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KG: An interview with Hanne Blank, part I

by KufiGirl :: posted 25 June 07

“Like gold or cattle, land or cloth, female virginity has long been treated as a type of property,” writes Hanne Blank, an independent historian, feminist author, and former sex educator. “But this practice, however long and well-established, is in many ways a paradox. Unlike other forms of property, virginity is essentially intangible… Using it as an object of trade seems almost like trading in wind, fog, or oceanfront properties in Luxembourg. But for thousands of years, virginity has been considered a form of real as well as symbolic property, and treated that way without a shred of irony.”

Blank’s latest book, Virgin: An Untouched History, recounts virginity’s cultural history. From the ancient Greeks to the Middle Ages, through Victorian England and Puritan America to Beverly Hills, 90210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blank looks at the myriad ways female virginity has been defined, policed, purchased, sold, lost, and defended.

I recently met Ms. Blank at a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and last week sent her an e-mail plea to let me interview her for this blog. She wrote back the same evening and said, “Oh! I’d love to. I am an occasional reader of HijabMan myself, actually.”

KufiGirl: You describe virginity as “relative but relevant.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Hanne Blank: The short answer is that virginity has not always been handled, treated, or defined in the same way across time periods or across cultures, but in whatever form(s) it takes or has taken, it has always been socially, culturally, and religiously important regardless. Virginity both is and is not a monolith, in other words. It often appears monolithic because it has such a consistent, and consistently important, presence in so many cultures. But in reality, it’s much more of a mosaic.

KG: You devote chapter 3 to “hymenology,” pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, the hymen is not “like the head of a drum, a skin that is stretched across the opening of the vagina,” but rather a bit of flesh that comes in “a wide and colorful variety of configuration and shape,” and that a hymen without an opening is considered a birth defect that must be corrected surgically. Yet a belief persists that doctors can always tell if a girl has had vaginal sex, just by looking at her hymen. What’s up with that?

HB: Medical history teaches us, by example, that people have always wanted to believe that having intercourse permanently alters the female body.

In the bodies of both Greco-Roman and Arab/Persian medical writing, there are numerous discussions of how the doctors believed intercourse altered the female genitals. There is, in this literature, a really staggering variety of descriptions of what the female genitals were believed to be like: corrugated tubes like the bendy part of a soda straw, canals whose walls were tied together with webs of blood vessels or sealed off by trampoline-like stretched skins, “knots” of ligaments and blood vessels that blocked the entrance to the vagina, and so on. One writer even suggested that there was a little nodule of flesh that looked like a chickpea up in there, and that this getting ruptured was the cause of bleeding at first sexual intercourse.

The drawback, of course, is that none of this is actually found in the body! But doctors wanted there to be, because a) they wanted something that would explain why some women bleed the first time their vaginas are penetrated sexually, and b) they wanted something that would provide some kind of tangible proof of virginity.

So, basically, they kept on inventing things that could—assuming they could be proven to exist at all—provide these answers.

This is where the hymen comes in. The word “hymen” is Greek for “membrane.” It can indicate any old membrane, and indeed in ancient Greek medical writing, that’s exactly what it does mean: the pericardium is the “hymen” of the heart, the amniotic sac is the “hymen” of the fetus in the womb, and so on. It’s unclear exactly how “hymen” became specifically about the female genitals, but my guess is that as it became more and more obvious that all these webs and knots and veils and corrugated tubes did not exist, people defaulted to the assumption that “okay, okay, so there’s nothing up in there that looks like a chickpea and bleeds when you poke it… but there must be a membrane or something in there somewhere that bleeds when you punch a hole through it, right? Sure! Of course, there has to be!” Because again, doctors wanted some way to explain this phenomenon of why (some) women bleed when they are first vaginally penetrated. And membrane, as we’ve seen, equals “hymen.”

The assumption that there was some membrane in the vagina—in short, that a “hymen” existed—predates by several centuries anyone actually systematically looking for or finding such a thing in the bodies of actual women. The hymen wasn’t identified in a dissection until 1544. Even then, and even today, though, we do not really know how much we can and can’t tell from the hymen. The more we learn about hymens, the more we discover that they aren’t very useful for determining whether a woman is a virgin or not, simply because hymens come in so many shapes and sizes, and because they can, in many cases, change shape, size, and configuration over the course of one’s life. A hymen can literally look entirely different at different ages, without anything external happening to it at all.

But this doesn’t change the basic fact that we as patients look to doctors to have more information about the human body than we do. We want and expect doctors to be able to figure out the mysterious things our bodies do… that is how they diagnose and heal us, after all. Nor does it change the basic fact that doctors, since the dawn of medicine, have felt a strong need to be able to say that they, as authority figures, really have that information, and really understand those mysteries.

The short answer is that we often believe that doctors can diagnose virginity from the hymen because we desperately want there to be SOMEONE who can give us a definitive answer. And the reason that we believe that the hymen is a useful basis for making that diagnosis at all is basically the same reason: we desperately want there to be SOME part of the body that can give us a definitive answer about virginity. But really we’re no closer to having a definitive medical means of determining virginity than we were when we were looking for those “chickpeas.”

KG: You are, maybe surprisingly, sympathetic to those who choose to have hymen restoration surgery.

HB: I’m sympathetic to many, but definitely not all, women who choose to have hymen restoration surgery.

I have a great deal of sympathy for women who seek out hymen restoration surgeries because of the threat of violence (whether physical or social or both). The simple fact is that not all women—and not even all economically privileged women—live in societies, communities, or cultures where they are free from the threat of severe repercussions if they are believed to be (let alone “proven”) unchaste. This is true around the world, in first world countries as well as third world countries. If a hymen restoration surgery is what stands between a woman and an acid attack, or beatings, or worse, then by all means she should be able to have that surgery.

These surgeries aren’t a cure-all, though. First of all, they are no guarantee that bad things won’t happen to women anyway. As we should have all figured out by now, what people believe to be true about women’s sexuality often trumps what actually is true. There is also the risk of the surgery being discovered, which can have its own terrible consequences.

But there is the larger problem, too, which is that at their most fundamental level hymen restoration surgeries cater to the myth that there is a particular way that hymens are supposed to be, and a particular way that hymens and women’s genitals are supposed to look and act, and a specific set of things that happen with virginal women’s bodies. None of that is true. So hymen restorations are propping up a fantasy of the virginal female body that I think is both societally poisonous and medically, biologically wrong.

Which brings me to the women who have hymen reconstruction surgeries that I categorically do not support: there are some women, admittedly not very many, who have hymen reconstruction surgery specifically and openly as a means of buying into the fantasy of this inaccurate, imaginary “virginal body.” Sometimes they have them to fulfill a husband or boyfriend’s fantasy of being with a virgin. Surgically “remastered” virginity as sex toy, in other words. I think that’s politically and ethically bankrupt, both from the patient side and the surgeon side. If someone wants to play-act at being a virgin for the sexual thrill of it, why not just take acting lessons? It sure seems a lot more honest, and frankly more fun, than paying someone a lot of money to remodel your genitals with a scalpel.

KG: The inevitability of first-time bleeding is another myth you put to rest. In many parts of the world, women are expected to produce stained linen on their wedding night, and I’ve been amused at the creative solutions they’ve found to this problem. (My favorite is the jaded midwife who waits in the next room with a supply of chicken blood, unbeknownst to the eager groom.) Yet it’s a serious issue – women have been divorced and even killed over this. Did you find, in your research, any open resistance to this practice among women, or was it mostly the clandestine sort?

HB: I think that, like many forms of female resistance against sexual and reproductive oppression, it is mostly clandestine. But I also get the sense that the strategies women have recourse to in this regard are a sort of open secret in many cultures, things that “everyone knows” are being done but that people just turn a blind eye to so that they can continue to tell themselves that “but of course none of the women in my family do things like that.”

KG: I think one of the most important points you make is that, historically, a girl might start menstruating at 13, be married at 14, and have her first child at 15. The transition to adulthood happened very quickly, so expecting her to “wait for marriage” in such a scenario doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice. But today girls might start menstruating at 10 and not get married until 25 or 30. In the urban Middle East, where housing shortages have led to a much higher age of first marriage, this is often discussed as a source of frustration for men, but there’s still this nudge-nudge wink-wink thing going on that allows them to have secret girlfriends, or to pay for sex. But talking about sexual frustration among women during those years remains largely taboo.

HB: I am of two minds about the whole putative problem of sexual frustration. I think there is a level to which sexual interest is just going to be there, sure, particularly for adolescent and young adult people. But I think culture has a lot to do with whether sexual interest that does not have an outlet is going to be perceived as frustrating or not, and how serious an issue such frustration is going to be perceived to be.

In a culture where women are not expected/permitted to experience or at least voice sexual frustration, it is, I think, pretty likely that they actually will experience less of it because they simply aren’t being taught to, or expected to, experience any unrequited sexual desires they may have as “frustrating.” Perhaps they are just mildly annoyed. Perhaps it strikes them as something unruly that the body does, a bit like menstruating, that just has to be coped with. Perhaps they are noticing it and it is teaching them things about what they like and what turns them on. I mean, I personally find that unrequited sexual desire can be quite pleasant sometimes: you can think all you want without the pressure of having to do anything, or taking the risk of doing something about it and having it turn out to be a disappointment. So I think it is important to be clear that just because sexual desire isn’t being acted upon doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a “frustration.”

But of course this is as true for men as it is for women. I have known a number of men who have felt very pressured to express that they were frustrated by a lack of sexual activity in their lives but who did not, by nature, actually find it all that frustrating! What they found frustrating is having to put up a front, and having to posture as if they were suffering from sexual frustrations they didn’t feel, in order to not have their masculinity questioned. This is a double standard that definitely cuts both ways.

If I had my way, I would like a world in which men and women could freely talk about how they actually felt about sex, including unrequited sexual desires. Some of them doubtless would talk about frustration. But I think we would find that a lot of them would be talking about more complicated and varied responses, too.

Part II of this interview continues here.

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1. noor at 26 June 07 :: #

   i don’t visit your page for a few days and this is what happens… your blog ‘plodes!!!

2. Aisha at 29 June 07 :: #

   Wow. Thanks for giving me good stuff to read in between breaks. Wow.

   PS: A comment once upon a time on a post about being an imam got deleted by me somehow, but its stuff like this that makes me pray that you will one day become an imam because we need thinking Muslims out there like you leading us.