Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film

Virgin Territory

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

Ursinus College

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Lisa Parks

University of California–Santa Barbara

Virgin Territory

Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film

edited by

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Virgin territory : representing sexual inexperience in film / edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald.

p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3318-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Virginity in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. I. McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.

PN1995.9.V55V47 2010

791.43’6538—dc22

2009037066

Typeset by Maya Rhodes

Composed in Adobe Garamond and Myriad Pro

ISBN 978-0-8143-3695-3 (e-book)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

TAMAR JEFFERS MCDONALD

Gaylyn Studlar

Velvet’s Cherry: Elizabeth Taylor and Virginal English Girlhood

Ilana Nash

The Innocent Is a Broad: American Virgins in a Global Context

Timothy Shary

Virgin Springs: A Survey of Teen Films’ Quest for Sexcess

Rebecca Sullivan

Postwar Virginity and the Marjorie Phenomenon

Alisia G. Chase

One Very Chic Hell: Revisiting the Issue of Virginity in Bonjour Tristesse

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

Performances of Desire and Inexperience: Doris Day’s Fluctuating Filmic Virginity

Pete Falconer

Fresh Meat? Dissecting the Horror Movie Virgin

Nina Martin

Don’t Touch Me: Violating Boundaries in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion

Greg Tuck

Orgasmic (Teenage) Virgins: Masturbation and Virginity in Contemporary American Cinema

Lisa M. Dresner

Love’s Labor’s Lost? Early 1980s Representations of Girls’ Sexual Decision Making in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Little Darlings

Shelley Cobb

Was She or Wasn’t She? Virginity and Identity in the Critical Reception of Elizabeth (1998)

Andrea Sabbadini

The Window and the Door

Carol Siegel

Irreconcilable Feminisms and the Construction of a Cultural Memory of Virginity’s Loss: À ma soeur! and Thirteen

Celestino Deleyto

The New Road to Sexual Ecstasy: Virginity and Genre in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Bibliography

Filmography

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This edited collection has had a long gestation and has thus garnered a similarly long list of people to whom I owe a debt of thanks. Richard Dyer encouraged me to investigate all things cine-virginal during the years of my doctoral thesis. Robin Larsen, Alisia Chase, and Peter Thomas helped me work through issues of virginity and anthology organizing during and after a lunch at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in Atlanta. Barry Keith Grant and the anonymous reviewers at Wayne State University Press provided very helpful feedback. To all these I owe my thanks and appreciation.

Colleagues and students at Birkbeck College, University of London, Warwick University, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, Oxford Brookes University, and the University of Kent, as well as at various film studies conferences, helped by hearing my ideas as they developed and bore with me as my fascination for disproving Doris Day’s perennial virgin status showed no sign of waning.

I am indebted to the chapter authors for their patience with my edits and their high levels of enthusiasm for the project. Special recognition and gratitude is owed to Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press for her keen interest and support throughout, and to the Press’s Maya Rhodes and Carrie Downes Teefey and copyeditor Mary Tederstrom for their inestimable assistance in getting the book to print.

And, of course, it is to my family that I owe greatest thanks: my mother for taping odd films for me late at night; Chloë for helping me check the bibliography; and Chloë, Jessica, and Paul for sitting through innumerable bizarre genre products with me because they had some tenuous relation to virginity (The Dunwich Horror again, gang?). My love and thanks to you all.

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

Introduction

Does she or doesn’t she? Is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? Should she or shouldn’t she? Should I surrender? Have you been bad? As these lines from books, articles, advertisements, and films from the cusp of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate, virginity resists scrutiny and provokes interrogation.¹

Although these queries in the popular media can be dated from the 1953 publication of Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, popularly known as the Kinsey Report, a moment that propelled the figure of the desirable and desirous female virgin into the public eye, it would be wrong to assume that this was the first or only incidence of virginity becoming a hot, and hotly contested, topic in popular culture. As chapters in this book explore, virginity was already an important social trope during the early decades of the twentieth century as well as during the years of the Second World War, and it remains so today, despite superficial assumptions about permissiveness.

Indeed, virginity has had a long and vexed history and has never been a simple matter of an ontological either/or. It most often has a chronological, medical, legal, religious, or moral dimension to its loss; frequently its maintenance is seen as being as problematic as its relinquishment. While virginity may seem an old-fashioned object, it nevertheless remains one of perpetual currency within popular culture and the various cinemas that serve it.²

This collection thus considers examples of virginity as produced and marketed in film in order both to prompt discussion about the topic’s wider significance within culture and to consider the specific problems that an internal quality such as virginity presents when it is rendered in a visual medium. This collection is titled Virgin Territory for two reasons: first, because all the chapters within are about virgins and, second, because research into the topic of virginity in films is, remarkably, fairly untrodden ground. While there have been a small number of individual analyses of the subject of virginity in film, either looking at specific stars or offering sexually symbolic readings of film moments, to date there has been no comprehensive treatment of the topic.³ Thus this collection attempts to supply a lack and make a start at opening a dialogue on an important topic.

Virginity fascinates the writers of these chapters because of its paradoxical nature. At first glance, virginity seems such an obvious concept, so personal, private, and natural that it renders discussion unnecessary. But on closer examination, it becomes apparent that virginity is not personal but social, not private but public, not natural but constructed, and not obvious but invisible—a point that causes no less anxiety in the various contexts within the films that we examine here than it does for film as a medium itself, one predicated on showing. For this reason, while the essays here may take different time frames, genres, and star personae as their topics, they all center on examining how virginity—a lack of experience, a zero—can be made visible to audiences. Unexpectedly, perhaps, this turns out to be as problematic an aim in modern cinema as it was in earlier times when the Motion Picture Production Code in Hollywood mandated that such matters could not be openly discussed on-screen. The inclination to displace virginity from overt dialogue onto the bodies of the actors or the mise-en-scène, or both, can be seen operating not only in Hollywood films before the abandonment of the code around 1968 but also in modern films and those adhering to alternative cinematic traditions. The aim of this volume, then, is to destabilize assumptions about virginity by questioning how it can be performed, externalized, and rendered not only visible but spectacular, across a range of periods, genres, and performances, and through this destabilization to relate the virginity moments outward from their filmic texts to their wider social meanings.

Popular culture has long assumed an association, reckoned in both verbal and visual terms, of the virgin state with innocence and naturalness. This seems at first uncontroversial: we are all born virgin. Yet when questions are raised about who has and who has not relinquished this status—as has been a popular motif in melodramatic films since the beginnings of cinema—relying on outward signs proves misleading, reinforcing again the central question of this edited collection: How can a state before experience be rendered in a visual medium? Virginity becomes narratively interesting when its loss is threatened and therefore has been accompanied by prurience throughout cinema history. This collection seeks to explore the contrasts and continuities in film’s attempts at representing externally this internal state. Using films from different genres, cinemas, and historical periods, the following chapters study representations of virginity in relation to issues of femininity and masculinity; identity; the body; sexual agency and control; stardom and performance; the individual and society; and hysteria, trauma, and psychosis. All contributions thus investigate the strategies elected by various films to represent the unrepresentable, but beyond this the chapters are largely organized chronologically. It is hoped that readers will find connections and convergences, as well as variations of approach and conclusion, across different chapters. In addition, this volume has employed a conscious policy to permit recurrent mentions of some films, in the spirit of fostering more debate, rather than limiting them and thus perhaps implying that any single or final readings have been reached.

Throughout the chapters—and the films that are examined within them—virginity seems to prompt consideration around several core clusters of ideas: about power, desire, and agency or passivity; about the need for, and simultaneous impossibility of believing in, visible signs for this invisible state; about the symbolic register that virginity can operate within; and about the curious qualities it possesses that allow it both to figure as a metaphor for the coherence of the nation-state and to refer to a literal state of sexual inexperience.

The most commonly occurring clusters of ideas prompted by the figure of the virgin in this collection are those of conflict and context. The virgin appears, in chapter after chapter of this anthology, to mobilize conflicting arguments and points of view and does so in contexts that are always both entirely specific to the time of the particular film and connected to longer traditions of beliefs about purity, innocence, and goodness. The double standard and the technical virgin may seem to be uniquely 1950s concepts; yet essays here show that both are still pertinent to current films and the societies they reflect and serve. Virginity causes, and is revealed and made visible through, conflict: it appears through paradoxes and sets aspects of film style, such as mise-en-scène and costume, against the dominant narratives. Female virgins have been simultaneously enjoined to be go-getting, can-do national citizens yet remain passive and underachieving as girls; the maintenance of virginity is posited as both right for the girl and wrong for her partner. The liminality of the virgin on and as a threshold underlines her position as a central point in a moment it is impossible to sustain. Yet other films indicate that the true discovery of sexual knowledge is more properly understood as a process than as a state reflecting a stark either/or. Finally, virginity can be understood as a state that seems clear-cut but is actually deeply ambiguous—physically, literally, and symbolically—especially when it is taken as the shorthand indication of moral qualities. It seems, therefore, that, as Kathryn Schwartz notes in her provocative exploration of Elizabeth I, the issues raised by virginity have more resonance than we generally acknowledge: Perhaps the questions precipitated by the apparently archaic institution of virginity have had a longer and more potent shelf life than we might expect.⁴ While today sexual sophistication is assumed uniformly possessed by adults and seemingly ever younger and younger teens, virginity can be posited as an anomaly, pathologized rather than naturalized in any but the very young. It is this rarity value that creates the humor in a film such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the frisson prompting successive starlets such as Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Katie Holmes to market their uninitiate state as remarkable—for as long as it lasts.

Studying the Virgin

As noted, despite the fact that virginity (especially perhaps female virginity) has been such an important and contested area of cultural thought across many historical periods and national and social contexts, there has not been, to date, much academic consideration of the subject, either within film studies or indeed at all. While there are no direct precedents in film theory for this book, the collection does draw on existing research in various areas, including studies of virginity in literature; star, reception, and genre studies in film theory; sociocultural and cultural histories; and a newly emergent thread of academic interest, girlhood studies.⁵ Although this book does not assume that virginity is only connected with the teenage years or indeed with the female, but rather seeks to contest and problematize such assumptions, several of the authors have been inspired by this recent turn in cultural and film studies.

Quite late in the gestation of this project, two book-length treatments of the topic were published almost simultaneously: Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History (2007) and Anke Bernau’s Virgins: A Cultural History (2007). Blank’s book looks in detail at the historical, religious, medical, legal, and social definitions and meanings of virginity, uncovering fascinating facts (such as the precise dating of the discovery of the hymen: 1544) and provocatively arranging juxtapositions of information so that the story of virginity’s long history never seems random, despite its variations. Beginning with the difficulty of offering a definitive definition of the word and then proceeding to examine the changes in its meaning and importance from Old Testament days forward, Blank brings her topic up-to-date with brief explorations of film and television presentations of virginity, including asides on Little Darlings (1980, discussed in this book by Dresner and by Shary), The Breakfast Club (1985), Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). In contrast, Bernau does not offer such useful links from contemporary popular culture to the historical and religious convictions concerning virginity explored in the book—a curious fact, because she confesses in the introduction that she was drawn to studying virginity by researching the topic in film.⁶ Bernau is a medieval historian, and her work seems most comfortable when discussing virginity in that time period.

Both Blank and Bernau recognize the importance of the work of Kathleen Coyne Kelly, another medieval historian, on chastity and purity, and indeed we, the cine-virginologists of this collection, must also acknowledge the great debt we owe her. Kelly’s book may be titled Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, but it convincingly manages to link ideas, assumptions, and superstitions about the topic within current thought and popular media. Kelly traces in detail these ideas through to their visible conclusions in films from a range of periods, including A Summer Place (1959) and Hair (1979). She also, uniquely among these historians, considers the habitual association of virginity with certain female film stars; Kelly finds that virginity is assumed to be legible on the body of its possessor within cinema just as it is within the stories of saints and martyrs from the Middle Ages.⁷ That assumption, and film’s attempt to grapple with it in visual terms, informs the work of this edited collection, as various chapters consider the impact of the legible virgin body on the star personae of several actors, including Doris Day, the subject of my own chapter, whom Kelly specifically references.⁸

Another piece that has been of great interest to scholars in this collection is Kathryn Schwarz’s article The Wrong Question: Thinking through Virginity, in which she examines the myth of virginity surrounding the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. While Schwarz takes pains to establish that her article explores virginity specifically in a sixteenth-century context, her discoveries have great resonance with portrayals of virginity on film four centuries later, and not only in those films dealing specifically with Elizabeth (as with the 1998 film discussed in this volume by Cobb). Chiming with Kelly, throughout her argument she relies on the idea that both sexual innocence and sexual experience are written on the body and are legible to others. As Schwarz notes, however, Bodily certainties are precarious, vulnerable to the disruption of the processes that refer. This is the failing of the test: when the structures of proof become visible, proof itself is in some sense under scrutiny.⁹

Tested virginity does not merely cast doubt on its own means of examination, however. This external proof of an internal state is open not only to scrutiny but also to manipulation. Once there are considered to be external signs indicative of internal states, these signs can be manufactured without the internal referent on which they are supposed to rely. In other words, once virginity can be read, it can be faked. This has great significance for film, especially during those periods when the performance of the actor alone was relied upon to convey the sexual status of the character (as, e.g., in Production Code–era Hollywood when the word virgin was taboo).

Schwarz also seems to believe that virginity is significant solely as it pertains to women, calling it a vehicle for misogyny.¹⁰ In this view she is in agreement with Kelly and Blank; as the latter further formulates it, Virginity . . . is exclusively heterosexual. . . . [It] is also female.¹¹ While these assertions are based on how religious, medical, and legal doctrine have conceptualized the term, rather than the authors’ own beliefs, they all choose not to pursue the idea of the male virgin; this is understandable in the case of Schwarz, who deals with a specific female monarch, but in the book indexes of Kelly and Blank also there are scant or no references to the concept or possibility of the male sexual innocent. By contrast, this collection has actively tried to contest the assumption that the virgin is inevitably female, as the chapters by Shary, Falconer, Tuck, Sabbadini, and Deleyto illustrate.

Chapters in Brief

Initiating the collection, Gaylyn Studlar offers an in-depth consideration of the legibility of the star body as a site of virginity, using Elizabeth Taylor in her early 1940s roles as her exemplar. Studlar relates the virginal girl persona of the child star Taylor to both immediate wartime contexts and traditions within fine art that reach back to the Victorian period. Both settings play on the girl’s Englishness and the associative qualities evoked by that national allegiance at a time when America was especially receptive to the idea of preserving its ally’s independence and way of life. Studlar finds that the particular piquant quality Taylor brought to three child roles of 1944 locates itself in the paradoxically womanly beauty of the young girl. Conflicting notions of innocence and eroticism, passivity and agency, pricelessness and marketability, swirl around the figure of the beautiful virgin girl, which Studlar ties to Victorian art conventions, referencing Millais’ portrait Cherry Ripe, itself a mixture of innocence and awareness of the girl child’s allure.

Next, Ilana Nash compares paired films from the 1940s and 1960s, finding that the anxieties created by the national circumstances in which America found itself on both occasions—openly fighting the Second World War and more covertly waging the Cold War—can be mapped onto the figure of the virgin teenage girl, an ambivalent source of both prurient interest and disturbing tensions. Her chronologically paired virgins, Janie and Corliss, Scarlett and Molly, are all treated in some way as emblematic of the nation itself: hence fears of their bodily penetration can be seen as revealing a fundamental uneasiness about America’s safety and inviolability. Yet the teen girl is finally shown as the nation’s ultimate hope for the future. She can be the ideal citizen, as long as her passions are directed patriotically rather than personally.

Timothy Shary, in turn, provides the collection’s first examination of male virginity in his survey chapter, which investigates the cycle or minigenre of the teen sex quest film. From the 1920s onward, movies most frequently warned against the dire consequences of indulging teen lusts, but with the arrival of the Canadian film Porky’s (1982), the trope of sex-crazed boys begging to be Goin’ All the Way (1982), Losin’ It (1983), and hoping to find The Sure Thing (1985) began to proliferate. Later 1980s films abandoned the teen quest with the coming of the AIDS crisis, dwelling instead, as Shary indicates, on the romantic aspects of teen couplings or on their inevitable consequence, pregnancy. Larry Clark’s kids (1995) caused a crisis within the teen sex genre, as the film reverted to evoking associations with crime and depravity hinted at by 1950s exploitation shockers, but with documentary-style explicitness in the sex scenes. Although the quest film has subsequently returned, most contemporary films that show teen sex have done so in a downbeat manner; while the 2007 summer smash Superbad seemed to reverse this trend, the next popular success about teens, Juno (2007), returned the emphasis on teen sex to its predictable filmic conclusion, pregnancy.

In her exploration of a similarly widely popular text from the 1950s, Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Rebecca Sullivan maintains the focus on the significance of virginity to the couple, not just the female innocent. Sullivan’s chapter reveals that the 1950s, far from being the epitome of safe conformism, was actually a time of sexual challenges and exploration, for women as well as men, which anticipated in many ways the turmoil of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Sullivan compares the film to its source novel by Herman Wouk, finding that the movie text attempts to alter the moral center of the book through its casting and performance strategies, especially by having the charismatic star Gene Kelly play the male lead, Noel Airman, inevitably elevating him from feckless wastrel to tortured artist. Ultimately, however, the film cannot resist compliance with the traditional double standard, finding the maintenance of Marjorie’s virginity as vital for her as it is damaging to Noel.

Alisia G. Chase also analyzes a film in comparison with its source novel, examining Bonjour Tristesse (1958) for the ways in which director Otto Preminger exploited the contemporary notoriety of the book, and his juxtaposition of its scandalous young author and ingénue star, in order to secure audience interest in his film. Chase further reveals how Preminger attempted to satisfy both the young women who had bought the infamous novel and their mothers, who would prefer the amoral heroine Cecile to be punished in the film for her sexual precocity, as she is not in the book. Chase’s chapter explores Preminger’s manipulation of codes around the legibility of the virgin, using mise-en-scène and costume to carry affirmations of sexual sophistication and chicness for the young women to enjoy, as the narrative trajectory seems to plod toward a more punitive resolution for Cecile in order to appease their mothers.

My own chapter attempts to problematize the habitual, unthinking fixing of the label virgin to the star persona of Doris Day by pinpointing the moment of the label’s attribution. Looking at moments of performance from two films, Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961), my analysis seeks to demonstrate that virginity was a status that Day consciously adopted for her character, Carol Templeton, in the latter film, but it was absent from her role as Jan Morrow in the former and had not been a factor in her characters before the 1961 film. By analyzing in detail the vocal and somatic choices made by the actor in two comparable scenes from these films, in which the central female excitedly anticipates, or tremulously debates, her sexual union with the desired male, my chapter challenges the notion that Day always plays a virgin and also inquires both how playing a virgin—outwardly manifesting an internal quality, an invisible lack of knowledge—could be executed and why the assumption of virginity is so often made about the star.

Pete Falconer then switches the focus to the horror film, considering how the figure of the virgin has become so associated with and necessary to the genre that films such as Scream (1996) and Scary Movie (2000) can parody the usage of the trope. Falconer, with his discussion of the Final Girl, who is the ultimate prey and the vanquisher of the psycho killer throughout the genre’s most iconic films, pushes further the association of the virgin victim with the killer, finding that both present bodies that seem inviolable, closed.¹² His chapter also considers how virginity can be conferred on a subject symbolically even though literally it may be missing: Blade (Wesley Snipes), the reluctant vampire hero in Stephen Norrington’s 1998 film, for example, is probably not literally a virgin, but his refusal to indulge his own bloodlusts conveys upon him a kind of purity, as the chapter elucidates.

Continuing the association of virginity with horror, Nina Martin embeds Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) not only firmly within generic borders but also within the specific context of the swinging sixties. In doing so, Martin investigates how the post-Pill period fostered different, but no less urgent and intense, problems for women seeking sexual autonomy in the 1960s from those in the previous, apparently more repressive, decade. Repulsion’s heroine, Carole, attempts with increasing hysteria to cling to her youthful innocence despite attracting male sexual attention; as she begins to imagine threats of invasion and penetration being mounted against her body, her apartment becomes psychically figured as the contested terrain, to be guarded against male intrusion by any means necessary. The chapter considers how the film manipulates the spaces of the apartment in order to portray the unraveling of Carole’s sanity and how editing techniques in particular are employed to enable the viewer to share the protagonist’s trauma.

Greg Tuck’s chapter problematizes the notion of virginity by coupling it with masturbation as a topic in recent Hollywood films across a range of genres. The chapter considers how masturbation affects the subject’s sexual status, finding provocative associations between self-pleasure and innocence, and experience and madness, coalescing around the figure of the desirous virgin. Looking at a number of contemporary Hollywood films, beginning with American Pie (1999), Tuck explores the ontological position of the seemingly paradoxical orgasmic virgin, finding that sexual experience is shown in such films as unfolding along a continuum rather than hinging on one single event. While not compromising virginity, then, masturbation does conflict with maturity: adult masturbators are seen to regress to adolescence (as with Lester Burnham’s morning shower indulgences in American Beauty [1999]), prompting Tuck to conclude that contemporary cinema deems solo sex only excusable as practice for the main event, heterosexual procreative intercourse. Paradoxically, according to Tuck, only a masturbating mother (Betty in Pleasantville [1998]) can risk self-pleasure without sacrificing her adult status.

While Tuck’s examination concludes that masturbation is still seen in too highly pejorative terms to have a wholly positive association with virginity, Lisa M. Dresner investigates a rare moment in recent history when female sexuality was portrayed in a positive light and also as a fitting topic for a film’s narrative. Against a familiar background of films detailing boys’ quests to end their virginity, also considered by Tuck and by Timothy Shary, Dresner considers the more unusual female quest film via two early 1980s examples, Little Darlings (1980) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The female protagonists setting out to gain sexual experience in these films are shown to be obsessed with sex, turned on by nubile bodies, prepared to plan and scheme to achieve their goals: to be very much, then, like their male equivalents in the boy-focused films. The female-centered narratives, however, also tacitly illustrate that the most enjoyable aspect of the quest comes from the homosocial bonding it necessitates rather than any heterosexual pleasures derived from sex achieved.

Shelley Cobb shifts the focus from America to Great Britain but maintains the perspective on the association of the female virgin’s body with the nation-state in a specific time frame, as considered in previous chapters. Cobb explores the contemporary reception of the 1998 film Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, discussing the significance of the film’s portrayal of the queen’s relinquishing her sexuality as a political move. Showing the young queen first engaged in an active sexual relationship and then making an overt decision to become a virgin were the two most contentious facets of the film, which Cobb relates to late 1990s debates in British society around female agency and desire and which she links to the unlikely figures of Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher, and the Spice Girls.

In his intervention, Andrea Sabbadini brings to film studies insights from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Considering two sexually uninitiated characters, one female and one male, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, Sabbadini examines the employment of Freudian notions about virginity in art cinema, as well as examining the use of virginity as an organizing theme within two European films, A Short Film about Love (1988) and Stealing Beauty (1996). In this divergence from the tenor of the book’s largely American focus, Sabbadini neatly reminds us that virginity has been a vexed topic in societies and periods beyond those of the American 1950s, with which it is so often and oversimply associated.

In addition, the book’s final two chapters confirm in different ways the importance of virginity outside of the 1950s: Carol Siegel considers two films from the cusp of the new century, one American and one French, which both deal with very young women’s sexual initiation. By contrast, Celestino Deleyto concludes the collection with a chapter that reverses both the gender and age of the main protagonist against societal assumptions.

Carol Siegel devotes her attention to two recent female rites-of-passage movies, À ma soeur! (2001) and Thirteen (2003). While both deal with the coming-of-age of female protagonists, Siegel finds more radical variation between the texts than just their respective American and French provenances. She considers the films’ different approaches to virginity, and to female sexual agency and desire, as emblematic of the types of feminist thinking they display. The two texts thus represent the tensions between American and French feminisms at the turn of the new millennium. In Thirteen Siegel finds all the traditional associations of virginity still applied in contemporary cinema to enshrine the female and confer innocence and purity upon her, particularly when this purity is under threat. By contrast, the overt horrors visited on the virgin heroine of À ma soeur! are, challengingly, held by the film to be less damaging than growing to adult femininity within traditional patriarchal structures.

Finally, the collection concludes with Celestino Deleyto’s reading of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), a key text in the latest round of filmic obsession with the subject of first sex and one that raises the usually troubling specter of male virginity as a central topic for comedy.¹³ Here Deleyto finds a rare positive instance of the inexperienced man and then proceeds to relate this figure to the romantic comedy genre more widely. Deleyto sees the tonal mixture of the film, merging scatological and explicitly sexual talk and imagery with more common romantic notions, as part of a move seemingly to open the genre more overtly to male audience members. Furthermore, he reads this blending as indicative of a flexibility, an ability to incorporate new elements as they become popular, within the romantic comedy genre, which bodes well for its continued viability in the cinematic marketplace. Deleyto’s concluding piece indicates that, while the topic of virginity remains a recurrent one in cinema, new approaches toward this perennial favorite are still possible.

It bears repeating that this edited collection is intended to inaugurate exploration of this fascinating topic rather than offering any definitive last words on it. There are many other films, historical periods, national cinemas, and specific stars that could very fruitfully be examined by focusing on what part virginity plays in their meanings. Finally, of course, virginity and the ways in which it is portrayed and envisaged continue to have importance, as sexual initiation remains a recurrent topic of interest and currency in films and wider media culture. For example, in late August 2006, Sky Television launched the show Virgin Diaries. Accompanied by the tagline There’s a first time for everyone, the program followed various teen virgins as they attempted to gain sexual experience, debating with themselves and each other, on camera, the rights and wrongs of losing it. Britain’s BBC2 dealt with the topic in a comparable talking-heads format in May 2008: Virgin Memories, though presented from a somewhat more sober perspective, also chose to invite people to speak about their sexual debut[s], asserting that each first time has a different tale to tell.¹⁴ In addition, incidents at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards show fostered interest in the topic when the evening’s compere, British comedian Russell Brand, criticized popular Disney Channel boy band, the Jonas Brothers, for prominently displaying their promise rings, only to be attacked in turn by female teen singer Jordin Sparks (It’s not bad to wear a promise ring, because not everybody—guy or girl—wants to be a slut).¹⁵

Such evergreen currency of the topic will likely remain, as each individual’s relinquishing of virginity is an inevitable rite of passage into adulthood and as successive societies continue to struggle with how the individual’s sexual identity, desire, and agency intersects with cultural concerns and decrees. As Kathryn Schwarz notes, the state of sexual innocence retains an ambiguous and paradoxical charge: [Virginity] is in the past, in the future, in the negative, in the subjunctive, an impossibility, a provocation, a performance, a lie.¹⁶ This collection explores in detail these ambiguities and paradoxes.

Notes

1. Does she or doesn’t she? Clairol, 1955, advertising slogan for Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath; Is she or isn’t she? Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis and Associates, 1962), 64; Will she or won’t she? Jules Archer, Playboy, January 1956, 13; Should she or shouldn’t she? Nora Johnson, Sex and the College Girl, Atlantic Monthly, November 1959, 60; Should I surrender? Lover Come Back (dir. Delbert Mann, 1961); Have you been bad? A Summer Place (dir. Delmer Daves, 1959).

2. Kathryn Schwartz, The Wrong Question: Thinking through Virginity, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2002): 1.

3. For examples of those focused on specific stars, see Georganne Scheiner, Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee: Beyond a White Teen Icon, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 2 (2001): 87–106; and Tamar Jeffers, Pillow Talk’s Repackaging of Doris Day: ‘Under all those dirndls . . . ,’ in Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, ed. Rachel Moseley (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 50–61. For an example of a study offering a sexually symbolic reading, see the perceptive chapter by Peter Krämer on the relationship of the heroine’s loss of virginity to the sinking of the ship in Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997) in "Women First: Titanic, Action-Adventure Films, and Hollywood’s Female Audience," in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, ed. Kevin Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 108–31.

4. Schwartz, Wrong Question, 5.

5. For studies of virginity in literature, see, for example, Joanne Stroud and Gail Thomas, Images of the Untouched: Virginity in Psyche, Myth and Community (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute for the Humanities and Culture, Spring Publications, 1982); Lloyd Davis, Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993); and Marie H. Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press). For sociocultural and cultural histories, see Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy: From Athena to Elizabeth I, Leonardo Da Vinci, Florence