Virgin Hyperlink to the Third Millennium

Innocence Demanded: The Global Production and Consumption of Female Virginity

Lucy Tatman, October 2004 (Originally given as a paper at the Gender & Popular Culture conference organised by the Center for Equality Advancement in Vilnius, Lithuania, November 4, 2004)

Why is virginity so popular at this historical moment? Or, more specifically, why is it that worldwide female virgins are increasingly desired by men now, at the threshold of the third millennium (as Christians have colonised time)?[1] This vexing, perplexing question is the central, albeit often obscured, focus of this essay. Although it is an essay, that is, a unitary text, I think of this piece as a hypertext – perhaps because as I was thinking it through my thoughts kept flitting and jumping around, connected by only the most intangible of threads and links. How, after all, do multimillion dollar teenage abstinence programs as they are being promoted by fundamentalist Protestant Christian groups (and funded by the US Government) relate to or connect with honour killings as they are occurring in putatively ‘traditional’ Muslim families, and how do they relate to middle-aged Japanese businessmen who are willing to spend enormous sums of money to have sex with putatively virginal school-girls, and what is their connection with HIV positive males in South Africa who want desperately to believe the myth that sex with a virgin will cure them of AIDS? All of these demands for innocence, all of these different demands for ‘virgins’ would seem to be so culturally specific that to think them together would be to commit an inexcusable theoretical faux pas. Both feminist and cultural studies have taught us all to be acutely aware of spatiality, or of the importance of different locations, situations, and contexts, haven’t they? To imagine virginity as a single ‘black hole’ the gravity of which is irresistibly attracting the global masculine imaginary is simply monstrous. And yet. Hyperlink.

Think with me for a moment about geography, about spatiality, and about an enduring metaphorical expression for certain places. The ‘spaces’ I have in mind have for centuries been described as ‘virgin territory’. Pure wilderness. Untouched, as yet unpenetrated by man. Unknown. Unconquered. Abundantly mysterious, fresh, new, and always potentially dangerous. There might be animals with long sharp teeth. Very dangerous. Rife with uncertainties, overflowing with the unpredictable. In need of being tamed, controlled. Alas, the last time I checked there was a decided lack of virgin territory passively awaiting man’s courageous arrival. The highest mountain, the deepest sea, they’ve been explored. Even the cosmos has been irrevocably entered (and littered with broken satellite bits, which may or may not be a different matter entirely); Sir Richard Branson, coincidentally of Virgin™® fame, is planning on offering tourist flights into space within the next few years. At £100,000.00 a pop you too will be able to boldly go where more than a few men and chimpanzees and dogs, oh, and women, have gone before.[2] Collectively, we’ve been there, done that. Thought symbolically, there is no more virgin territory: humanity has, with regard to place and space, penetrated it already. But time…that’s another matter. Hyperlink.

The issue of western calendar time, of a new millennium and its possible (imagined, fantasized) relation to virginity, this is perhaps an issue worth considering. Let’s begin by re-visiting the notion of “the masculine birth of time.” What on earth did Francis Bacon mean by ‘masculine time’? Honestly, I don’t know for sure. But he seemed intent on telling a kind of time that strode purposefully forward: a time that would not be deterred from its linear path into a future which would unfold in accordance with Certain Laws. A progressive time of the sort that Hegel assigned to History is how I imagine it…a time of ever-decreasing uncertainty and ever-increasing predictability, control. The time in which the Rational Truth shall be revealed (by brave and daring men) once and for all, and no one will ever argue or giggle about it again. Hyperlink to Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘Women’s Time’.

Once again, I am not certain of what exactly the author has in mind. But Kristeva writes about three times at least – time linear, cyclical and monumental. [3] She assigns the fantasy of linear, progressive time to the masculine – this much is clear. Cyclical time she seems to characterise in terms of birth and death, the lifecycle of newborn through old age; she also alludes to cyclical time in terms of menstrual cycles and the repetitive passage of the seasons. The barrenness of winter is followed by the fecundity of spring, again and again and again. Cyclical time seems to me to reverberate with the maternal-feminine of Luce Irigaray, and I quite like it. I am also astounded by its utter absence. It is a time, a way of keeping time if not exactly telling it, that seems to me to be most unkept at this particular time.

At the moment western culture seems to be shrouded in monumental time. Masculine time has aged (most ungracefully) into an atomic clock currently set at seven minutes to midnight.[4] Masculine time has birthed itself into its deathbed. Into the real possibility that all human time(s) might be destroyed by a stupidly programmed chain reaction of nuclear explosions. Masculine, linear time, is having to confront the possibility of its end, an end potentially brought about by the penetration of matter which ought not be penetrated, and it’s not a pretty thought. But it’s also not the only time in which we are dwelling.

We of the west, those of us alive at this moment, are in the midst of time monumental, I suspect. Time monumental, about which Kristeva did not write much, but which I imagine as a time heavily obscured, yet nonetheless mightily present, unmoving, a ‘now’ reaching into both recent past and unforeseeable future. A time that does not pass, but through which he feels he must somehow press. A time in which he finds himself lost. Engulfing him as a massive threshold: the third millennium both confronts him and surrounds him, a vast and virginal expanse of time, replete with uncertainties, overflowing with the unpredictable and dangerous, with terrors real and imagined. He simply does not know what he might encounter on this time’s ‘other side’; he knows only, dimly, that he stands within this time’s threshold – within a new time, a time not pregnant with any time other than itself.

The threshold of the third millennium as monumental, virginal time. Stay with the metaphor, and just imagine with me…the wedding night is not yet over, but already the sheets are drenched in blood. It’s a frightening image. Hyperlink.

“At the end of the second millennium, we need, perhaps now more than ever, the words of the Risen Christ: ‘Be not afraid!’”[5] (Italics in original) So wrote His Holiness John Paul II, in his runaway bestseller Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published in 1994. It would seem, if in fact the Pope has his finger on the pulse of the people, that at the end of the second millennium, at this particular temporal threshold, certain people are afraid. Because you do not say ‘be not afraid’ to those who are not, in truth, filled with fear. Hyperlink.

What might perhaps have prompted the western (masculine) cultural shift from its modern ‘age of anxiety’ to outright third millennial fear – a shift from existential angst to terror-as-such? My thoughts on this matter are not now and will never be empirically verifiable, but I wonder…. I wonder if the collapse of the former Soviet Union might not be very much involved – at the level of the masculine cultural imaginary – with the current upsurge in fear. What if Ronald Reagan unwittingly spoke an imaginary truth when he characterised the USSR as “the evil empire”? What if all the territory, all the space behind the Iron Curtain (which I remember as being depicted in dull grey on school maps) – what if all the territory on the other side of that massive border was imagined to be the geographical site, the specific location of all bad scariness? The presence, existence of which required continual diligence, the keeping up of the west’s collective, manly strength. That murky area safely behind a solid barrier – was it perhaps the ‘placial’ repository for the vast preponderance of terrifying godless evil in the world? Was it the place into which was poured almost all of the irrational fears of western masculine culture?

When the Iron Curtain disappeared, coincidentally at the very end of the second millennium, what was revealed? The existence of a whole lot of people with relatively few consumer goods but an abundance of health care. Just imagine. Suddenly his demons could no longer be located (safely) over t/here. Terror was set loose; uncontained, unbound, it freely returned home – where it was not welcomed. George W. has tried, God knows, to locate all bad scariness elsewhere once again, but really. North Korea, Iran and Iraq? With no Iron Curtain it just doesn’t work. Those poor countries are far too small to hold all the terror of the west. Their boundaries are too porous; their thresholds have been pierced too often. They leak too much. And anyway there is nothing very mysterious, unknown, uncertain about them. They are countries with troublesome leaders, or with troublesome factions within their populations. Ho hum. They serve, at best, as a temporary distraction from that much more monumental issue: western Christian man’s passage into the third millennium.

The apocalypse did not happen on schedule; he (white Christian man) must find his own way, his own means of crossing this epic threshold. A means of proving to himself that he is still man-enough to press ahead, to assert himself into the unknown, uncertain, frightening, potentially dangerous new time. If only he could find a way of making such a huge intangible temporal entity…tangible. And small enough to not be too threatening. Easily, readily graspable, penetrate-able. But it must be a place no man has gone before. A very compact version of a ‘dark continent’ would do nicely…a tad mysterious, vaguely frightening, but conquerable. To enter such a virgin fleshold to the third millennium and come…out alive. [6] Could this be how he hopes to control, to manage his terror? Is this how he is trying to be certain of his own significance in this new age? Hyperlink.

To control his terror. To assert his own significance. To be certain of his own significance. To have his significance affirmed, confirmed by another. To ensure his continued significance. His significance, and that of his kind… Hyperlink.

“Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise.”[7] (Mary Douglas) “As long as purity and impurity remain distinct, even the worst pollution can be washed away; but once they are allowed to mingle, purification is no longer possible.”[8] (René Girard) “The first [kind of ‘social pollution’] is danger pressing on external boundaries….”[9] (Douglas)

What, or who, has been produced to serve as the corporeal boundary between reactionary Islam and the dangerous, godless west? Could it be that extremist Muslims are protecting themselves from all evil, corrupting influences by barricading themselves behind the covered bodies of female virgins? Would their own significance be destroyed if they felt that their communal Islamic purity had been compromised? Is this why a young woman’s family members will murder her on the suspicion that her boundary (their boundary) has been breached by an outsider? Again I have no empirical evidence to support these thoughts, but again I wonder. The fear, the visceral horror of defilement, pollution: so shameful, so dishonourable, so intolerable that the solution to the problem must be final.

Young Muslim women, allowed sometimes to venture into the outer margins of the public sphere of extremist Islam. Allowed no public voice at all, yet mightn’t their veiled presence in the marketplace serve as the visible curtain drawn shut against those imagined insatiable, prying western eyes? The problem, perhaps, is that curtains made of cloth, curtains made of flesh are so easily rent asunder. To maintain the untainted certainty of his own significance he must be ever watchful, ever vigilant, and ever willing to sacrifice her life at the first hint of any worn threads in the curtain. To keep the terror, the evil outside, has he placed all his significance, all the certainty of his world, the world of his kind, behind her fragile hymen? Hyperlink.

Once upon a time in Japan, an orderly Confucian-turned-capitalist worldview ensured the significance of every man.[10] Mothers could be counted on to submit to their sons’ authority. Wives were obedient to their husbands. Daughters were docile and dutiful; father ruled without question. His authority, His dignity, His significance was certain, fixed. He was sure of his standing both at home and at work. His place in the world was secure. And then…it began…not to be. Cracks in the structure began to appear. The 1980s. Economic prosperity with a vengeance, to the point that some employees, although obviously superfluous, were not fired. Madogiwa zoku. They were known, literally, as the ‘window edge tribe’. Poor men. They had nothing to do but sit and stare out the window, read magazines, stare out the window some more. Their salaries kept coming, but they were unnecessary, absolutely without significance, and they knew it. What’s worse, their wives and children knew it, too. How shameful it was, how unbearably shameful. Crack. Into the 1990s. And into a rash of curious divorces. She waited until his retirement. Until he had received his compensation package or his pension, and then, having put in her time, she left him. Crack. “Husbands! They are sticky wet leaves, hard to get rid of.”[11] Reduced, in so short a time, from men of authority and dignity and respect to sticky wet leaves, being swept out the door. Crack, splinter, shatter. How terrifying to be so easily dismissed from one’s own world. Rumour has it that middle-aged Japanese man consumes ‘Lolitas’ simply to assert His own significance. To be made certain of his own significance. To have his significance affirmed, confirmed by another. A young virgin other, one with (he imagines) no basis for any unfortunate comparisons. Hyperlink.

Not so many years ago the AIDS epidemic did not exist in South Africa. It does now. And he is desperate to ensure his continued significance, his continued existence – to delay his death, to put off the terrifying end of (his) time. I do not know when the rumour began, but the story has spread, and young virgins’ legs have been spread forcibly apart that he might gain access to her healing power. In the year 2000 there were approximately 21,000 reported instances of child rape in South Africa. Girl children as young as nine months old.[12] For he must be certain that she truly is a virgin. And what on earth is more uncertain than virginity? What else can one do but take it on faith? Split-hyperlink. First to taking, then to faith.

Taking her virginity. Needing for her to be a virgin not for herself, but for him. The fact that such a need, such a taking has become an increasingly ‘popular’, global cultural phenomenon is cause for feminist concern, I would suggest. I am eerily reminded of Heidegger’s concept of zuhanden as a mode of being. A mode of being characterised primarily by waiting patiently, passively, to be used by another for that other’s purpose. Female virgins functioning as a standing reserve, standing ready-to-hand to be used by men. Yes, I am mightily worried by the pattern I perceive.

But, but, but, I can hear you thinking, what about individual women’s agency? Don’t some women choose virginity because they feel empowered by it, and aren’t some of those Japanese school-girl entrepreneurs laughing all the way to the bank, and anyway there’s virginity in the masculine imaginary/s and then there’s virginity in the feminine imaginary/s, and surely they are different, and surely that difference matters, and just what has this to do with popular culture? Let me assure you, I agree. There’s virginity and then there’s virginity, and their difference makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference, I think, between Britney Spears and Madonna. The difference between being advertised and marketed, sold and consumed (for a short while) as a literal virgin, versus Demanding the Right to feel ‘like a virgin, touched for the very first time’, each time, every time, as many times as she freely chooses. Is it a coincidence that Britney’s time as a pop star is on a linear track already covered in dust, while Madonna, that monumental icon, births herself anew with miraculous regularity? Is it a coincidence that Britney puts her faith and her image in her male manager’s hands, while Madonna is notorious for keeping control of her career, for putting her faith in herself? Such a difference reminds me strangely of the difference between Emmanuel Levinas’ frankly quite disturbing characterisation of ‘the virgin’ and Luce Irigaray’s depiction of the continual becoming of virginity. Hear these words from Levinas:

The Beloved, at once graspable but intact in her nudity, beyond object and face and thus beyond the existent, abides in virginity. The feminine essentially violable and inviolable, the ‘Eternal Feminine’, is the virgin or an incessant recommencement of virginity, the untouchable in the very contact of voluptuosity, future in the present. […] The virgin remains ungraspable, dying without murder. […] The caress aims at neither a person nor a thing. It loses itself in a being that dissipates as though into an impersonal dream without will and even without resistance, a passivity, an already animal or infantile anonymity, already entirely at death.[13]

‘Neither a person nor a thing’, ‘an animal or infantile anonymity’: exactly what this means I leave for you to decide. But it is clear that Levinas’ virgin dies, and dies having been contacted, grasped, and violated. To theorise, to re-materialise the virgin as otherwise than dead, otherwise than his, otherwise than animal or infantile: this, I think, is what Luce Irigaray is attempting to do when she exhorts us all to remain “faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, and the world. Faithful to becoming, to its virginity….”[14] To keep faith in change, in process, in becoming, in its virginity. At this particular moment in time to keep such faith will not be easy. I fear that the global masculine demand(s) for readily available female virgins will only increase in the foreseeable future. But Irigaray reminds us that there is always also the unforeseeable, the unpredictable, ‘the perpetual newness of the self, the other, and the world.’

And so…in response to the global masculine cultural demand(s) for virgins, I think we ought to engage in some creative culture jamming. If virgins are what they want, then, women, let us give them virgins. At the dawn of every (to quote Sting) Brand New Day, let us produce and celebrate our miraculous re-virgination. Let us flood the market with virginity – with virgins according to Madonna and virginity according to Irigaray. I have no idea what might happen when we do, but I have faith that whatever happens will be better for ‘material girls’ than being used to shield men from their terror, used to assure them of their continued significance. And perhaps one day he might get the hint, and begin to produce his own virginity. Which we could then demand the right to enjoy.

[1] “The year 2000, for instance, is the year 2544 in the Buddhist, 1420 in the Muslim and 5760 in the Jewish calendar. It is not the year 2000. It is a year 2000.” Jay Griffiths, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Flamingo, London: 1999, p. 72.

[3] Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Barbara C. Gelpi, eds., Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1982, pp. 34-36.

[4] http://www.thebulletin.org/clock.html Accessed October 9, 2004. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ web page, the clock first appeared on its magazine cover in 1947. It was originally set at seven minutes to midnight, and has since been reset only seventeen times in 57 years. Most recently, on February 27, 2002, the hands were moved from nine minutes to seven minutes to midnight.

[5] http://www.catholic.net/RCC/POPE/HopeBook/chap34.html Accessed October 10, 2004.

[6] For the glorious neologism ‘fleshold’ all thanks to Polly McGee, personal conversation 9 October 2004.

[7] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley: 1966, 1979, p. 162.

[8] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London: 1977, 1979, p. 38.

[10] From the 1880s through the 1950s, Japan incorporated a patriarchal nuclear family structure as an accompaniment to its incorporation of capitalism as its economic system. The influence of Confucianism lessened greatly over this time, but a very similar gender hierarchy was developed which maintained man’s supremacy in the home. I am deeply, thankfully indebted to Kyoung-Hee Moon and Motoe Sasaki for explaining to me the gendered hierarchy of the Confucian worldview and for giving me a crash-course on the gendered aspects of the Japanese economic crisis of 1989, as well as the gendered ‘fallout’ from the crisis throughout the 1990s. Our conversations (September-October, 2004) were not only informative, but also great fun.

[11] Quote from Motoe Sasaki, in conversation.

[12] “S. Africans March to Protest Surge in Rapes of Baby Girls”, from Reuters, in The Los Angeles Times, Monday, November 26, 2001, p. A14.

[13] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, Boston, London: 1979, pp. 258-259.

[14] Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York: 1993, p. 82.