Virgin: The Untouched History

I think my heart stopped for a second or two when I saw the byline at the top of the review of Virgin in the Washington Post.  The writer was none other than Marina Warner, eminent and brilliant British historian and the author of, among other things, standard-setting books on both the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc.  In short, someone who really knows her business, and one of the few people who really knows a fair swack of mine, at least so far as Virgin is concerned, too.

She liked it.  Quite a lot, in fact, although she had–as I would expect her to have–some quibbles as well. [Link]  She didn’t like the puns, disagreed with some of my choices in terms of the nature of some of the source materials I chose to examine, and took me to task for an error I tried pretty carefully not to make (in the Epilogue, the only place where I even mention FGM) and am not entirely sure I actually did make, though if it seemed like I did to her, I’m just going to take it on the chin.

But.  Having her call my work “vigorous and eclectic”?  Having her praise me for being “judicious when entering very difficult territory”?  And the final sentence, “At its best, this entertaining history is a passionate polemic, brimming with a genuine spirit of emancipatory activism.”?

Oh yeah, I’ll take that.  I’m overjoyed to.

I’m really amazed–and okay, pretty thrilled too — that every time I turn around someone’s sent me e-mail telling me that there’s another new review up somewhere.

This time it’s my hometown AAN weekly, the Baltimore CityPaper, weighing in with this review by Zak Salih [Link], my favorite bit of which is this:

Blank’s exploration of the evolution of virginal thinking, despite its female-centered focus, leaves little unexplored. The Virgin Queen Elizabeth I, ribald 17th-century poetry, greensickness (in which virginity caused some young women to become physically and mentally unbalanced), billboards in Baltimore calling for abstinence–it would all be exhausting if it weren’t so enlightening and, for reasons both prurient and educational, page-turning.

It made me giggle, because I’ve been described similarly by people who know me well… that I’d be intolerable at times if I weren’t (for reasons both prurient and otherwise, indeed) as engaging as I am.

Also, a nice tight review in the San Antonio Current, by a chap named Steven Kellman. [Link] Although he seems unsatisfied by my focus on the Western world (a choice I explain in the introduction, but who reads introductions any more?), he does seem satisfied by the book, or rather, the book seems to have done for him what I hoped it would: it answered a lot of questions, supplied a fair bit of interesting information, and made it very clear how much work is left to be done on the subject.  Which he notes, and it is a completely fair cop… but no one could possibly cover everything there is to cover in a single book, so I’m not bothered by it.

At Atomic Pop (3620 Falls Rd, Baltimore, MD (410) 366-1004)
Thursday, April 5 @ 7 PM — Free!

Here’s what the Baltimore City Paper [Link] has to say about it…

When you’re young the issue of virginity takes up a good deal of mental space. When will you lose it? To whom? Will people think you’re a slut if you do? Or a prude/loser if you don’t? Ally Sheedy’s Allison in The Breakfast Club said it best: It’s a trap. You want to but you can’t, and when you do you wish you didn’t. But once the deed is done, most people don’t spend too much time considering the subject. Virginity is generally only a big deal to virgins and the parents of teenage girls. Well, erotica maven and Baltimore transplant Hanne Blank has taken a thorough and detailed look at the history of not doing it in her new book Virgin: The Untouched History, which you can get signed tonight at Atomic Pop. Outspoken, irreverent, and sex-positive Blank is anything but a stuffy academic–though she’s taught at the likes of Brandeis University, Tufts University, and Whitworth College–insuring that, despite the book’s title, Virgin is anything but demure.

At Bluestockings, New York City [Link to Directions]
Wednesday, April 25th @ 7PM - Free

Join author Hanne Blank for an evening of virgins! “Virgin: The Untouched History” is the first comprehensive history of virginity. “Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor,” according to Publishers’ Weekly, Virgin is a treasure trove of information and insight about this often ignored aspect of women’s lives. Hanne Blank is the author of “Unruly Appetites.”

At the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA, sponsored by the Center for New Words
Friday, April 27 @ 6:30PM

From the simple task of determining what constitutes its loss to why it matters to us in the first place, Blank gets to the heart of why we even care about it in the first place. She tackles the reality of what we do and don’t know about virginity and provides a sweeping tour of virgins in history—from virgin martyrs to Queen Elizabeth to billboards in downtown Baltimore telling young women it’s not a “dirty word.” Virgin proves, as well, how utterly contemporary the topic is—the butt of innumerable jokes, center of spiritual mysteries, locus of teenage angst, popular genre for pornography and nucleus around which the world’s most powerful government has created an unprecedented abstinence policy. In this fascinating work, Hanne Blank shows for the first time why this is, and why everything we think we know about virginity is wrong.

A review in the Winnepeg paper by Julie Kentner, available online at What’s On Winnipeg, says “Blank delves into the history and nature of virginity in the Western world with unrestrained abandon” (among other very flattering things): read it here. [Link]

Virgin also gets a nice mention in an op-ed by Ruth Graham in the New York Daily Sun. [Link] The topic is male virginity, and as Graham points out, “The book doesn’t spend much time on male virgins, who have a much less rich cultural and clinical history than their female counterparts.”

However, Ms. Graham, should you happen to read this, allow me to take the opportunity to lead you (or anyone else curious about male virginity) to the chapter I wrote on male virginity. It was ultimately excised from the book at the advice of my editors when we were making massive cuts for reasons of length, but I’ve made it available online here, separated out into chunks by topic for ease of reading:

Male Virginity: A Contradiction in Terms?
A Male Hymen?
Every Sperm is Sacred
Evangelical Equality
Consider the Eunuch

Because really, who doesn’t like having their book characterized as “erudite and witty”?  This is a really sympathetic review, intellectually as well as in terms of the reviewer liking the way I said what I had to say, and makes me wish I could buy the reviewer a drink. [Link]

I wonder whether the Trib will review it now that the Sun-Times has?  In towns with two big dailies, one never knows.

In a somewhat curious reviewer choice, the New York Times assigned their shopping columnist, well-known cosmetic surgery aficionada Alex Kuczynski (she’s written a book about the cosmetic surgery industry), to review Virgin. [Link]

It’s a chatty and in parts quite positive review, but Kuczynski seems to have bounced pretty hard off of all but the most sensational bits of the book. The parts that seem to have sat least well with her are the parts that are concerned most with history and specifically history of ideas.

To which I can say only: de gustibus non disputandum est.

Reviews have been coming in pretty thick and fast, which is gratifying, and they’ve been saying some interesting (and flattering) things. Here are two lengthy and thorough ones recently published online:

Kelly Mayhew’s review in the San Diego Union-Tribune: Pure and Not Simple: Hanne Blank’s ‘Virgin’ is an impressive, disturbing look at the West’s sexual history

Anna Jane Grossman’s review in the New York Observer: The 2000-Year-Old Virgin: Purity, Chastity, Mystery

In the current issue of Australian fashion magazine Russh, journalist Rachel Hills has a feature entitled “The ‘V’ Word,” about the modern face of virginity.  It focuses on Australian women, but also deals with American subject matter.  Hills interviewed me for the piece, which is why I know about it (for some strange reason my local newsstand doesn’t have Russh on its shelves here in Baltimore), but I thought I would link to it here because I think it’s a nicely balanced piece, neither dismissive nor strident. [Link]

I particularly appreciate that Hills brought out the intense anxiety women often feel when called upon to explain their virginity.  The illustration she provides of a woman who, put on the spot, falls back on lying and telling fellow partygoers that she’s a devout Christian who doesn’t believe in premarital sex, even though she isn’t, is so telling.  I can’t help but be reminded of all the innumerable similar (maybe even identical) lies that have been told by queer men and women when asked why they aren’t married or aren’t dating anybody.  Interesting, no?

An exciting and very good review of Virgin in the March 23, 2007 edition of Entertainment Weekly (the issue with the film 300 featured on the cover).  Here’s what they had to say:

In her lively book on virginity, Blank writes with forthright gusto, “Short of catching someone in the act of sex, virginity can be neither proven nor disproven.”  She has a juicy time cataloguing cultural associations historical trends (the rise of Protestantism changed the face of virginity in Europe), and physiological factoids (did you know female llamas, manatees, and rats all have hymens?).  With a cheery, erudite, feminist eye, Blank argues that “today, ‘virgin’ tends to mean female unless stated  otherwise.”  The punny section heads (”Cut to the Chaste,” “A Recycled Box”) are groaners.  But who could resist “To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before”?
A-
– Lisa Schwarzbaum

I suppose the minus was because of the puns, but you can’t please everybody!  I confess to enjoying puns, and also to having used them to help provide a little levity in what was often a terribly depressing catalog of misogyny to write about.  Glad she could appreciate that some of them at least just weren’t resistable.

There’s a great, and extensive, review of Virgin coming up in the Sunday, March 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.  I’ve just gotten to see the preview PDF, and was very pleased to see reviewer Bob Blaisdell’s very thorough writeup.

I’ll be honest, the most gratifying part of the whole review, for me, were these two comments, coming from the middle third of the review:

Not allowing us to sneer, Blank continually reminds us of our own distressing cultural history… 

Fairer than most of us might be, Blank is scrupulous about trying to understand why and how ignorant theories have developed and established themselves… 

I’m so glad that these two things came across clearly.   Maintaining as fair and unbiased an authorial voice as I could was particularly tricky.  It has really made my day to read that my attempts at doing so were, at least as far as this particular reviewer was concerned, a success.