Like a Virgin – Whatever That Was

July 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Virginity has mattered as far back as we can tell. It is introduced in Genesis . . . and is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Hebrew Bible.

So says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his recent book How Pleasure Works. Bloom is certainly no creationist who believes that our species dates back only a few thousand years, no older than the people in the Bible. He believes in evolution, and one of his arguments is that evolution accounts, in part, for what we find pleasurable.

Pleasure draws upon deep intuitions . . . it is smart, and . . . it is evolved and universal and largely inborn. [my emphasis]

Culture and society, in Bloom’s view, matter only in that they vary the foods that feed these largely inborn hungers.

Belgian chocolates and barbecued ribs are modern inventions, but they appeal to our prior love of sugar and fat.

Since the importance of virginity goes back “as far back as we can tell,” it must be like the love of sugar – largely inborn. In that same chapter on sex (you couldn’t very well write a book called How Pleasure Works and not have a chapter on sex), he writes,

The obsession with virginity is one of the ugliest aspects of our sexual psyche.

I could be wrong; Bloom is, after all, a Yale professor – smart and well-educated – and the book jacket has accolades from heavy hitters like Steven Pinker. But Bloom’s “as far back as we can tell” seems to be ignoring most of our time as a species on this planet. That truncated time span is important for the idea that this obsession is an inborn part of our psyche.

For a few hundred thousand years, we humans lived as hunter-gatherers – small, egalitarian bands, nomadic and with fluid membership . . . and not much concern for virginity. The societies that prize virginity are agricultural and pastoral. They have been around for only the past 15,000 years or so. Agricultural societies may seem like the “real” humans, but that’s only because they account for all of our recorded history. Pre-literate hunter-gatherers left no accounts their canons of morality.*

So maybe the concern with virginity is not inborn or universal but just a patriarchal blip in a much longer history, a fad that captured our imaginations for a few thousand years and fit well with other ideas but is now fading. Today, as societies move from agricultural to industrial or post-industrial modes, people come to regard virginity as akin to the plow – a curious, antiquated instrument not really of much use at the office. Even in an advanced country like the US, it is those regions closest to their agricultural past (and present) where virginity is most likely to be seen as a necessary sign of virtue.

So when I read that sentence about the obsession with virginity being part of “our sexual psyche,” I am tempted to ask, “What you mean ‘we,’ patriarchal agriculturalist?”

*Update. True, we have no information about the morals of humans who lived long before the dawn of recorded history. But we do have accounts of hunter-gatherers in the past few centuries, and these do not provide much support for the idea that virginity has always been a universal and eternal obsession.