Let me tell you some stories.
Let me tell you some stories about virgins.
For the past few years of my life, I have been writing a book about virgins, about
virginity, about the history of these things in our culture and our world. You might think
that this means that I have been spending a lot of time writing about purity and about
innocence, about girls and women who are exalted for being "good girls" and doing all
the things they should. You might wonder why I would bring up the subject of virgins
and virginity at a Take Back The Night rally—what on earth could virginity have to do
with this?
Well. Let me tell you.
The book of Deuteronomy, one of the books of the Torah which is also known as the Old
Testament, was written somewhere near what we now call Israel, sometime around the
seventh century BCE. In the twenty-second chapter, it says that if a man takes a wife,
and goes in to her to consummate the marriage, "and hates her, and speaks libelous
words against her, and calls her by evil names, and says, 'I took this woman as a wife
and when I went to her as a husband I found her not to be a virgin,' then shall the girl's
father and mother bring forth the tokens of the girl's virginity unto the elders of the city, at
the city gate."
These "tokens" were spots of blood on a cloth, like a sheet or an undergarment. This
girl, this daughter, had to bleed for her husband. It did not matter why she might not
bleed. It did not matter if it might perhaps be normal for her, or for any woman, not to
bleed. A woman's blood, you see, was not optional. Because if these tokens "were not
found, then they will bring the girl to the gate of her father's household and the men of
her city will stone her to death." Crushing a woman's skull, her ribs, her womb, her heart
beneath a pile of rocks hurled by angry men, the Bible tells us, is how "you will cast evil
away from you." A woman's blood, you see, is not optional.
Move the view a few hundred miles west and north. Fast forward a little bit to the time of
the great archon Solon, the man renowned for justice and known as "the Law-Giver," in
the sixth century before the common era. In Athens, any citizen who was father to a
daughter and who believed that his unmarried daughter was no longer a virgin was
forced, by law, to sell his daughter into slavery. It was the single instance in Solon's
entire legal code in which a freeborn Athenian could be made a slave.
Pan just slightly south. A ferry ride away, in Crete, a man who raped a female
household serf would be fined two staters if the serf had been a virgin, but only one obol
if she had not been. At twelve obols to the stater, this meant that raping a woman who
had been a virgin was twenty-four times worse than raping a woman who had already
had sex. The fines were payable to the owner of the household. The women who had
been raped got nothing except raped.
Pause.
These are virgins we're talking about. The untouched, the innocent, the
pure. These are the "good girls."
Nothing bad can happen to a good girl. If you are a good girl, you will
be safe, and people will like you. If you are a good girl, the gods will
smile upon you.
If you are a good girl, you live happily ever after.
Pause.
Fast-forward. Shift westward again, then south. The scene is Egypt, around 200 years
into the common era. A man, a Christian and a scholar, is writing at his desk, describing
a quality he called mulieritas, literally translated as woman-ness. "A qua potuerunt filiae
hominum concupiscientiam sui adducere," he writes, "when daughters of men can
induce desire," they are no longer girls but women. In another text this man, Septimus
Tertullian, writes that "a virgin ceases to be a virgin from the time it is possible for her not
to be one," that even being looked at in a sexual way was sufficient to ruin a woman's
virtue and destroy her purity.
Go north, and north again, and west. Fast-forward. The year is 870, the place is
Scotland, and the Vikings are on their way. The only thing that traveled more swiftly
than the barbarian raiders was the news that they were on their way. Ebba the Younger,
the mother superior of Coldingham Abbey, gathered her sisters together to warn them
that the invaders were coming and that it was likely that the convent would be stormed
and the nuns raped. Taking a knife, Ebba cut off her nose and upper lip to make a
bloody spectacle, a fearsome and hellish vision with which to repel the rapists. One by
one, the other nuns followed suit, fearlessly carving into their own tender flesh in the
hope that their voluntary blood sacrifice would forestall one they felt was far, far worse.
The Vikings, or so the story goes, took one look at the horrific faces of Ebba and her
nuns and burned the convent to the ground. Ebba and her sisters died mutilated, but
they died virgins. The Church assures us that they found an instant place in Heaven for
their martyrdom.
Pause.
These are virgins. Good girls. Good girls go to Heaven.
If they never get looked at sexually. If they never, ever induce lust in other
people. For any reason.
If they cut off their noses to spite their faces.
If they are willing to accept that the price of not being sexually violated is to be burned
alive.
Good girls go to Heaven.
Pause.
Fast forward three hundred years or so, and go south to England. "Go ahead," say the
parents of a young noblewoman named Christina to the politically powerful and
notoriously lecherous Ranulf Flambard, "do whatever you please with her." Flambard
did not succeed in either seducing or raping Christina, who had taken a personal vow to
remain a virgin. Christina's parents tried getting her drunk. It didn't work either. Finally
they simply arranged a marriage and forced her into it. On her wedding night, Christina
convinced her new husband, Burthred, to accept a chaste marriage so that she would
not have to break her vow. Christina's parents told Burthred to rape her if he had to, and
if he wasn't man enough, they'd help. Christina escaped and went underground for
several years, hiding from her family and the law until she was finally released from her
marriage and allowed to become a nun.
Fast-forward again. Across the Channel, south to Italy, the 1400s. The virgins of the
convents, writes Dominican monk Bernardino of Siena, are "the scum and vomit of the
world."
In Pisa a hundred years later (1544), world-famous anatomist Andreas Vesalius
prepares to perform public dissections of the bodies of two nameless virgins for the
purpose of attempting to find the hymen. One corpse is that of a nun, stolen from the
hospital where she died by Vesalius' patron, Cosimo de Medici. The other is that of a
seventeen year old hunchbacked girl, stolen from the city's public cemetery by medical
students who, like Vesalius, assumed that she would be a virgin because, being a
hunchback, "no one had ever wanted her." Vesalius discovered the hymen. No one
knows the names of the women whose hymens he "discovered."
Pause.
Her parents would have preferred to see her raped than to allow her to choose for
herself that she would not have sex. To have an alternative she had to run away,
renounce her family, her possessions, and her home. She had to hide for years.
Being a good girl means praying hard and having high standards for yourself. Being a
good girl means being above suspicion. It means sticking to your guns and fighting hard
for what you believe in. It means having a good name.
You know. Like "scum" or "vomit."
They were discovered to still have hymens when their bodies were stolen and sliced up
with knives. This is how we know they were good girls. Their names weren't important.
What's in a name, anyway?
Pause.
Across the ocean. Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1642. A man of the colony, a Puritan in
good standing, sexually molests three little girls, all of them under the age of ten. In
response, the governors of the colony institute North America's first age of consent law.
The age of consent to sexual acts is, following the model of British common law of the
time, set at ten years for girls. The man is permitted to repent to his neighbors and their
God, and is reintegrated into the church and community. The extant records do not say
what happened to the three little girls.
Back to Europe, to Paris, 1724. A churchman, the Abbe Claudius Nicholas des Rues, is
convicted of having raped 133 virgins. Within two years the story of his crimes and his
trial is available in book form in Venice, Berlin, Brussels, and London, all those raped
virgins trapped in the pages and selling like hotcakes. No one knows what happened
to the 133 women the Abbe raped. No one seemed to care.
Once more across the Channel. 1885, London, journalist William T. Stead, the editor of
the newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette, blackmails a reformed procuress out of retirement
and has her assist him in arranging to purchase a thirteen-year-old virgin girl named
Eliza Armstrong for five pounds sterling. Armstrong is taken to a midwife and forced to
undergo a genital examination to make sure she is still a virgin, then taken to a brothel
and drugged to sleep. Afterwards, Stead takes her to a physician to have her examined
again, to prove that he took no liberties with the girl. Then the girl was shipped off to
France without the knowledge or consent of her parents and kept there with no contact
with her family or friends, no knowledge of whether she would ever see home again.
Meanwhile, Stead published an expose on the British sex trade in virginity in his
newspaper. He called it "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." In it, he gave Eliza
the pseudonym of "Lily" and described her purchase, her forced examination, her
drugging in the brothel as a primary illustration of the evil machine in which virgins were
sold to rich men to satisfy their perversions. But he never described his own part in
"Lily's" purchase or presumed "ruin."
Afterward, Stead was convicted of trafficking in underaged prostitutes under the terms of
the law he staged the whole thing to support, a law which raised the age of consent in
England from thirteen to sixteen, where it remains today. Disgruntled, Stead maintained
that Eliza Armstrong had, I quote, "experienced not the slightest inconvenience." W. T.
Stead became a hero of the anti-prostitution movement, wearing his prison stripes in a
grandstanding yearly reenactment of his unjust conviction, until he went down aboard
the Titanic in 1911. Eliza Armstrong vanished once she was returned to her family.
Nobody seems to know what became of her.
Pause.
Laws exist to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. This is what we are told.
Virtue is its own reward. They tell us that, too.
But who reaps the reward? Who disappears?
Pause.
A Glasgow courtroom, 1913. His Majesty's Prison Surgeon Dr. James Devon takes the
witness stand. "There is a curiously persistent and widespread belief," Dr. Devon
explains, "that a man who suffers from venereal disease can get rid of it by having
connection with a virgin. I have been surprised at discovering the existence of this belief
in people generally well informed as well as among the comparatively illiterate. I have
tried to find evidence for the theory that it is a belief traceable to certain districts but I
have discovered it among people of different places and of different occupations—so
different that now I should scarcely be surprised to come across it anywhere."
Gauteng Province, South Africa, 2005. University of South Africa surveys reveal that as
many as 32% of people surveyed in the country's capital believe that having sex with a
virgin will cure a man of AIDS. The BBC estimates that a South African girl has a better
chance of being raped than she does of learning how to read.
Heathrow Airport, London, the 1970s. Women of East Asian origin coming into England
and announcing that the purpose of their journey is to migrate to England to marry are
subjected to mandatory gynecological examination by British authorities. The purpose:
to establish whether the women are virgins, and thus telling the truth about their
marriage plans. Women whom the doctors decide do not appear to be virgins are
suspected of entering the country in order to commit immigration fraud.
January 21st, 2002 Stockholm, Sweden. Twenty-six-year-old Fahidme Sahindal is shot
to death by her father. Fahidme's crime: refusing an arranged marriage and choosing a
Swedish lover. Fahidme's boyfriend also died, a few months before she did, in a
suspicious car crash.
October 12, 2002. London, England. Sixteen-year-old Heshu Yones is stabbed to death
and her throat slit by her father. Heshu's crime: having a Christian boyfriend whom
Yones' father assumed had, or soon would, compromise her virginity.
November 26, 2004. Birmingham, Alabama, the United States of America. Twelve-year
old Jasmine Archie is murdered by her mother, forced to drink bleach and then
suffocated by having her mother sit on her chest until she died. Jasmine's crime: her
mother believed that she had lost her virginity.
Pause.
Men get sick. Virgins get raped.
Virginity exams are made forcible, used as a lie detector test. Shut up. Lie still. Spread
your legs. Let the doctors judge you. If you are a good girl, we will trust that you are
not here to break the law.
If you are a good girl, we will trust you.
If. Never forget who sets those standards. Never forget who makes those rules.
None of us is good enough to be trusted with our own sex, our own self.
It is easier to kill us than it is to trust us. It is easier to kill us than to let us decide for
ourselves.
Listen.
Listen to what these virgins are saying.
Being good girls did not protect us.
Being virgins did not save us.
Living beyond suspicion did not keep us out of harm.
Listen hard. This is a hard lesson.
We like to think that we are good, upstanding, right-thinking people. We have values, we
have ethics, we care. We like to think that this is, somehow, enough.
When our virtue cannot save us, we cannot afford to be merely virtuous.
When virtue cannot save us, there is nothing left to do but fight, fight hard, and then
keep fighting.
The night we have to take back is not like ordinary night, where we can count on the sun
to rise and fill the world with light. Tonight and every night, today and every day, each
and every one of us must be what brings the light and the heat.
So. Since I am someone who does her best fighting with words, let me give you some
words to fight with, to carry inside you, to bring the light with.
No Pity.
When we pity someone, we make them an object of our pity. No one who has already
been made the object of violence needs to have that object-ness reinforced. Don't make
other people the object of your pity. Give them your help and your care.
No Shame.
There is no shame in surviving the forces that try to obliterate us. There is no shame in
being someone who was the object of an attempt at obliteration. It doesn't matter who
you are. Whore or virgin, old or young, male or female or intersex, transgendered or
comfortable with your birth gender, straight or queer, if your vulnerable human self is
made the target of abuse and violence, survival is the first, best victory. The shame
belongs to those who have behaved shamefully. The shame belongs to those who
misuse their power.
No Silence.
Speak for the dead, speak for the living, speak for yourself, speak for those who cannot
speak for themselves. But speak. And speak LOUD. If your virtue and your values
can't save you, you had better believe that your silence won't either.
No Excuses.
When we make excuses for those who perpetrate harm, we implicate ourselves in the
harm they create. We do seek to understand the forces that lead people to cause harm,
but comprehension is not an excuse. Objectivity is not the same thing as neutrality.
Where wrong has been done, we are ethically bound to bear witness.
No More.
This is the goal, the point, the object of the game: a world in which all this violence is no
more. Not just reduced, not just handled better when it happens. No. More.
No Pity. No Shame. No Silence. No Excuses. No More.
Say them with me:
No Pity. We will not make the wounded the objects of pity. We will give them help to
heal.
No Shame. We will hold our heads high, and looking the world in the eye, announce the
victory of survival.
No Silence. We reach out, across time and pain, with words, just anger, and witness.
No Excuses. We do not excuse, we do not make allowances, we do not condone what
is wrong.
And for all of us, for Jasmine Archie and Heshu Yones and Fahidme Sahindal, for Eliza
Armstrong and Christina of Markyate and Ebba the Younger, for daughters sold into
slavery by their fathers and stoned to death by their neighbors, for each and every one
of us who has borne the wounds of incest, rape, molestation, harrassment, abuse,
neglect, coercion, violence, humiliation, whatever it may be, we say: NO MORE.
