The Virginity Project

Oranges are not the only fruit...

It’s Thursday and I am back from a place where real oranges grow on real trees. Yes, it’s true. I am such a townie that the sight, no, the apparition, of edible fruit growing on actual trees was an almost continual source of fascination during my trip overseas. Needless to say - and taking the credit crunch into account - I was apprehended at Palma Airport attempting to smuggle six tons of Mallorca’s finest through customs. Enough oranges and lemons to prevent an entire ship’s worth of sailors suffering from scurvy. Not really.

I was a little nervous though and I’ll tell you why. Just before I left for the airport I got an email from the BBC’s World Service asking if I could take part in a global debate about virginity that very night. Now I love doing radio, but not so much in a busy international airport with Spain’s scariest flight attendant telling me that if I don’t get on the bus NOW and board the plane that is just about to leave then it will go without me and I will be forced to purchase another plane ticket. Sadly it seemed, my window of opportunity was too short and I couldn’t make the debate. It’s a shame because it was an interesting subject.

The topic on everyone’s lips was this: ‘Should a woman be a virgin when she gets married?’

Now, just before you check to see you haven’t crash-landed in another century by accident, consider the following figures:

33% (or 2.1 billion people) of the planets population are Christians (I include Catholics, Protestants, Anglican’s, Evangelicals etc in this figure)

21% (or 1.5 billion people) are followers of Islam

16% or 1.1 billion people are Atheist, non-religious or Agnostic

The remaining 30% are a melting pot of Hindu’s, Buddhists, Sikhs, Rastafarians and other assorted religions.

The point I am attempting to make without involving too much maths is that this stuff matters to people. A high proportion of the world’s population do believe that a woman should be a virgin when she gets married. Shocking but true.

Of course, if you asked me the question I would say ‘not in a month of Sundays’. I might consider it if my male partner was prepared to follow suit but that’s not going to happen. Plus, the words ‘shutting' and 'stable door’ and ‘horse has already bolted’ spring to mind. That ship, my dears, and hopefully the one with all the oranges on it, has already sailed. It’s too late and it doesn’t really matter, at least not to me. But to some people it does, and so once again I find myself asking the question ‘why?’

I respect the individual’s choice to do as they please with their bodies. If someone makes a conscious decision to hold onto their virginity until such point they deem appropriate, I am down with that. Sadly ‘doing’ and ‘pleasing’ are not part of the modern vernacular of many religions. Critical choices are being made for people – mainly women it has to be said - on their behalves. How does this work? What is the reason for this? Are we not able to make these decisions for ourselves? In this day and age, I genuinely do not understand why this is happening. Viola Anderson sums up my confusion thus:

 ‘viola anderson June 12, 2008 at 5:14 am

Try to remember a time when the only reliable birth control was total abstinence from sex. It follows then that men would insist that their wives be virgin before the marriage in order to be certain that any child born would be his own. The virginity was not the object – assurance of paternity was.

Nowadays, at least where reliable birth control is available, insisting on virginity (for that reason) is an outdated practice.

However, if the object of requiring the virginity of the bride is to prevent the woman’s comparing her husband’s sexual practices to any other man’s, then it is a whole different matter and is surely an unreasonable requirement.

It is another example of how a man’s fear (in this case, of not being as good as some other man) has been foisted onto the woman who is required to save the man from his fears of inadequacy.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself. This is one of over 400 comments that were posted on the worldhaveyoursay site where the topic was first raised. It is an emotive issue and the comments on the site reflect that.

 I cannot help but come back to the same blindingly simple thought again. In the modern age, women, as well as men must be able to make these choices for themselves. It really is that simple.

Now for the facetious bit. I can’t help it but honestly, this story is worth telling twice. I posted it on my blog last year but if you didn’t see it then, try it now. This story tells you everything you want to know about the word ‘unbelieeeeeevable’.

 

 

‘Woman describes losing virginity to her dog!!’

When I read the line above, I actually expected to see a film about someone sitting and telling their pet about their long lost virginity. Nothing wrong with that I thought. I tell my cat all sorts of things. Turns out, that wasn’t what they meant.

If you can get past the extreme ick factor this film engenders then I have to admit, it makes compelling listening. Don’t worry, there are no scary visuals.

But it still left scary thoughts somewhere more pertinent - my head. I needed something nice to think about. This helped. Laughing – tick, teddies – tick, innocence - most definitely. Bring it on.

(Apologies for not posting the YouTube link directly. If there are any Typepad brain-aches who know how to do it since the new 'Compose page' was introduced, please tell me!)

To have and to have not....

Sometimes a story’s interest lays not so much in what it does say as what it doesn’t. This is a curious little tale with some large holes. I was going to wait and post it once its author filled the gaps but I can’t hold back.

He raises a subject not often mentioned: the male urge to have sex with virgins. I was going to try and dress that up a bit but what’s the point? This is what I mean to say. Since the dawn of time, the virgin woman has held a certain allure. This is beyond the need for verifiable paternity so that the correct children inherit the correct wealth and it’s also beyond the concept of virginity as commodity, something to be traded via marriage for upward social mobility.

This is virginity as fetish. The idea that the virgin woman imbues us with something magical that cannot be gained elsewhere. Youth perhaps? Or even a cure for Aids? This may seem a preposterous idea, but in this day and age, children in some parts of the world are suffering under the tragic and misguided belief that sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS.

Virginity is a powerful and potent symbol. As ever, I turn to Hanne Blank and her book ‘Virgin: The Untouched History’, for some clarity. She says this:

‘In eroticizing virginity, youth, physical nobility, ignorance, inexperience, fragility, and vulnerability are objectified from the perspective of someone who, by definition, is none of these things. The erotic charge of sex with a virgin rests on the interplay of the sexual aggression of an experienced partner and the sexual submission of a virginal one. It champions sex as a vehicle for completion and transformation, and it insists that a person who has sexual access to a woman automatically claims or colonizes her, body and soul.

Virgin territory. Perhaps that’s what its all about. Is it that deep down, man needs to plant his stake, so to speak, upon virgin soil, previously unsullied by anyone else? Who knows? The owner of our story certainly isn’t sure. ‘I am not a religious person’, he tells us, ‘but I may have been influenced by religious thinking’. He then finishes by telling us ‘my obsession with having ‘pure love’ is a detriment to my happiness and life in general’. This is a large statement with no conclusion – yet. Watch this space and let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of one of The Virginity Project’s most perplexing challenges yet.

*‘Brady’. Age unknown.

'Hi Kate,

Wow, have you ever set up a good website. The topic of virginity has consumed my life. First of all, I am male. I abstained throughout high school, figuring that there was ‘one for everyone’. I soon changed my mind and thought that I would have to have sex because nobody seemed to have any morals whatsoever and that if I were to be seen as ‘cool’ by the ladies then I would have to lose my virginity. This logic does not make much sense as I write it. I didn't have it, but to have it, I had to have had it previously: the paradox of virginal thinking!

Anyways, my friend hooked me up with a ready and willing (drunk) girl at the bar one night, and we did it. Unfortunately, she was not expecting a one-night stand and ran off upset. I also did not feel that much better about myself for having done it. It really seemed like nothing had changed, besides perhaps feeling a bit more superior to another girl, my first serious girlfriend, who had just broken up with me.

Still, there was a yearning to have meaningful sex. The one-night stand didn't do much to make me feel like I'd accomplished anything besides thinking ‘Yes, I'm cool, girls. I've done it’. Then there was another paradox: I was desiring a virgin so much, but then thinking why had I decided to go ahead and lose my own virginity?

Since then, I've had a series of girlfriends, both serious and not, from near-engagements to one-night stands. Yet still, I long for a virgin. I believe it is the only way I can find pure, everlasting love, and form a pure, unbreakable bond with a girl. I am not even a religious person, although I may have been influenced by religious thinking. Where I got my beliefs from is a whole other question; some guys don't seem to think virginity is an issue at all.

My obsession, (as I will call it) with having ‘pure love’ is a detriment to my happiness and life in general. It's a depressing cloud that covers me. I try to find happiness in the girls that I'm with, yet I confront them, I challenge them, and make them feel guilty for what they have ‘done’. It makes me wonder if I can ever be happily married or love my wife the way I know I could. So, I'm waiting, sometimes to the point of hopelessness and despair, for the girl who will pledge herself and her love to me and make me feel like a whole, complete human being.'

*All names changed to protect identity.

The times they are a-changin’?

Perhaps it is the practice I have been getting with the interviewing of people, or maybe it is a lifelong skill that I simply never noticed, whatever it is, I appear to have an innate ability to get people to talk about stuff - without really trying. Take last week as an example. It was Saturday and it was national expose your flesh day. You know the one I mean. The one day in the year that the sun comes out and people everywhere, much like the ecstatic scrabbling of dogs looking for leads, tear open the doors of their closets and don the most optimistic item of clothing they own in order to celebrate April’s first five minutes of sunshine.

And so it was that I found myself in a strapless sun dress standing outside Somerfields in Brentford, yes, Brentford, at 7pm on a Saturday night. It was my old buddy Mark’s birthday and I had the dress to prove it. We met at The Brewery Tap. On arrival I was reminded of a previous visit, many moons ago. It was vaguely comparable to the scene in American Werewolf where our hero arrives at the back of beyond, pushes open the door to the local pub only to be met by rotating heads and the stony silence of a series of League of Gentlemen look-a-likes.

Except this time they were smiling. Kind of. ‘We don’t get your type around here much’. This was clearly what they were thinking as I perused the facilities. To the right, a pool table – still nobody on it! So far, so good. To the left, the judge and jury, a motley bunch consisting mainly of Brentford’s most ‘senior’ members, and, starboard, our host, stationed behind his taps, much like the captain behind the controls of a large sailing ship.

The pub might not have changed much but I have. I’m more of a driver than a drinker these days and I couldn’t resist half a lager in one of those glasses that looks like the thick glass windows of an old fashioned pub. You don’t get many of those to the pound in your average Gastro pub. Nope, there’s wasn’t a herb-crusted cod nor pan-fried frittata in sight at The Brewery Tap. This is what we would term ‘a proper boozer’. You’ll have a packet of pork scratchings and a pint of Young’s and be glad of it here at the Brewery Tap.

Now, I know I said I had an innate ability to get people to tell me stuff but I’m only half telling the truth. Mark began celebrating his birthday at around midday so I can’t take all the credit. Mr Lager played his part too. It was quite a scene as I stepped out into the self-designated young(er) persons area i.e. the garden. A lot of celebrating had clearly been done and one person was asleep on the table.

The birthday boy was having a fine old time, if you could only get a look behind his sunglasses – so the thing on a Saturday night out in Brentford. My good friend Tania had also been let out of the house for the night, a party girl if ever there was one and it wasn’t long before they were contemplating the piano action in the front bar. Yes ladies and gentleman, this wasn’t just any old real boozer. This was a real boozer where real old people sit around and listen, sometimes even joining in, to another real old person who plays the piano and sings. Tania looked like she had died and gone to heaven. I, meanwhile, spent some time getting to know the birthday guests. The first conversation went something like this:

Him: what do you do with your time then?

Me: I interview people about virginity loss.

Him: (raising eyebrows), I don’t actually remember losing my virginity but I am about to become a grandfather.

My turn to raise my eyebrows now and you would too if you were looking at what I was looking at.

Me: If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?

Him: I’m 39

Me: and how old is your expectant son or daughter?

Him: It’s my son, and he is 13

Here I will leave a long silence in which to contemplate this astonishing piece of news, although in real time I think I did continue to gabble about something whilst lifting up my jaw from its resting place on the pavement. Here was a normal enough looking man, of sane mind, no outward signs of poverty/ill-education or any other cliché ridden stereotype that you might care to reach for in order to explain such a calamity, telling me that his thirteen year old son is about to become a father. Tania has a son who is 13. He is a lovely boy but he still laughs if you tickle him. He is a child.

For the record, the man looked like he had been slapped about the face with a fish. And in amongst the lager, cigarettes and the warmth of a first Saturday evening spent outdoors, I felt sad for this man, and his son, and most of all, for a girl who had managed to conceal a tiny human being inside her body for almost seven months until the bump got too big and the game was up. We want to believe that this doesn’t happen in this day and age, but it does. Virginity loss can be every bit as dramatic now as it was for our parents.

Revelation number two pales a little in comparison but it is no less poignant. The owner of the tale was Dave, a forty two year old man, whom, as it turns out, was a frequent visitor to many of the same watering holes I frequented in my teens. The Cobwebs, The Bull and Bush and The Old Ship. We revisited them in our memories and then got onto first gigs.

Me: ‘My first gig on my own’, (up until13 years old, my brothers took me to gigs. Genesis, Echo and the Bunnymen, Blancmange, I was a pretty eclectic kid), ‘was the Hammersmith Palais to see Africa Bambaataa and The Soul Sonic Force’.

Him: ‘I was conceived outside the Hammersmith Palais’.

There’s not much to say to that except how the monkey nuts did that happen?

As it turned out, he was adopted and he didn’t find out this truly unique piece of information until years later when he questioned his birth mother and she told him the truth about her ‘situation’. Without going into too much detail, a night out at the Hammersmith Palais can be memorable for many a reason, not least for the fumble outside in the car that led to the birth, and the adoption of a son in 1966.

Perhaps I do have one of those faces. Or maybe we are just a generation who are happier with the truth. We no longer live in an era where pregnancy has to be concealed – unless you are thirteen years old. In a week when I was also told a story about a woman who gave birth to her second child and lost her husband to a heart attack on the same day, I realise that truth really is stranger than fiction. You don’t have to scratch the surface of most human beings too hard in order for them to tell you stories that you will never forget. We all have them. Perhaps I might write down a few of my own sometime.

Meanwhile, the party in the pub continued. Not only that, but the ice had begun to melt as Tania and Co talked the pub pianist into playing a selection of Elvis classics and the evening’s entertainment really got underway. Later, as Mark, with two fingers bandaged from an accident earlier in the week, attempted as good a rendition as you could ever expect to hear from a man with only eight digits of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, I fancied our geriatric audience were enjoying themselves more than they let on. But it still wasn’t quite like this in our day, they seemed to say. Actually it was. You just didn’t talk about it is all.

*All names have been changed to protect identity.

Hot monkey love....

It is hard to summarise love in 200 words but that is just what I did last week when a nice lady from Harper Collins emailed and asked if I could contribute to a Valentines Day blog to celebrate the launch of a new book. Said book is a fabulous collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Having written a lot about love lately, I was only too happy to continue the theme. You can read it here.

But today’s themed vote for romance goes to Leah and George. Leah and George are two Gorillas’ from the Congo. Leah, the female, has already made history by becoming the first gorilla ever to be photographed using a tool. That’s not an innuendo. In 2005 she was photographed testing the depth of a lake with a stick before wading in. Humans would do well to take heed. This month, the pair made Simian history by becoming the first animals ever to be photographed mating in a face to face position.

Writing in the Gorilla Gazette, a team from the Wildlife Conservation society said:

‘Leah was lying on the ground and George was looking into Leah's eyes.’

Diane Doran-Sheehy, anthropology chair at Stony Brook University has observed more than 500 gorilla matings in the wild—and none were face-to-face.

‘It is an interesting observation and raises questions about why they sometimes engage in it,’ she said.

There may be practical considerations given the apes’ marshy habitat, for example.

‘Perhaps a female doesn’t want to be face down in the swamp,’ Doran-Sheehy said.

Or maybe they just looooooooooooove each other?

Dr Strange love...

Becoming privy to the intimate details of the lives of complete strangers does alter your outlook on life somewhat. I cannot tell you the amount of times someone has revealed a tender insecurity about themselves and looked to me with those eyes that talk before their mouths do. Eyes that say, ‘please tell me someone else has told you this crazy thought and that I’m not the only one’?’

‘Thank Christ for that’, I’m thinking, as they await my response. ‘I’m not the only person that has thought that crazy thought’.

Interviewing older people, people that had sex back in the dark ages, when sex didn’t really exist, is also an eye opener. This was bought home to me recently when I interviewed a seventy two year old actress with an extraordinary tale to tell. The extraordinary part had less to do with the manner in which she lost her virginity and more to do with the way in which she answered the question, ‘And how did you find out about sex in the first place’?

‘Oh’, she said, ‘you would never guess in a million years. It was extraordinary’.

It was.

She proceeded to tell me a gob-smacking story about a trip to the doctors that had entailed the removal of her clothes so the doctor could take a look at ‘a terrible rash’. As he did so, he asked her what she was planning to do with her life.

‘I’m going to be an actress’, she answered.

‘You’ll meet lots of exciting people’, he said. ‘There will probably be alcohol and parties. I’m going to show you what to do’, he said, ‘in case you feel tempted to have sex’.

In my interviewee’s words, ‘he then proceeded to stimulate my clitoris and brought me to orgasm. And I really didn’t know what was happening, because strangely enough I had never done this to myself, which I think was quite odd really’.

Not odd at all. This would have been the fifties. This was a world that looked nothing like the world we live in today. Sex was not spoken about, masturbation, for women at least, barely thought about.

Once I had picked myself up off the floor - metaphorically speaking of course, in real time I never so much as batted an eyelash in surprise - what interested me the most was the attitude that she had chosen to adopt. She was grateful to him, because, ‘I don’t know if I would have ever worked that out for myself, but I did it very happily and very successfully for many years.’

My eagle-eyed transcriber, a woman with many interests besides typing, was soon on the trail and the next time I saw her she slung a couple of printed A4 sheets of type at me. On them was a short extract from Joan Wyndham’s ‘Love is Blue: A wartime journal’.

In them, Joan tells the story of a certain Dr Schliemann.

‘I know a doctor’, Joan’s friend Ossie had told her. ‘A friend of mine went to him who had the same problem as us and it seems we’ve got a thing called a clitoris, which makes us have an orgasm’.

For the sum of thirty bob, one could get an appointment with Dr Schliemann, a small balding man with glasses, who examined his patients in ‘a most embarrassing way. ‘Aha’, said Dr Schliemann, peering through his bi-focals, ‘I see you haven’t got a man in your boat!’ He sounded pleased at this discovery. He then went on to explain about the clitoris being a kind of magic trigger, but not to worry if I hadn’t got one because he would give me a special cream to rub on every night’.

Joan and her friend finished up by saying that ‘neither of us has noticed any appreciable difference in the length of our clitorises but we’re certainly having plenty of orgasms!’

Charlatan? Creep? Or giver of life enhancing ‘creams’?

Either way, despite the iffy implications of these stories, you cannot deny that both of these women, and their friends, were liberated by the information that these men shared with them. The difference between the scanty knowledge that people had about themselves, and the working of their bodies, as compared to today, is astonishing. We have books, magazines and the Internet. They had very little to speak of at all.

My problem is that I have no idea how much thirty bob is in today’s terms, so in the case of Dr Schliemann, I can’t work out exactly how benevolent his intentions were.

Anyone got any idea?

N.B. As a footnote to the above link to Joan Wyndham’s profile, the great lady sadly passed away on 8 April, 2007.