Comments on: Why should we be concerned with virginity?

By: Brendo

Brendo — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:25:00 +0000

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.

By: Joost van Loon

Joost van Loon — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 13:51:00 +0000

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…