WILLIAM HARWOOD
A recent news report on BBC television told of the demand by an Egyptian theocrat that persons importing a device that would enable Muslim brides to pass themselves off as virgins be executed. Reading about such misogynous hatred prompts me to explain how virginity-addiction became such a widespread fetish, and why it continues to exist long after the beliefs that triggered it are known to be as scientifically illiterate as phrenology and phlogiston.
Religious believers are not noted for “prove it to me” skepticism. The ability to believe that a book endorsing a flat earth is nonfiction is solid evidence that Christians and Jews are as capable of doublethink as any Muslim. If unteachables such as recent American presidential candidates are able to rationalize that the discoveries of science are wrong because they falsify a 2,000-year book of fairy tales, it is understandable that they can continue to view victimless recreation as a taboo violation even though they have no awareness of why it was so categorized in the first place.
Virginity was originally a negative quality. Following the Big Discovery of c 3500 BCE, that children have fathers as well as mothers, a “virgin” was a woman who had never given birth to a live infant. Given the cost of feeding and housing a woman for a minimum of several months only to see that investment wasted when two out of three women died in childbirth, that made a virgin a risky purchase as a breeder of heirs. But purchasing a breeding woman who already had a child was no bargain either. The problem was solved when priestly castes in widely separated cultures came up with the solution of demanding that all firstborns be sacrificed to the tribal god (Exodus 13:1). Thus a woman was able to demonstrate her economic viability by giving birth to a child that would be sacrificed, and thereafter, by adhering to an “adultery” taboo, producing biological heirs for her legal owner.
But as early as 2000 BCE, disparate cultures evolved concepts of morality that found human sacrifice abhorrent. Herakles is credited with declaring that, “Zeus hates human sacrifice.” That presented a problem, because firstborns were believed to have been jointly fathered by every lover the woman had ever had, whether the coupling had occurred several days before birth or as recently as the day before quickening. Pregnancy was believed to be initiated when the total amount of sperm intromitted into a woman reached critical mass. The belief explained why Zeus needed thirty-six hours to pump sufficient sperm into Alkmene to generate his greatest son, Herakles.
Since neither buying a wife whose womb was carrying sperm that would eventually combine with her husband’s to produce a bastard (defined as a child of many fathers), nor adopting the child she already had, was a desirable option, the solution was to impose on women birth-to-marriage celibacy, so that children of the marriage would be the biological offspring of her legal owner and no one else. At that point virginity, redefined as possession of an unpolluted womb capable of producing a legitimate heir, became the virtue the culturally conditioned still consider it today. (The concept of a male virgin, a man capable of bearing his owner’s legitimate heir, is the ultimate oxymoron.)
But even premarital virginity was no guarantee that a wife’s future children would be the lawfully-sired offspring of her husband alone. So to guarantee that only husbands could impregnate their breeding slaves, men imposed a further taboo on all sexual recreation capable of throwing the paternity of a married woman’s child into doubt. They declared adultery, meaning the fraudulent impregnation of a married woman, a capital crime. But since birth control was virtually unknown and certainly unreliable, extramarital copulation by a married woman was automatically equated with adultery, even though it was the procreational and not the recreational element of the act that was recognized as a crime against property and prohibited.
As increasing knowledge about the biophysics of impregnation spread, and most alleged adultery was recognized as nonprocreative, civilized societies removed it from their shortening lists of capital crimes, although Muslim cultures did not, and preacher Billy Graham is on record as endorsing the execution of adulterers. Henry VIII executed two allegedly adulterous wives (most historians consider Anne Boleyn innocent) and their alleged lovers at a time when adultery by the wife of the king had the potential to put a bastard, by that time defined as a child passed off as the legitimate heir of a woman’s husband but actually fathered by a usurper, on the throne of England and therefore constituted treason. The failure of the foregoing information to reach the masses enabled at least one educationally challenged individual to write a letter to The Times, citing Henry VIII as a precedent, demanding that Princess Diana’s lover be similarly beheaded.
Had the ancients been aware of the duration of pregnancy, the brief mortality of sperm, and the fact that a child was fathered by a single spermatozoon, and had they had the means of ensuring that a copulation would be nonprocreative, the current belief that copulation involving an unmarried woman, a pregnant woman, or a woman using birth control constituted adultery would never have come into existence. With the invention of The Pill, the belief that nonprocreative recreation constituted adultery should logically have disappeared. But by that time all taboos, regardless of the logical reasons for which they had originally been invented, were attributed to capricious gods whose only reason for banning anything was, “Because I said so.” The belief that a god’s laws did not have to have a logical basis eventually led to the expansion of the adultery concept to include copulation between a married man and an unmarried woman, as well as same-sex couplings when one of the participants was married.
Since books attributed to a god declared adultery a sin, and the original and only logical definition of adultery had long been forgotten, the victimless nature of most extramarital copulation was deemed irrelevant, as was the reason for the glorification of virginity. The tribal god had labeled once-injurious behavior a no-no, and believers were incapable of asking themselves, “Why would any sane god ban victimless pleasure?” The consequence is that victimless pleasure is today denigrated as adultery, or fornication (originally a form of false-god worship, since it meant the tupping of a fertility goddess’s nun), or sodomy (an anachronous term for the same-sex coupling that was not a Jewish taboo prior to 621 BCE). And the masochism of self-inflicted celibacy continues to be lauded as the virtue of virginity—all because believers in religion allow their deities to make laws that, if a president or king issued the same decree, would have him committed to an asylum for the criminally insane for the term of his natural life.