“The virginity issue… it’s a personal decision and it reflects how I feel right now about myself,” Britney Spears told an interviewer in 2002. “There are so many emotions involved that I would like to be able to wait until I know I’m with the right person and I’m married” (‘Spears – I’m Still A Virgin’). Here, we can see Spears aspiring to embody what I term in this book the image of the “consummate virgin”, a potent figure in the imagination of the English-speaking Western world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is an image which can only be inhabited retrospectively, as the consummate virgin is one who has lost her virginity in what is considered to be a socially and culturally appropriate way, and thus can be deemed to have done virginity “correctly”.
This is a difficult identity to embody, and not just because of the temporal paradox inherent in it. In the Anglophone West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, virginity loss is burdened with a host of tensions which the virgin must negotiate. We can see some of these in the quote from Spears above. Virginity loss is a “personal decision”, but one that is often made with reference to social institutions. The weight placed on the decision to lose one’s virginity is considerable, and so virginity loss should not be undertaken with anyone except the “right person”, ensuring that it becomes a consummation of a romantic relationship. This “right person” is a figure in an affective and romantic discourse: with virginity loss, there are “so many emotions involved”. But how do you know who the “right person” is?
Spears was the most famous of the high-profile virgins who emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s, but she was by no means the only one. Jessica Simpson, Julianne Hough, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato also spoke publicly about their commitment to ongoing virginity, represented, in some cases, by wearing a purity ring (Womble; ‘Julianne Hough’; Fuentes). In 2008, Miley Cyrus said, “I like to think of myself as the girl that no one can get, that no one can keep in their hand. Even at my age, a lot of girls are starting to fall and I think if [staying a virgin] is a commitment girls make, that’s great” (Thomson).
The symbolic public deflowering of many of these high-profile virgins is a familiar story to anyone acquainted with contemporary pop culture. After her career faltered, Cyrus remade her image in 2013, shedding her virginal aura and transforming herself from Hannah Montana, “every girl in America’s best friend” (Farrow), to a sexualised star who gyrated in a flesh-coloured latex bikini at the MTV Music Video Awards and swung naked on a wrecking ball in the film clip to her song of the same name. Spears’ transformation was not so abrupt—her virginity was perhaps already more sexualised than Cyrus’, with her appearance as a sexy schoolgirl in 1998 in her first film clip and the inclusion of lyrics like “I’m not that innocent” in her early works—and her virginity remained a topic of public discussion for many years. “I really wish I never would have said anything to begin with”, Spears said at a press conference in 2002, expressing her displeasure at a (yet another) question about her ongoing virginity. The same year, her long-time boyfriend Justin Timberlake, with whom she had recently split, publicly stated that she was not a virgin: “and I should know,” he reportedly said (‘Britney Is Not A Virgin’). The virginal image, so successful for Spears early in her career, proved disastrous for her in the longer term, when it could no longer be maintained. In 2003, when she publicly admitted to sleeping with Timberlake, she told an interviewer:
It was two years into my relationship with Justin. And I thought he was the one. But I was wrong. I didn’t think he was gonna go on Barbara Walters and sell me out… The most painful thing I’ve ever experienced was that breakup. We were together so long and I had this vision. You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life together (Vineyard).
The cases of Spears and Cyrus were both bound up with religious notions of purity, and Christianity was important to both stars’ images as they performed their virginity publicly. However, it would be a mistake to read their performances solely through a religious lens, as both women were and continue to be stars on a global stage, operating as icons of white Western womanhood. Similarly, it was not only in religious spheres that the resonances of their public virginity losses were felt; rather, these were broader popular cultural phenomena.
The two stars dealt with virginity loss differently. Cyrus’ virginity loss was both non-specific (while she was romantically linked with figures like Liam Hemsworth, he did not play a major symbolic role in her cultural defloration) and actively scripted. When Cyrus’s career flagged, she essentially remade herself as an anti-virgin, making a clean break from her virginal image and symbolically embracing the “fall” she had condemned five years earlier. She demolished her Hannah Montana image and reconstructed a new one, characterised by carnivalesque display and regular discussion of sex. Notably, earlier discussions of Christianity and purity disappeared from the Cyrus lexicon.1 Figuratively, the good girl became a bad girl in the cultural imagination.
Conversely, Spears’ public virginity loss was not planned or scripted, and it was specific, tied to her ex-boyfriend Timberlake. Instead of breaking with her virginal image the way Cyrus did, Spears took an alternate discursive path and mobilised a discourse of true love and betrayal. Implicitly, she argued that her virginity loss was acceptable, even though she had broken her promise to wait until marriage, because she believed that she was in love with Timberlake, that he was the “right person” she had gestured to a few years earlier, that he was “the one”. In essence, she sought to assert her right to the title of consummate virgin, despite the fact her relationship with Timberlake had failed, in order to maintain her claim that she had embodied virginity in the “right” way.
Compulsory Demisexuality and the Consummate Virgin
Demisexuality is a relatively new term in contemporary sexual vocabulary. It is often discussed as a point on the asexuality spectrum, and where it has been addressed in scholarship, it has hitherto largely been in asexuality studies (see, for instance, Pinto; DeLuzio Chasin; Przybylo). Stacy Anne Pinto describes demisexuality as “a concrete sexual orientation that falls between asexual and sexual on the continuum” (335). Generally speaking, the term demisexual refers to someone who “indicates an interest in sex that develops only sometimes and only after one feels very close and intimate with someone” (Przybylo 182–83): that is, they only experience sexual attraction to a person with whom they have formed a close emotional bond (DeLuzio Chasin 422). Julie Decker notes that demisexuality is not about “willingness to have sex”, but instead, “about capacity to experience sexual attraction”; however, she also notes that the usefulness of the term has been debated, because “some people – especially women – are rewarded with social approval for having sex only after the emotional bond develops” (locations 948–52). In other words, while demisexuality is a sexual orientation (one certainly not shared by all people), not a moral position, it is often ascribed to women as a whole, as both natural and moral.
Adrienne Rich famously theorised “compulsory heterosexuality”, the notion that heterosexuality is culturally encoded as compulsory for women, thus positioning non-heterosexual activity as deviant. In this book, I build on Rich’s notion to argue that women in the contemporary English-speaking world have become subject to a discourse of “compulsory demisexuality”, which positions female sexual activity that takes place outside of an emotional relationship (usually a committed romantic relationship) as unnatural, deviant, and wrong. Sexual desire and romantic love are tied together in this socially sanctioned image of female sexuality, to the extent where the two are indistinguishable.
I contend that this discourse is applied particularly to female virginity loss, via the image of what I have termed the “consummate virgin”. This is an identity that can only be embodied in retrospect. The consummate virgin has lost her virginity in the right way at the right time to the right person, and thus can be said to have “done” virginity properly. Importantly, “rightness” here is bound up with romance: it is a notion governed by the paradigm of compulsory demisexuality. A woman who loses her virginity in the wrong way, and who thus does not ultimately embody consummate virginity, becomes a figure of some suspicion. Just as Rich argued that, under compulsory heterosexuality, non-heterosexual activity was positioned as deviant, behaviour outside the demisexual paradigm—particularly at the moment of virginity loss, which, as discussed at length in this book, is a moment laden with cultural anxiety—positions the woman who undertakes it as problematic, troubling, and transgressive.
This is clearly evident if we return to the case of Britney Spears. Her much-publicised virginity positioned her not only as someone adhering to the dictates of compulsory demisexuality, but also to older, even stricter dictates which made marriage the point at which sex became acceptable for women. She was imagined as a figure of admiration, a role model, an example. When her virginity was lost, however, this standing was immediately called into question, and Spears had to find another way to recuperate her image. It was to the ideas inherent in compulsory demisexuality that she turned: the entanglement of sex and love. Losing her virginity to Justin Timberlake was justified and acceptable, she argued, because she was in love with him. Unlike Miley Cyrus, who embraced a new identity as a bad girl, deliberately positioning herself as a transgressor, Spears attempted to reclaim post-virginal good girl status and cast Timberlake in the role of the rake. She loved him, and he deceived her, not just by breaking her heart, but by “selling her out” and publicly tarnishing her virginal reputation. In this narrative, he is clearly the villain, because she genuinely believed her virginity loss was a consummation of something good, right, romantic, and lasting, and he betrayed her trust.
The ongoing fascination with the virginity of figures like Spears highlights that although the discourse around the “right time” for virginity loss might have changed, female virginity loss itself is a locus of cultural concern. It is symptomatic of larger societal concerns about women’s bodies and what they do with them. While the shift from marriage to love as legitimating force for female sexual activity is a major one in sexual politics, the fact that legitimation is still needed is telling. Women need an “excuse” to have sex, while men do not (and have not). The widespread emergence of the discourse of compulsory demisexuality in the twentieth century demonstrates the ongoing sexual double standard inherent in Anglophone Western culture. Sex is still imagined as something that can harm women, perhaps irrevocably, if not undertaken in carefully controlled circumstances.
This is nowhere more obvious than in the case of female virginity loss, where, for women, “loss” is arguably the most important word. While the term “virginity loss” is also applied to men, the moment is typically figured more as gain than loss, a moment where a kind of symbolic manhood can be attained. For women, on the other hand, this notion of loss remains pervasive. The female virgin body has regularly been figured in Western history as an object in a patriarchal economy of exchange: an economy in which men are the subjects and the owners, not objects themselves. While male virginity has been virtually irrelevant, female virginity has been crucial, imbued with a value virtually independent of the woman herself. Although Western society has become at least nominally more sexually progressive, female virginity loss ...