one as ‘complete’ (mature), that is, integrated into the (heterosexual) socius.
2. From a political point of view, virginity reveals the ambivalence of agency and free will. One the one hand, imbued in hedonistic discourses of sex-as-pleasure, virginity signifies an increasingly obsolete traditional obstacle to the realisation of sexual agency. On the other hand, virginity signifies the possibility of autonomy exercised in the form of non-disclosure and continence (self control).
3. From a moral point of view, virginity reveals the ambivalence of dispossession. As that which can only be given away or withheld, it signifies a promise that can only be given if retained. Like all acts of sociation, sexuality can never be morally indifferent as it necessarily implies the other, who is either virtually or actually ‘present’ or both.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:51 am
When I first saw this post yesterday I thought, omg, if this doesn’t frighten readers, I don’t know what will! –grin–
But I’m really interested in this “ambivalence of body-boundaries” and the threat to unity or wholeness. It intrigues me that today a teenage girl might “protect” her virginity by only engaging in oral sex - hinting at a sort of hierarchy of orifices (”one of these holes is not like the others”) and some differences between bodily boundaries on girls and boys.
So while I think you’re right to note that losing one’s virginity marks one’s passage into sexual maturity and wholeness, it does not come without a loss of purity or innocence, especially in the case of girls. In the end, I suspect that “self-control” lacks any sort of value if one does not subscribe to the notion that this kind of purity is something to be protected in the first place.
I’m curious to know how you see virginity (or abstinence for that matter, as they begin to overlap) acting as some form of resistance to sexual permisiveness? In other words, what kind of agency is this - and what does it (seek to) accomplish?
And while I’m at it, what is the problem with pleasure? Must we define it in terms of hedonism, with pleasure as the “highest good”? It seems to me that virginity (and again, abstinence) can then only be coded in terms of a kind of piety that requires and rewards denial…
November 7th, 2005 at 5:00 am
Hi Anne thanks for your reflections. I think you make a nu,ber of interesting points. The key problem as I see it, of sorking on concepts of virginity is that it easily leads to a confusion of different registers. The original idea was to reinsert (no irony intended) a sense of ‘theological depth’ into the concept; I think here for example in terms of linking virginity with a non-masculinist form of potentiality, of that ‘which may become’ (which, for me is something even more interesting than the more empiricist understanding of ‘becoming’ one finds in common Deleuzean applications). I also would like to be able to contribute to a problematization of this concept as a single threshold; I’d prefer a sense of ‘continuity’. Virginity is not lost once-and-for-all, but remains a potentiality, even if completely eroded (e.g. in the mythical figure of ‘the skank’).
Purity does come into it, orat elast, some form of purification is essential; not because pleasure is intrinsically evil (or abject), but because without some form of purification, pleasure itself will be lost. I do not believe virginity and pleasure are opposites; instead, they form a binary pair of mutual implication. Yes, perhaps I do have a moralist prejudice against hedonism; it comes in the form of Skunk Anansi’s phrase ‘kust because it feels good doesn’t make it right’. for me the politics of hedonism are not creative (as is often assumed) but destructive (I want it all, I want it now; I want it for me). Hedonism erodes the ability to love, because you become indiferent to the other.
November 11th, 2005 at 1:25 am
Strange space for this discussion, but I think I see the link.
As a new dad to a daughter, two films come to mind: Larry Clark’s 1995 Kidz, and the Australian vintage classic Puberty Blues. Both chronicle the brutality that so often surrounds virginity. It’s the same brutality that seems to follow kids everywhere.
While it’s nice to talk about ambivalence of body-boundaries and wholeness, I think it’s important to put together a message that rings true for the kids themselves. I’m not sure (outside of the traditional guilt message) that that’s been done well - yet.