Like a Virgin by Emily Maguire
‘What is it about being the first man to vaginally penetrate a woman that is so appealing?’ Emily Maguire asks in her essay on virginity in The Monthly. She describes ‘virgin porn’ websites that feature videos of women being ‘deflowered’. She writes that ‘the porn sites tell us that virgins are precious, rare and worth 30 bucks a month.’ Thirty-bucks too much as a quick Google of ‘virgin porn’ can unveil free ‘defloration’ videos such as ‘The Defloration of Melinda Kiszner’.
Virgin porn rates quite well on the porn sites, with Melinda Kiszner’s defloration receiving 7750 votes of support, and only 623 against. Yet the authenticity of the video is quickly dismissed. One commenter says ‘fake cause’ when I fucked to my girl she scream so different, painful, almost cry, also, she move so natural, totally fake,’ and another writes ‘what a piece of crap.. showing hole with NO hymen and then the magic gushing blood fountain.. for retarded teens at best.’ I assume that by ‘retarded teens’ the commenter is referring to virginal teens who don’t have the experience nor knowledge to assess the authenticity of a true deflowering. But why do these ‘more experienced’ men (I assume men) fetishise the act of sex with a virgin so much? Maguire proposes that the ‘attraction has to do with pain and power.’
The erotic thrill, it seems, is in the fantasy of breaking a girl down (“It took us months to talk this virgin into showing us her cherry.”) and then making her bleed (“You have to be gentle with them, the first time hurts!”).
Pain and power. The two pillars of masculinity that continue to corrupt the burgeoning gender identities of many a young lad. From Rugby League stars pummelling into each other, to the conquering heros of Hollywood blockbusters, such as Sam Worthington in the upcoming ‘Clash of the Titans,’ power and pain go in hand in hand with the idealised narrative of masculinity. Yet this masculinity myth that pervades the media has moved from the more traditional idea that power comes from inflicting pain, to the more current concept that power comes from enduring pain. Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Extreme injuries in extreme sports. Fetishising the infliction of pain is almost taboo outside of Tarantino flicks. Yet the virginity porn demonstrates that fetishisation of the infliction of pain, especially on women, still holds currency, albeit not in the mainstream.
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I want to uncover where all this stems from. The masculine as “conquering man” because surely that is why fetishisation of virginity persists. It is the act of invasion of claiming new land, of puncturing the earth with a flag pole. To where no man has gone before. All that bullshit.
In Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, he talks about women becoming cocks. It is supposed to be his feminist novel, a story that recounts the sexual revolution, where ‘the girls become boys’. In the novel the girls want to become boys, and to become boys means to become sexual conquerers. The act of sex, it seems even after the sexual revolution, still has the narrative of violence, of war, of conquering. The sexual revolution just meant that women could be recruited into the conquering forces. He writes about adapting to the sexual revolution:
It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys – who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose. And ingenuousness was probably over. Maybe, in this new age, the girls needed designs.
The women needed designs. Designs to conquer. But conquering women are ridiculed, as is evident in the Cougar phenomenon. Phenomenon. Fad. The problem is that the whole act of love. Act of sex. Is that it is all framed culturally and historically as an act of power play. I am consumed by love. I am made loved to. I fucked you. Something submits. Maybe we need to lay off the verb for a while and just have sex or make love. Think of it as an abstract noun, as I have written earlier:
I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.
But why do men fetishise virginity? The main character in The Pregnant Widow keeps on referring to himself as ‘the incredible shrinking man’ during the sexual revolution. Virginity is something dim-witted men still consider as something that they alone can conquer. Women don’t conquer virginity. The whole myth that women don’t rape. The dumbfounded responses to female teachers raping school students. ‘Oooh he’s a lucky guy.’ Men fetishise virginity, because they believe it something that they can take from women, that women can’t take from them. As Maguire writes in The Monthly:
Boys are not taught to think of themselves or their virginity as something to be offered up, unwrapped and enjoyed… the virginity of men has never mattered very much outside specific religious contexts.
Even in religious contexts, the virginity of men doesn’t really matter. A man’s virginity isn’t taken, but he can take a woman’s. As evident in this extract from Maguire’s essay:
‘It’s hard because everybody at our church is waiting for marriage and we pretend that we are too. Every time I hear someone say ‘true love waits’, I cringe. They talk like it’s so degrading to have sex. We had this guest speaker and she told us to imagine if on our wedding night the handprints of every man who’d ever touched us appeared on our bodies – how ashamed we’d be for our husband to see these dirty handprints all over us. Anyway, Paul said that the boys’ talk was the same, except they were told to imagine the wife’s body, to imagine their handprints on someone else’s wife.’ A 16-year-old girl quoted in ‘Like a Virgin’ by Emily Maguire, The Monthly April 2010.
I can imagine that the religious man who lost his chastity with countless women would probably get off thinking about his hand prints all over someone else’s wife. Virginity shouldn’t matter, but it does, and because it does it continues to promote the idea of ‘power’ in sexual relationships. As Maguire writes:
It all adds up to a society in which teenage girls are treated as delicate halfwits, so vulnerable that sex with a man causes their hot, sexy bodies to bleed and break, and their soft, squishy hearts to be forever changed.
Sex should be about mutual pleasure. Not about conquering. Not about power. It reminds of me of a comment by Lauren Hendry-Parsons during an Insight program on the issue of consent.
I’m finding it interesting that the first thing we’re thinking about sounds like blame who should have done what and where. When I think about sex, I think about being with somebody and it being about mutual pleasure. So if you’re in a room with a pack of guys and they’re having sex with you, at what point are they thinking this person’s having a good time with me?
Sex is too often framed as a transaction, yet virginity is always framed as a transaction, as Tony Abbot put it, virginity is about giving. So do we need to stop talking about virginity, or stop talking about sex as transaction. Let’s lose the verb for a while. Let’s make sex an abstract noun, like love, let’s mutually participate in sex, in love, let’s stop being fucked.
Elsewhere: Read Rachel Hills response to the Monthly essay at her blog Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
