Beginning with True Love Waits in 1993 and the Silver Ring Thing in 1995, there have been any number of virginity pledge programmes impacting (for better or for worse) upon the sex lives of millions of young women all over the world.
Mostly this has been an American phenomenon initiated by conservative Christian organizations and churches in the United States who fetishize a notion of moral purity which, strangely, can be compromised by what a girl may choose to do with her vagina in an extra-marital context.
Obviously, this is not something I would support.
However, I am interested in the idea of what might be characterized as a militant form of virginity; i.e. one in which it is not female chastity which is the major concern per se, but female autonomy; one in which the girl does not pledge herself to daddy, to God, and a future husband, but rather commits to her own empowerment, demanding full rights over her own body (socially and politically as well sexually); one in which she gets to wield a sword like Joan of Arc, and not simply wear a wedding band.
As Andrea Dworkin points out, for women inspired by her legend, Joan is a hero "luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship".
And central to this was her virginity; she chose to make war, not love; to be free, not screwed into place.
That is to say, her virginity was not intended to signify her purity, or preciousness as a sexual commodity to be traded. Rather, it was "a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked".
Dworkin continues:
"Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebelliousness and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. ... Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing ... She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal ... Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice."
If I were a thirteen-year-old girl today, I like to think that I would have a poster of Joan of Arc above my bed rather than Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber and be proud of my virginity - not as something puerile and determined by men who secretly lust to take it, but as something active and indicative of resistance to all forms of phallocratic tyranny.
Note: The lines quoted from Andrea Dworkin can be found in Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007), on pp. 104-06.
As Andrea Dworkin points out, for women inspired by her legend, Joan is a hero "luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship".
And central to this was her virginity; she chose to make war, not love; to be free, not screwed into place.
That is to say, her virginity was not intended to signify her purity, or preciousness as a sexual commodity to be traded. Rather, it was "a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked".
Dworkin continues:
"Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebelliousness and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. ... Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing ... She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal ... Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice."
If I were a thirteen-year-old girl today, I like to think that I would have a poster of Joan of Arc above my bed rather than Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber and be proud of my virginity - not as something puerile and determined by men who secretly lust to take it, but as something active and indicative of resistance to all forms of phallocratic tyranny.
Note: The lines quoted from Andrea Dworkin can be found in Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007), on pp. 104-06.
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