Virgin: The Untouched History (33 page)

Although the film industry's interest in virginity has often been limited to boys-will-be-boys raunchfests
(Porky's
[1982],
Losin'It
[1983], and
The Last
American Virgin
[1982], etc.), some comedies—
Animal House
(1978) is one example—have managed to get in some cogent digs at conservative virginity ideology along with their quotient of titty jokes. There have also been occasional serious treatments. Spike Lee's 1988
School Daze
and John Hughes's 1985
The Breakfast Club
both explored virginity as a socially and emotionally complex issue among young adults, both films providing a harsh look at the relationship between virginity and social acceptance.

Since the 1970s, television has also engaged with virginity narratives. The majority of television virginity plots tend to be neat single-episode packages aimed at high-school-aged viewers, in which characters of a similar age range go from confronting the possibility of virginity loss to dealing with the aftermath in a single swift half-hour installment. This is, at least in terms of age range, a relatively accurate reflection of reality: American age at virginity loss has hovered around the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old range since the 1970s. Aside from the matter of age, what
Slate
television critic Kate Aurthur has called the "Very Special Virginity episode" has had consistent conventions over the thirty years that virginity has been a subject of television programming. Among them is the repeated contention that virginity loss always has consequences.

A fine case in point was provided by the extraordinarily long-lived prime-time soap opera
Beverly Hills go210,
which ran from 1990 to 2000. Originally the saga of a Minnesotan family who relocates to Beverly Hills, the show centered around the family's twin high-school-aged children, Brandon and Brenda, as they came of age in the milieu of one of the United States' wealthiest communities. True to form for a teen-centric series drama, there was a virginity-loss narrative beginning in the very first season. Although it took most of the first season to do it, Brenda (Shannen Doherty), the daughter of the central family, lost her virginity to the Porsche-driving bad boy Dylan (Luke Perry). Brenda and Dylan's sexual liaison was foreshadowed very early in that year's story line, but Brenda, frightened by the possibility of sexually transmitted disease, postponed the act until the season's penultimate episode. This left an entire juicy episode of consequences, in this case a pregnancy scare and the breakup of Brenda and Dylan's relationship. The season thus ended, leaving fans to wait two months for the news that Brenda was not in fact pregnant.

Of the numerous deflorations that took place during
90210's
ten seasons, the one that garnered the largest number of column inches in the press was that of the "good Catholic girl" character Donna, played by Tori Spelling, actress daughter of
90210's
producer. Donna's virginity, an open topic of discussion among the core characters of the show from the beginning, lasted very nearly as long as the show itself. Although Donna was at the core of the cast from the first season and began a romantic relationship with the character David in the second season, the course of what ultimately turned out to be true love (or at least a Hollywood approximation of it) ran nowhere near close to smooth. Quite exceptionally, given the crazed rutting to which
90216
's characters seemed so prone, Donna hung on to her virginity until her last year of college, the show's seventh year. When she finally did have sex with David, it took place offscreen, and while there were mild consequences—she had to break the news to her Catholic mother—there was no punishment. Ultimately, and anticlimactically, the Donna and David characters married.

What viewers and critics made of Donna's lengthy virginity—lengthy by Hollywood standards, anyway, although hardly so by a real-world metric—varied a great deal. Heralded by some as evidence of a newfound (and, it was implied, long overdue) return to traditional sexual mores among young people, others found Donna's perennial discussions and displays of virginity infuriating and heavy-handed. In terms of its historical moment, Donna's much-discussed virginity was both and neither.

Brenda and Donna both, simultaneously, reflected meaningful trends in the sexual culture of the era of
90210.
By the mid-1980s, approximately half of unmarried women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were what the researchers euphemistically call "sexually active," meaning in most cases that they had identified themselves as having engaged in partnered sex at least once, a la Brenda.
*
And as in Brenda's case, the real issue wasn't whether one was or wasn't a virgin, but whether the consequences of sexual activity endangered one's own chances of middle-class success. Sexually transmitted diseases and, particularly, unplanned pregnancies among women "old enough to know better" are often seen as revealing a lack of critical discipline. Brenda's pregnancy scare was thus a cautionary tale, while Donna succeeded in negotiating premarital sex "correctly."

In
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
another long-running teen drama series (spring 1997—summer 2003),
Buffy
creator Joss Whedon addressed virginity from yet another perspective: that of the personally and sexually empowered young woman. That young woman is Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), slightly ditzy California high school student by day, anointed slayer of vampires and other supernatural menaces by night. With the help of the mentor and father figure who is her "watcher," Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and a small group of close-knit friends, Buffy becomes a gifted warrior whose job it is to combat the forces of evil that frequently appear in their small "hellmouth" town of Sunnydale.

Along the way, as is traditional for teenaged heroines, she falls passionately in love. But the man with whom she falls in love is a vampire, Angel (David Boreanaz), known as Angelus to his vampire friends. He is a curious creature, living under a gypsy curse that gave him back his soul and thus also his conscience and which is destined to remain with him until such unlikely time as the guilt-ridden creature experiences a moment of perfect happiness. At the start of the show, Angel is thus that very
rara avis,
a vampire-hating vampire who himself fights the forces of darkness. Over the first half of the show's second year, the romance between Buffy and Angel intensifies. Finally, in the first half of a two-part episode that falls squarely in the middle of the second season, Buffy's seventeenth birthday arrives and she gives in to the passion that has been building in hen relationship with Angel. Buffy loses her virginity in a steamingly erotic, yet nongraphic, visual vignette that conveys, in its glowing skin tones and rich, draped fabrics, a mixture of intense romance and profound sensuality.

The consequences are not long in arriving. Buffy wakes up to find Angel gone, and it rapidly becomes clear that sex with Buffy was the occasion of perfect happiness required to break the curse that equipped Angel with a soul. The paradox is overblown, but it works: the sincerity of Buffy and Angel's emotions is proven by his turning, quite literally, into a demon. Having had Buffy in one metaphorical sense, Angel is now determined to have her in the other. Buffy's life (as well as those of her family and friends) is on the line as a soulless Angel seeks revenge for having been forced to endure the apparently emasculating constraints of having a soul. No garden-variety pregnancy scare for Buffy.

The entire second half of the second season follows Buffy's attempts to deal not only with the threat Angel poses but also with her cherished memories of the lover and relationship she lost. Although at first she does not realize what has happened, and begins to blame herself for Angel's sudden cruelty, she soon realizes that the change in Angel represents a far larger problem than post-coital betrayal. Buffy rapidly deduces that there are only two solutions to the problem Angel represents: find a way to reinstate the curse and restore Angel's soul, or kill him. Ultimately, with the help of her friends, she does both. With tears in her eyes, she tells Angel to close his eyes, kisses him one last time, and plunges her sword through his heart, sending Angel to hell.

Buffy's virginity story, otherworldly as it is, is at root not about sin and punishment, but about maturity in the face of adversity. Buffy's decision to lose her virginity to Angel has its consequences, but those consequences are not in themselves consequences of sex. Angel loses his soul as a consequence of the power of emotion, not merely of orgasm. Whedon places romantic love on a pedestal only to kick the pedestal out from under it. In the Whedonverse, even the most culturally impeccable romantic virginity narrative is not enough to turn a girl into a woman. To truly be her own mistress a young woman must be capable of much more than just sex. In the world of
Buffy the Vampire
Slayer
—and in our world as well, Whedon implies—a woman's true value does not lie in her virginity, or her ability to be sexually loved. It lies in her ability to love, be loved, and simultaneously kick ass, take names, and do whatever needs to be done, no matter how difficult.

True Love Legislates

Of all the countries of the developed world, the United States is the only one that has to date created a federal agenda having specifically to do with the virginity of its citizens. Involving hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, this agenda has proven hotly controversial. Intersecting in a number of ways with evangelical Christian and other socially conservative efforts to promote a resurgence of what advocates term "traditional values" or "family values"—although both terms are to some extent misnomers when viewed from historical or anthropological viewpoints—the focus of this governmental program is to establish virginity as the only appropriate sexual status for any never-married person.

The history of this agenda and its associated legislation is simple enough in outline. In 1981, during the first term of President Ronald Reagan, a program known as Title XX of the Public Health Service Act, the Adolescent Family Life Act, or AFLA, was sponsored by then-senator Jeremiah Denton, a Republican from Alabama (later joined by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy). The bill passed and was instituted under the aegis of the U.S. Office of Population Affairs. AFLA's mandate was to create programs to decrease pregnancy rates among unmarried minors (the age of legal majority in the United States is eighteen) specifically by promoting chastity and sexual self-restraint. The media quickly began to refer to AFLA as "The Chastity Act."

A successor to the 1978 Adolescent Pregnancy Program, the first federal program designed to prevent teenaged pregnancies, programs funded under AFLA were required to teach abstinence from sex—in other words virginity, since these programs were to be aimed, at adolescents who were not yet sexually active—as the normative standard and best practice for preventing pregnancy and disease. Abstaining from sexual activity was also to be taught as a "secondary prevention measure" for teenagers who had already had sex and/or a past pregnancy. The terms of AFLA forbade grant money to be given to projects that encouraged, promoted, or advocated family planning services, including contraception or medical abortion.

Initially funded at $11 million, AFLA was a fairly small program by U.S. federal standards. In 1982, with $13.5 million at stake, five hundred research grants were proposed and sixty-two were granted. Many AFLA grant recipients had close ties to churches and religious organizations. Programs funded by AFLA soon came under fire for using explicitly religious language and concepts, and it was not long before the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit on the grounds that AFLA's activities violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution—the principle of separation of church and state.

This suit, filed in 1983, went as far as the Supreme Court but was ultimately settled out of court in 1993. The settlement left AFLA standing and provided parameters within which the program and others like it would be permitted to function. AFLA marched on. With regular funding increases, AFLA has grown from an $n-million-a-year program at its outset to a $3i-million-a-year program in fiscalyear 2004.

In 1994, the year after AFLA's more questionable practices had been reined in by the courts, congressional representative John Doolittle, a Republican from California, sponsored a bill to amend the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Doolittle Act, had it succeeded, would have sharply limited what sorts of material state and local school districts could include in their HIV-prevention curricula, a major venue for sexuality-related education in American public schools. But because the U.S. federal government is prohibited from dictating curriculum standards to public schools (U.S. public schools are administered at the state and municipal levels), the Doolittle Act proved unpassable.

Between the ACLU challenge to AFLA and the abortive Doolittle Act, however, proponents of what had by then come to be called "chastity education" had received a primer on what would and would not be found legally acceptable in terms of legislation on the subject. Explicitly religious language was unacceptable, and medical and scientific inaccuracy in the name of discouraging sex frowned upon. But the government's right to use taxpayer-funded programs to teach specific sexual ideologies and behaviors had gone entirely unchallenged. Furthermore, no laws existed to prevent the federal government from linking grant monies to specific educational content. They had only to make the states responsible for accepting or rejecting the funds, and with them, the designated content.

These lessons were put into practice in 1996 in the form of a rider attached to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This Act, a major legislative goal of the Clinton administration, was a component of a gargantuan overhaul of the American social welfare system. During the final hours of debate on the Act, a sleepy little rider—a sort of add-on legislation that piggybacks on a larger piece of legislation and is passed if the "parent" bill is passed—was attached to it. This rider received no public debate and, in fact, no real notice at all.