It may be old news to you, but way back in September when I was paying attention to things like a crashing economy and the horror of Sarah Palin, I missed the story about a San Diego woman who was auctioning off her virginity for a good cause. Nope, she wasn’t wanking for world peace, getting it on for a greener world, or any of the other host of great causes out there, she was trying to finance her master’s degree.
hymen intactThe 22 yr old co-ed (who was described by others as ‘not looking like a virgin’ in this creepy video clip from the fall) Natalie Dylan was assisted in her search for a ‘kind, intelligent’ Mr. Moneybags to claim her maidenhead by he-who-attracts-the-kind-and-intelligent-hymen-conquering-type, Mr. Howard Stern. The item caught my eye because yesterday the Telegraph UK reported that she had received over 10,000 bids, with a top offering of $3.7 million bucks.
And I probably would have passed on it, if a kind-and-intelligent (but poor, alas) colleague hadn’t passed on a snippet of news from the AP, where a man sold his daughter into marriage in exchange for beer, about sixteen thousand dollars in cash, and a few cases of meat. In addition to my concern about his diet, I had to stop and think about the hymen.
It is so much more than a membrane, as I recall from endless conversations with my high school students when I taught sex ed. Though I tried to explain that the hymen didn’t signify anything really, that there were a myriad of ways to have sex and that virginity was a flexible concept, they weren’t convinced. And the truth is, whether we agree or not, it does mean something not just about sex, but about the way we think about sex.
Natalie Dylan herself pointed out that, “It's shocking that men will pay so much for someone's virginity, which isn't even prized so highly anymore." And it is shocking, because one would think that sexual intimacy, experience and knowledge (which do often come with practice) would have a high value if the focus were on pleasure.
But the connection between these two stories is that there is a great value placed on women’s sexual inexperience—it’s worth money, promotion, and, you know, meat. But not just any sexual inexperience—it’s sexual experience with men. And sexual experience of the strictly penis-vagina type, as proved by the lesbian who auctioned off her virginity on Ebay way back in 2004. My guess is that this 18-yr-old lesbian was probably sexually active to some degree, but her unfamiliarity with the old p-v sex was enough to earn her $20k told her school expenses (maybe this is a diatribe on the high cost of an education, then…).
This classic definition of virginity does a disservice to all of us (unless we are entering higher education, I guess), and the hymen, more than acting as a physical barrier, really represents an ideological barrier that reduces sexuality from a broad and encompassing span of activities to one simple act (and an act in which only 20-50% or so of hetero women can actually have orgasms, at that). And it's about time that barrier got busted.
In the meantime, I’ve got a hangnail and some graduate student loans to pay. Any takers?
