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KG: An interview with Hanne Blank, part II

by KufiGirl :: posted 24 June 07

[Read Part I of this interview here.]

KufiGirl: You talk about the consequences for women who had sex before marriage, or were believed to have had sex before marriage, but you also talk about the consequences for women who chose to remain virgins in spite of societal pressure to marry. What motivated them, and how did their communities respond? Do you see any modern parallels?

Hanne Blank: Some women (and men) choose not to have sex, and/or not to marry, in any culture that permits it. This is true today and it has historically been true whenever (and wherever) the culture has made it possible for some people to opt out of sexuality and/or marriage. Not all do, and not all that do allow it without a fight. So it is hard to speak about how cultures/communities react in a general sense – some really don’t care, and it is quite a simple and easy thing, and some really do care, and people who want to not marry have to fight very hard for it and endure a lot of hardship.

I suspect strongly that the motivations are as numerous as the individuals. Some people simply don’t desire sex with anyone, ever, for any reason. Others find that virginity and singleness give them spiritual benefit. In some cases I expect it’s because of an aversion specifically to sex or genitals, or those of the opposite sex. Or it could be, especially for women, a terror of pregnancy and childbirth. And for some people it’s an issue of never finding someone with whom they feel they could have that kind of relationship. Or there might be some combination of factors. But these things too depend on where and when you live, and there is no one “profile” of a person who chooses virginity.

KG: One thing, which you also discuss in your speeches and on your web site, is the way virginity is constructed around race and class. Can you elaborate on that? I think, among white feminists, there’s a tendency to look at virginity discussions solely from the perspective of sexual liberation, but there are a lot of women in the world who see it first and foremost as an issue of protection and safety.

HB: Economic autonomy and sexual autonomy go hand in hand—the more you have the ability to support yourself without having to rely on a spouse or parent, the more freedom you have to behave as you please in other ways. That’s been proven many times in many contexts, historically. So yes, there’s a very good reason that white first-world feminists, who are pretty much by definition economically autonomous and live in a culture where female economic autonomy is now a default expectation, generally look at sexuality as a matter of repression vs. liberation and dependence vs. independence. It is, as you suggest, very shortsighted, and also far from universal.

In my work on virginity it has become clear to me that there are two fundamental places where race and class intersect with virginity.

One is that the less an individual’s race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class are valued, the less valuable her virginity is and the less likely she is to be able to adequately protect (or get help in protecting) her virginity. The enormous vulnerability of being a part of the underclass, in whatever way or ways, definitely includes virginity. This is true even if one’s own home community or home culture values virginity highly, because it is so difficult for an underclass to effectively resist the inexorable pressures (social, economic, legal, etc.) of the ruling classes if the ruling classes decide that the underclasses have something they want. The only real protection one has, as a member of an underclass and particularly as an underclass woman, is in numbers and community.

So yes, virginity very much becomes a matter for community investment in these circumstances, because if your community is invested in your ability to retain your virginity, it is more likely that they will protect you from threats against it. Thus the virginity of women can become a symbol of a successful underclass: our unmarried women are virgins both because they are “good” and they conform to our expectations of them, and because we have been successful in protecting them.

The other major place that virginity and class intersect is that most of the time, historically speaking, virginity has been described as and thought of as being almost identical to stereotypes of the bodies and expected behavior of upper-class women. Virginity, historically, has been described (among other things) as: white, pure, unsullied, untouched, beautiful, pristine. It does not labor, it is not sweaty, it does not participate in the world of business and commerce, it does not show itself in public, it does not engage with things that are considered male or masculine. It is set aside and exists for its own sake, it is not productive, nor does it engage with others.

When virginity is described and thought of in these ways it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for women who do not fit this description to be thought of as virgins, even if they are. The Fathers of the (Catholic) Church were very adamant that women who worked “in the world,” which is to say outside their households, might still be virgins in fact but that it would be impossible to tell, because they engaged in the polluting, “devirginizing” activity of earning a living.

It has always been a marker of economic privilege for a family to be able to afford to have its women remain solely in the household. This is not to say that women who are in the household do not work: for the most part, historically, they have worked very hard. But there is a difference between a family that can afford to have its women working in the household, solely for the benefit of the family, and a family whose economic situation is such that they cannot survive only on what the men of the family bring into the household, and so the women as well as the men must go out of the household to work.

So what becomes of your virginity when your family is sufficiently poor that you simply do not have the option to refuse to work outside of your household? It effectively vanishes. You are assumed to be not-a-virgin. Probably you are treated as not-a-virgin, too, particularly by those higher up in the socioeconomic hierarchy than you are (namely the people from whom you can least effectively protect yourself).

This discussion doesn’t even get at even more socioeconomically (and often racially) polarized situations like slavery, in which the virginity of female slaves has usually been viewed as one more valuable good that is the rightful property of the slaveowner, not the slave.

KG: You’re very clear in the introduction that, due to length limitations, and your own background and expertise, you’ve deliberately limited your work to a study of virginity in Western civilization. Yet several reviews of the book have chastised you for not taking on “the East” – presumably code for Islam – as though it were an oversight on your part. Obviously these issues are relevant for women in Muslim countries, too, but it seems like there’s something more going on here. Many Muslim women see Westerners, including Western feminists, as fetishizing the issue of sex in Islamic cultures, while ignoring their own violent history or dismissing it as “all in the past.” What would you say to critics who would argue that your book is interesting but only as history, whereas Muslim women, uniquely, are “still” dealing with it?

HB: This whole issue frustrates me immensely! As a Western feminist, living and working in the West, I see a lot of my colleagues succumbing to this fantasy notion that we in the West somehow represent the apex of some Pilgrim’s Progress march from the pits of female oppression to the summit of egalitarian society, and that, correspondingly, the rest of the poor, benighted, unenlightened world trails somewhere (three paces?) behind us.

This drives me nuts for a lot of reasons, one of which is that the whole idea that there is an inexorable upward movement toward liberation is flatly rubbish, a version of what historians and logicians call the teleological fallacy, the notion that events happen the way they happen because human beings are on an inexorable path toward a particular, human, goal.

I also hate this way of thinking and talking about the non-Western world because it really does encourage a lot of ignorant acceptance of stereotype. The whole problem, which I encounter frequently among politically active Western feminists, of believing that Islam, or the majority-Muslim world, is categorically “backward” or “oppressive” is fed by this. (Whereas I think anyone who has paid attention to American politics in the last 20 years, to say nothing of Western history generally speaking, should have a pretty clear picture of ways that people waving the banner of Christianity, particularly, can be gobsmackingly oppressive and repressive to their own people and outsiders alike.)

The real issue is, I think, that it is easier to point fingers at people who are very different to you, who act and talk and dress and believe differently than you are accustomed to doing it in your own culture. It is also easier to point fingers at people you don’t know than people you do: there is, to draw an analogy that I think is very relevant here, a reason that stranger rape is by far more frequently reported than date rape, acquaintance rape, or marital rape. It is desperately hard to call out the misogynists and abusers in your own family or community; it is desperately hard to name the forces that hurt and oppress and mutilate women in your own culture. It’s a lot easier to do it with other people. It is particularly easy to do it when the issues or events are big, headline-grabbing ones, and of course, if it involves womens’ sexuality and especially their genitals, it’s attention-grabbing.

It is a lot sexier and easier to work up a good head of steam about “honor” murders, say, than to seriously talk about what on earth we Americans are going to do with the fact that we are the only country in the developed world that actually has national legislation (legislation that no American was permitted to vote on, incidentally, and which likewise is not up for a vote to retain or discard it) that dictates “abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard.” Which is not to say that Westerners and non-Muslims shouldn’t be furious about “honor” crimes, we should. But we should also be recognizing that the “East” and the majority-Muslim world do not exactly have a monopoly on using virginity and sexuality generally as a tool to control and oppress women and girls.

Fatema Mernissi, in her beautiful, trenchant book Scheherazade Goes West, makes a scarifyingly accurate and wonderfully observed comparison between the policing of women’s bodies via hatred of fat, beauty standards, and the fashion industry in the West and the policing of women’s bodies via seclusion/the harem, veiling, and intensive sexual suspicion in the majority-Muslim world. A lot of Western feminists I know took issue with Mernissi’s comparison, saying that she was comparing apples and oranges, but I vehemently disagree. Many Western feminists like to waggle their fingers at “the East” and at “Islam” because it’s easier, I think, to point out places in which someone else’s culture retains varieties of sexism that are no longer practiced overtly in one’s own. Much much harder to go after the varieties of sexism one’s culture still practices in deadly earnest. Harder still to recognize them as being fundamentally the same sexist thing, just in different modes and incarnations.

And of course Westerners have a long tradition of being shocked and horrified by those scary dark-skinned Muslim men in their turbans and their ever-so-twirlable moustaches, their hands on their bejeweled crescent daggers, no? Westerners haven’t gotten over the tendency to see Muslim and especially Arab men as at least potentially monstrous. I wish I didn’t have to say that, but I think I do: I have been involved in too many conversations about these issues that boiled down to utterly cartoonish takes on What Muslim Men Are Like. So I think that again, there’s the familiarity/foreignness problem at play, with Westerners often attributing this specifically misogynist malevolence to the generic Muslim Man while blithely ignoring all but the most overt examples of misogyny coming from familiar-looking, familiar-acting Western men.

So what I would say to critics who take me to task for not addressing Islam, or the Muslim world: sorry, guys, but I had plenty of virginity-related problems to deal with right here in my own home culture. You want a book on the history of virginity in some other part of the world? Great! Me too! I’ll be eager to read it, just as soon as you write it.

Purchase Virgin: An Untouched History by Hanne Blank

Visit Hanne Blank’s web site, which includes portions of Virgin not included in the book

—kufigirl

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1. katiktuni at 27 June 07 :: #

   Thanks for an awesome interview Kufigirl, and thank God for people like Hanne Blank who stand up against othering.

2. sarah at 2 July 07 :: #

   fascinating!

3. Sumera at 12 July 07 :: #

   Thanks for this!