Virgin: the Untouched History - book review

Virgin: the Untouched History by Hanne Blank is an intriguing book. The author jokes in the Introduction that she was tempted to subtitle the book Everything You Think You Know About Virginity is Wrong. It's not much of a joke as she then proceeds to discuss fact after fact and situation after situation that, for me at least, proved the point.

For example, I had understood that human females were the only animals which, prior to first intercourse, had an intact hymen which usually was a reliable indicator of virginity. Within the first few pages of the book Ms. Blank points out that the female of several species including llamas, guinea pigs, bush babies, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rants, ruffed lemurs, and seals, all have a hymen. None of the above mentioned species cares a fig about the intact hymen except the guinea pig and bush baby where the hymen actually seals the vaginal opening when the female is not fertile. For some of the marine species, the hymen does keep water and waterborne substances out of the vagina. Apparently, the human sexual apparatus wasn't that intelligently designed.

Ms. Blank also points out that an intact hymen is a poor indicator of virginity. Studies indicate that as many as 63% of virgins do not bleed during their first sexual intercourse. Of course, Blank also points out that virginity itself has become a much hazier concept as when presidential oral sex doesn't even qualify for the label of "having sex". In fact where oral sex used to be mostly on the "forbidden" side of the sex scale, according to a 2003 Kaiser study, 50% of the respondents would not describe oral sex as "having sex".

The book goes on describing the value that sexual "purity" has had when marriages were often more economic than romantic and the double or triple standard of justice that was used when virginity somehow got lost or at least couldn't be proven with bloody sheets. The sexual revolution of the 60's seemed suddenly to make virginity an embarrassment to many people and we find that today the phrase "Just say no!" is applied equally to drugs and sexual advances.

I think the author summed up the situation well in the last paragraph of the book:

Virginity is an abstract, but an abstract so meaningful to the way we have organized our Western cultures that we have arranged lives around it, built it into our religions, our laws, our definitions of marriage, and our ways of organizing families, and woven it into our very concepts of identity and self.

I found the book very interesting, entertaining, and enlightening.