by Lisa Jervis
Virginity bias tacks a confusing corollary onto historical social opinion about the sexual behavior of women. Not so long ago, a woman had only to hold a nickel between her knees to avoid slut status. Easy enough. But since the sexual revolution, she can also be slapped with the equally damning “prude” label. We’ve strayed from the original intent of women’s liberation and limited women again, trading in the old prescription (sex will ruin a woman) for one that seems more modern (lack of sex will curdle her). We can’t seem to shake the need for a formula, constructing a narrow sixmonth window around a girl’s seventeenth birthday (if that’s early enough) as the approved defloration moment. We’ve led a woman I know to plan, one drunken night, to seduce her twenty-six-year-old cousin rather than go to boarding school a virgin at age sixteen.
While virgins are by no means an actively persecuted group, the prejudice our culture perpetuates against them is insidious. Signaling the near-complete shift from the old-fashioned “men want virgins” mentality, the 1970s bestseller The Sensuous Man, written by “M” during the heyday of the sexual revolution, includes a section titled “Hints on Sacrificing Virgins.” The author calls virginity “one of woman’s most hideous afflictions” and confesses a “general prejudice against women who have managed to keep their virtue intact.” He wishes that virgins were forced to wear badges to prevent men from accidentally seducing them, stating that “the term ‘virgin’ has almost become a gross insult to a woman’s sexual attractiveness.”
I WAS RECENTLY A BRIDESMAID IN A HIGH-SCHOOL FRIEND’S wedding. She’s twenty-three and Christian, and was a virgin on her wedding day—a dying breed—as was her fiancé. In fact, her first kiss was the night of their engagement, and they didn’t lock lips again until the altar. And it showed. Truly, it was the most atrocious “You may kiss the bride” moment I have ever witnessed: He went in for the smooch, she leaned in unexpectedly, they bumped mouths. He pulled back, startled; she swayed in for a little more, but it was over. I covered my mouth, horrified that these two thought they were going to do the nasty that very night.
Of the people onstage during the ceremony, I was one of three who knew carnal pleasure. My sexually active compatriots were the bride’s partnered lesbian Christian sister and the married pastor. Unmarried and not virginal, I was the only one living in sin (well, except for the sister’s minor gay issue).
The pastor’s talk that day centered on a line from my friend’s self-written vows that said, “I know you [my husband] will never fully satisfy me, that I must look to God alone to complete me.” Now, I had thought her comment was not really in the spirit of the day. But the pastor said that she was onto something—they both had to realize that God is the most important person in their marriage. To illuminate this nuanced point further, the pastor offered an image: “Marriage is like a God sandwich.” I blushed: This kinky talk from a pastor! But as I looked out into the audience, I saw all the Christian couples nodding. My friend one piece of bread, her husband the other, and God as the meat, always there in the middle. A veritable menage à God.
Suddenly everything the pastor said took on a sexual meaning to me, all the years of suppressed desire coming out in religious doublespeak. It was all merging, joining, intersecting, and satisfaction, and God was always there in the thick of it. The Holy Trinity had become the holy threesome. It was as if they didn’t really love each other, but they both loved God, and that was the ticket. And, in fact, it cast a weird light over the loss of virginity in general because they weren’t really making love to each other directly, but rather through God. Even within the union of marriage, when the whole abstinence bet was supposed to be called up at long last, sex was still dirty, base, or empty unless it was mediated by God.
When I tell people this story, it solicits unanimous outrage. Most recently, a woman responded, “What if the bride was allergic to her husband’s sperm and didn’t even know it?!” The sex-positive brigade thinks my friend is doomed to a lifetime of unsatisfying sex, she’ll never have an orgasm, she’s ashamed of her body, she’s repressed, she’s scarred, she’s guilt ridden, she’ll never masturbate, she needs to see a shrink, she wants attention, she’s a lesbian, her husband’s gay, it’s my responsibility to educate her, her father or priest molested her, she’s been brainwashed by evil forces. Hmm. Sounds to me like she’s pretty deviant—these are the sorts of comments usually reserved for queers, trannies, prostitutes, porn aficionados, S&M enthusiasts, and the rest of the freaks. Sounds like a Christian good girl just became “alternative.” And where does that leave all the formulas?
IF CAPITALISM AND ADVERTISING ARE TELLING PEOPLE THEY have to want sex, Christianity is telling them the opposite. For every woman trying to jettison her cumbersome chastity, there’s another who desperately wishes she hadn’t given it up. And for every Christian young person who walked the pure walk all the way to her or his wedding day, there are ten who gave in to temptation along the way. To serve them, the secondary-virginity movement was officially launched in 1993 by the Christian abstinence organization True Love Waits, which invites teens to pledge celibacy until their wedding nights, often announcing their new path at ceremonies where parents place pledge rings on their child. Parallel efforts sprang up, such as Sex Respect, which coined the snappy slogan “Control your urgin’—be a virgin.”
The secondary-virginity folk are going for a few good things here: first of all, the idea that people have the right to choose their own moment of defloration, that the label of “virgin” is actually arbitrary. If you did the deed but feel horrible about it, you should be able to call a do-over. Revirginizing allows you to define your own existence based on your current behaviors, saying, in effect, “I am who I conceive myself to be.” This is a very powerful and potentially very feminist—notion. Of course, unlike True Love Waits, I would also encourage the flip side: If you’ve been very physically intimate but haven’t technically had intercourse, you should be encouraged to define yourself as a nonvirgin if you want to.
Also, the secondary-virginity model is more gender fair than other sexual rule systems. Here, sex is a no-no for both sexes—zero room is allowed for statements like “boys will be boys.” And proponents don’t buy the whole “teenagers have such strong sex drives that they just can’t control themselves” thing. They respect young people enough to know that they have brains, they can be responsible for their actions, and they can stick to decisions they really want to make. They ride the fine line of accepting and repairing mistakes while setting high standards for behavior, which is, in theory, what Christianity in general does. But the problem with the secondary-virginity movement is that it still says, as loud and clear as any advertising campaign, that there are right and wrong ways and times to have sex, and asks people who do it wrong to deny that part of their lives.
Is sexual terrain really so treacherous that we need strict instructions from the church or the secular gods that are movie stars and models? If we must have a formula, why can’t it be that you “pass the test” by doing whatever it is that makes you ultimately happiest? Of course, it’s not easy to differentiate what makes me happy from the perks that society awards me for conforming. And it’s much simpler to rely on prepackaged identities—whether people are virgins or not, whether they are gay or straight, whether they’re loose or frigid by reputation—than to figure out if they’re satisfied with their lives. So how can we create a culture free of virginity obsession and outdated dichotomies? It may be time for a third term, a social creature even more unlikely and elusive than virgins: ourselves as individuals.
Envy, a Love Story
Queering Female Jealousy
Anna Mills / SUMMER 2001
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN ARE consistently drawn to images of other women? Mainstream female America can’t get enough of half-naked, conventionally gorgeous women sulking or smiling out from magazine covers, TV sets, and movie screens. Look at the magazine rack in your local drugstore or supermarket—without
the words, can you tell Maxim from Cosmopolitan? Can you tell if the “luscious” women on the covers are supposed to entice a man or a woman? I can’t. As feminists, we charge the media with using female bodies to sell everything from soap to beer to Palm Pilots. As often as not, though, these campaigns target women, not men. How do we explain straight women’s susceptibility to these images?
Here’s the traditional feminist explanation: In a patriarchal society, women’s worth is based on attractiveness to men. Women are drawn to images of women who fit the “beautiful and sexy” mold because we want to fantasize about the desire, love, attention, and respect we would get from men if we looked like them. “Land that man, ace your job, and look your sexiest ever!” screams a typical women’s-magazine cover line. Sexiness is all about status. Fascination with other women is all about admiration, competition, and envy. Right?
It follows that mainstream American culture expects women to be riveted by each other’s beauty. Straight women are often acutely aware of and affected by each other’s clothes, jewelry, makeup, and body size. Women are notoriously—stereotypically—competitive and jealous of each other’s looks. The cliché that women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women, passes without comment. But no one bothers to ask if sexual attraction has anything to do with it—not even feminists. We should. How can the sensual, the erotic, and the sexual not be woven into those complex and intense emotions that women feel when they compare themselves to each other? How can women’s intense interest in other women be totally divorced from sexuality?
It’s time to queer our views of women’s fascination with other women, to free them from assumptions of heterosexuality, and to look at the ways their meanings escape and wreak havoc with heterosexual, sexist norms—and the ways this fascination gets played out in envy, self-hate, female friendships, and women’s preoccupation with eating and body image.
An article in the sex section of Women.com—an umbrella site that hosts, among other things, Cosmo’s web presence—describes a woman’s relationship with her ex-husband’s new wife: “One afternoon, I breezed over early for the designated pick-up [of my children]. There, sitting in [my ex-husband’s] living room, was a young woman in shorts with the most beautiful legs I had ever seen. Legs are a big deal for me; I’m convinced mine look like storm-uprooted tree trunks. I was glad I was wearing a long skirt.”
Read the passage again, this time imagining that the narrator is bisexual. Might one wonder if she was attracted to her supposed rival? The encounter can be read as erotically charged until the narrator turns her reaction into an attack on her own body.
Women are expected to admire, comment on, and gush over each other’s appearances. Straight women regularly do so with warmth, enthusiasm, and sensual appreciation. Imagine two women, let’s call them Jane and Mary, greeting each other after a separation. “Oh, it’s good to see you!” says Jane, giving Mary a warm hug. “You look so beautiful!” Mary exclaims as she leans back to smile at Jane, hands still on her friend’s waist. She touches Jane’s blouse to feel the material and looks up and down her body. “That skirt makes your butt look so cute!” she adds. Are these women friends, lovers, or flirting? Imagine how shocked you might be if you saw two straight men behaving this way. Once the question of sexual orientation is raised, the scene becomes much more difficult—and interesting—to read.
For many of us, thinness is one of the major qualifications for sexiness. Feminists have documented many of the deeper meanings of women’s obsession with body size and eating, including messages about self, desire, entitlement, nurturing, and rage; one of the ways these obsessions function is as a point of intense connection, pain, and envy between women. Obsession with weight makes women hyperaware of each other’s bodies—always measuring and comparing, coveting and judging. Is your lunch partner eating a burger or a salad? Did your closest friend gain a few pounds? Many women are similarly obsessed with the various diets and exercise regimens employed by weight-conscious celebrities—thus we have Monica Lewinsky’s Jenny Craig diet and Sarah Ferguson’s tenure as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.
On Oprah Winfrey’s video about her own dieting process, Make the Connection, she rhapsodizes about Goldie Hawn’s butt and announces, “I’m now working out with Goldie’s behind in my mind.” Later, when Cindy Crawford appears in a skimpy leotard, there’s an awkward moment when Oprah openly looks Crawford up and down, taking in her figure with intense admiration. She leans back and announces, “There’s a body!”
How far am I going with this? Is all envy really attraction? Are all female friendships chock-full of repressed sexuality? Do women with body-image issues just need to come out? For sociopolitical shock value, it would be delicious to make these claims. For the sake of true and useful theory, though, I want to question just that type of absolutism. My point is not that we’re all big dykes, but that the distinctions among sensuality, sexual attraction, and platonic love are not always stable or easy to determine. The erotic is an integral part of the wide range of affection between women. Under a system where women are not encouraged to acknowledge attraction to women—even to themselves—that attraction has to hide somewhere. Where better than in the socially sanctioned obsession with other women’s appearance? Where better than in the supposedly “pure” model of platonic friendship?
I know from my own experience that it’s possible to completely confuse envy and attraction, and that this confusion can go totally unnoticed by both the woman in question and those around her. It was easy for me to use the concept of envy to spend twenty-two years as a straight girl, never realizing that I was attracted to women.
My mother explained to me when I was eight that gay people weren’t bad, just unfortunate. I understood that gay people were different, and that I would never be like them. It never occurred to me I might be one of them. When my friends and I entered puberty, I became acutely aware of other girls’ bodies. As I hit fourteen or fifteen, this awareness developed into intense envy and competition with other girls. I remember feeling a jolt when I saw a really attractive girl—a feeling that made my insides twist in despair, believing that I could never look like her. I fantasized about the attention, status, and love she got from men. I thought about how much they must want her. This misery led me to focus more and more on my weight as the source of all my problems. If only my body would change, I reasoned, I could be just like that other girl. And so began a cycle of compulsive eating, hating my body, and dieting that lasted for years.
In college, as I joined feminist groups and read analyses of overeating and dieting, heterosexual feminist interpretations seemed to fit my experience to a T. The books I read explained that I was jealous of other women because my attractiveness to men determined my self-worth. I was socialized to attend to men’s desires, not my own. I was focused on keeping my own body attractive and therefore out of touch with what I wanted for myself. Yes, yes, yes.
In my journal, though, I expressed confusion. “It’s not just a body, it’s a horror. My weight means something else about having a shameful body … It started when I started dating. It must have something to do with my sexuality. I always wanted to lose so he would be more attracted to me. I think there’s something going on here I don’t understand.”
No one—not my friends, not the women in my feminist groups, not the theorists writing about body image—mentioned that attraction to women, and ambivalence about my feelings, might be part of the picture. No one suggested that questioning my sexuality might be an option, much less a good idea.
By the end of my junior year of college, I was not eating compulsively, not restricting myself so much, and not beating myself up over what I ate. I was moving toward healthy relationships with men, as well as more body- and self-acceptance. I had read all about lesbian feminism, and I was primed to reinvent heterosexuality in empowering, feminist ways.
And then a strange and wondrous thing happened: A close friend told me she was a lesbian, and I realized I h
ad a crush on her. Over the next few weeks, I surprised myself again and again by noticing that I was, in fact, physically attracted to women. I felt it in the dining hall, walking down the street, sitting in class. Where I used to feel pangs of envy—followed by self-criticism and despair—I now felt attraction. Girls were pretty, cute, sexy. Looking at them made me hug myself, grin, gossip voraciously, blush, and feel goofy. I acted fourteen. I was incredulous at my good luck.
When I had begun to get my bearings as a queer woman, I rushed to the library to read about body image, envy, and sexual orientation. I found feminist-penned theories linking homophobia and male competition, which cited the homoerotic aspects of the military, athletics, the business world, and power relations among men in general. But I found no parallel analysis of women’s relationships.
