By Ebony Taylor
My roommates and I spent our undergrad years discussing ways to make more money. The simplest solution was to get jobs. However, one of my roommates thought get rich quick schemes were the best option. One day, she brought back a pamphlet for selling blood platelets. Another time, we spent the night investigating how much you could make selling your eggs. Finally, she landed on the mother of plans: selling virginity. “Except,” she told me, “I’m Black, so no one will believe I’m a virgin.”
Even though my roommate was joking, I’ve thought about the sentiment behind her statement. To be Black, as she understood it, was to be shaped in the image of a Jezebel – a lascivious woman. Virginity therefore was not simply a state of being. Rather, to be a Black virgin was in some sense a political statement. But what kind?
Virginity is a cis-centric social construct which rests on the poor understanding of the hymen in concert with the patriarchal view that women’s bodies are the domain of men. White women embrace sexual liberation with this in mind. Rightfully, they resist the notion that a woman’s value is found in her sexual activity. Sexual liberation is then often associated with sex and sexual expression free of condemnation – to own one’s body and assert oneself as a sexual subject.
This is not exclusive to white women. My favorite representation of the sexually liberated woman is Nola Darling of Spike Lee’s 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It. The problematic, liberated protagonist of the film is viewed as a “freak” and a “sex addict” by her lovers who are men, but she is unapologetic about not being a “one man woman.” Instead, she has sex with the same uncommitted selfishness normally associated with men.
And yet, this version of liberation seemed distant as I considered my roommate whose virginity appeared to isolate her from the world of sexually liberated women even as she lay claim to the centrality of choice in her relationship to her body. After all, to be a sexual subject is to assert oneself as the owner of one’s body not necessarily to embrace free love.
In an effort to write an article about sexual liberation, respectability, and the shaping of Black womanhood, I asked my friends “Can virginity be liberation?” The strongest answer I received for the negative was that to focus on virginity as a form of sexual liberation was to detract from the goal of the movement. After all, there wouldn’t have been a need for a movement towards sexual liberation if virginity was not prized and associated with women’s worth.
There is validity to this point, and the strength of sexual liberation is in how it works to dismantle the notion that sexual activity can be used as a metric of value. This makes space for virginity without centralizing it. It says: yes. It is possible to be sexually liberated and choose not to have sex.
But what this view lacks is a historical understanding of virginity. It sees guilt-free sex or as some might say “having sex like a man” as a goal to be attained. Whereas, virginity is treated as a default. But this has not been the case for Black women who have been excluded from the realm of being “sexually pure.” In fact, as Hannah Rosen and other historians have argued, virginity was historically understood as the domain of white women alone.((1Rosen explains that in the antebellum south courts defined rape as the “defiling of a man’s marriage bed.” As slaves could not marry, enslaved women could not be raped. This, argues Rosen, placed Black women in the position of “unchaste and thus undeserving of state protection.” Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in The Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 10. Furthermore, the narrative of Black women as naturally licentious followed them after emancipation leaving Black women vulnerable to sexual violence and excluding them from categories of sexual purity.))
So when we talk about women’s value as ascribed to their sexual actions, we must also recognize that this option has not historically been given to Black women. Sexual liberation calls for a dismantling. We must dismantle an ideology that claims a (cis) woman’s worth is dependent on how much she uses her vagina. We must dismantle the view that virginity is a biologically codified category rather than a socially and patriarchally constructed one. We must dismantle the cisgendered, heteronormative view of intercourse which allows society to perpetuate its (mis)understanding of virginity.
However, we must also acknowledge that Black girlhood is shaped in a tradition which strives to rebel against white views of Blackness. At times, this falls into respectability politics and does harm to how Black girls relate to their own bodies and forces them to take on the burden of racial responsibility. That said, if we don’t acknowledge how some Black girls learn to be women who embrace virginity as an antithetical to white notions of Blackness, we miss the ways that Black girlhood is problematically shaped by the history of Black women and sex.
In the end, I agree. Virginity should not be the center of our discussions on sexual liberation. But we must begin the work of discerning how virginity makes its own political statement in the lives of Black women.
It reminds me of Maria Ellis Wynn who, interviewed in the mid-90s, explained to an oral historian the importance of being regarded as a “lady.” For Wynn, one great Jim Crow injustice was that this category was denied to black women. Liberation, therefore, was not the freedom to act as a sexual subject, but the freedom from the category as sexual deviance.
Ebony Taylor is a Florida native currently writing and studying in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @EbonyPTaylor.
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