In devoting a volume to the romance and folk-lore of Virginity, it may not be inappropriate first to examine the psychology of a word and a quality as magical as they are misused.
What is virginity? Is it the possession intact of that delicate piece of membrane, the poets’ ‘flos virginitatis,’ or is it some indescribable, intangible attribute in no sense dependent on physical perfection? Does it imply abstention from and ignorance of all sexual pleasures, or must it be a chastity which falls little short of stupid, even criminal, innocence?
To us moderns, blessed (or cursed) with a smattering of science, woman is virginal just as long as we know or believe her to be, physical qualities notwithstanding. By the poet of the past, the romanticist, the mediæval lover, and the ignorant, physical as well as spiritual proofs were probably required or expected. To them, virginity was something tangible; to us it is not.
Nor is the reason far to seek. For while Havelock Ellis, the greatest authority on sexual psychology the world has known, describes the hymen as having acquired in human estimation a spiritual value which has made it far more than a part of the feminine body, ... “something that gives woman all her worth and dignity, ... her market value,” he goes on to point out that the presence or absence of the hymen is no real test of virginity.
“There are many ways,” he writes, (Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Philadelphia, 1914: vol. 5: Erotic Symbolism), “in which the hymen may be destroyed apart from coïtus.... On the other hand, integrity of the hymen is no proof of virginity, apart from the obvious fact that there may be intercourse without penetration.... The hymen may be of a yielding or folding type, so that complete penetration may take place and yet the hymen be afterwards found unruptured. It occasionally happens that the hymen is found intact at the end of pregnancy.”[1]
And while the foregoing is the exception rather than the rule, it goes far to prove the fallibility of the physical, tangible test.
To most of us, virginity is a quality supposedly prized at all times and by all races. This is far from the case. As Havelock Ellis points out, (op. cit.), virginity is not usually of any value among peoples who are entirely primitive. “Indeed, even in the classic civilisation which we inherit,” he writes, “it is easy to show that the virgin and the admiration for virginity are of late growth; the virgin goddesses were not originally virgins in our modern sense. Diana was the many-breasted patroness of childbirth before she became the chaste and solitary huntress, for the earliest distinction would appear to have been simply between the woman who was attached to a man and the woman who followed an earlier rule of freedom and independence; it was a later notion to suppose that the latter women were debarred from sexual intercourse.”
A French Army Surgeon, Dr. Jacobus X—, (Untrodden Fields of Anthropology: Charles Carrington: Paris, 1898), has some interesting remarks on the subject, and we offer no apology for reproducing them at length. Writing on the “Unimportance of the signs of virginity in the negress,” he says:—
“The Negroes of Senegal do not attach, as the Arabs do, considerable importance to the presence of the real signs of virginity in young girls.... The non-existence of the material proofs of virginity seldom give rise to any complaint on the part of the husband.... Moreover, the size of the virile member of the Negro[2] renders it difficult for him to detect any trick. The black bride, on the wedding night, shows herself expert in the art of simulating the struggles of an expiring virginity, and it is considered good taste for the girls to require almost to be raped. The least innocent young women are often the most clever at this game.