Envious Virgins and Adolescent Sexuality: The (Un)Importance of the Hymen in Virginity Studies

After reading Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In)significance of the Hymen, I found myself reflecting back to my own "first time" as a cisgender, heterosexual girl, and my decidedly tepid reaction to the experience. I distinctly remember thinking, "well I got that over with" in response to what amounted something of a non-event in my young adult life. While debriefing with my girlfriends about the pain (the only moment when the notion of the hymen touched my consciousness in the experience), I remember one friend asking how it was otherwise—and my response was: "what do I have to compare it to?" I think I was more relieved that it was done, as I could then move on to the trickier aspects of navigating my first real romance with a much more experienced teenage boy.

This idea is reflected in the title of part 1 of Virgin Envy, "Too Much Pain for Such Little Reward," and is in keeping with one of the questions the volume explores: "what would happen to the study of virginity if we moved the discussion away from the hymen altogether?" (5). Virgin Envy acknowledges the complex relationship that society has with the concepts of purity and virginity, how it imposes unrealistic value on both without acknowledging the very real experiences of youth who are navigating their own experiences in this arena.

Published in November 2016, Virgin Envy is edited by Jonathan A. Allan, Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory, in collaboration with Cristina Santos and Adriana Spahr. It consists of eight chapters that examine virginity through a variety of lenses. These include chapters on virginity tests (Amy Burge); cultural representations of the hymen (Jodi McAlister); virginity in popular vampire series such as Twilight (Jonathan A. Allan and Cristina Santos) and True Blood (Janice Zehentbauer and Cristina Santos); male virginity, the trope of death and homosexuality (Kevin McGuiness), and "effeminophobia" (Gibson Ncube); female purity in Bollywood (Asma Sayed); and the performativity and politics of virginity (Tracy Crowe Morey and Adriana Spahr).

The collection complicates the question of what it means to be a "success" in the context of one's virginity, and whether or not the so-called loss is in fact a victory. As the editors ask, just how important is the hymen to this discussion anyway, as it refers only to "the most normative, cisgendered body of the female" (4)? What about cisgender heterosexual males who are virgins? The three editors explain that as they began to explore these questions, even more began to emerge. "Does a gay man lose his virginity the same way that a straight man does? How does a bisexual person lose virginity? Twice?" (5) Throughout the eight chapters of this book, we come to recognize that virginity itself resists definition, as each subsequent discussion forces one to imagine how the tensions between "virgin" and "non-virgin" actually interact.

Virgin Envy is the second title in the "Exquisite Corpse" series, following Allan's earlier volume, Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Virgin Envy is structured in four parts, taking the reader on a journey beginning with a discussion of the physical aspects of virginity, including part 1's "Too Much Pain for Such Little Reward" and part 2's "Blood, Blood, Blood … and More Blood," toward a more social and political consideration of the topic in part 3's "Men Be Virgins Too: Queering Virginity" and part 4's "F*ck: They Entrapped Us in Social Issues and Politics."

A few recently published young adult novels explore these questions in their own way...