This book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.
See in particular the section on "The Virgin Heroine in the Romance Novel" which contains "This Modern Love: The Virgin Heroine in Historical Romance Fiction" (pages 131-167) and "Middle Class Morality: The Virgin Heroine in Contemporary Category Romance Fiction" (pages 169-209). Another section which may be of particular interest to romance scholars is "Virginity Loss in the Twenty-First Century and Reactions to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey" (pages 213-242).
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This book revolves around the virgin of the title: the consummate virgin, a paradoxical ideal that can only be embodied retrospectively. She is the now ex-virgin who followed the romantic heterosexual script for virginity loss, as dictated by the paradigm of compulsory demisexuality, and whose socially appropriate virginity loss demonstrates that she embodied virginity “correctly”. It is worth noting here that virginity in Western society has historically been tied up with whiteness, and that women from other racial backgrounds are often excluded from embodying consummate virginity, regardless of their individual sexual activity. This book’s focus on consummate virginity means that to a large extent it has become primarily a study of white women’s bodies. However, it also opens up future directions for scholarship: much more study is needed on how these discourses impact women of non-white backgrounds. (vii-viii)
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The second genre, which is the subject of this book’s third section (Chapters 6 and 7) is the popular romance genre. This is a genre dominated by women, in that it is primarily written by them and focused largely on the experiences of heroines. It is also a genre where compulsory demisexuality is the governing paradigm, as the link between sex and love for women is one of the genre’s defining features. These chapters examine the ways in which female virginity loss has been portrayed in this predominantly female-authored space, and the ways in which this has evolved across two different subgenres.
The final section of this book considers the figure of the virgin reader, and the way she is implicated in and haunts texts with virgin characters. Chapter 8 explores modern cultural phenomena Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, with particular attention paid to the ways in which readers responded via Amazon reviews to the portrayal of virginity in the texts. (viii)
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women in the contemporary English-speaking world have become subject to a discourse of “compulsory demisexuality”, which positions female sexual activity that takes place outside of an emotional relationship (usually a committed romantic relationship) as unnatural, deviant, and wrong. Sexual desire and romantic love are tied together in this socially sanctioned image of female sexuality, to the extent where the two are indistinguishable. (4)
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Compulsory demisexuality is one of the most dominant cultural sexual scripts for women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially when it comes to virginity loss. It is a discourse which has become increasingly visible as new evolutions and multiplicities in modes of sexual citizenship have put pressure on it: it is not coincidental that it is only now that we have the term “demisexual” to describe a sexual attraction specifically tied to emotion and affect. Just as the term “heterosexual” is surprisingly recent, first used in 1892 in C. G. Chaddock’s translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s Psycopathia Sexualis (‘Heterosexual: adj. and n.’), enabling us to recognise alternative possibilities to it, so too the term “demisexual” allows us to identify this particular cultural narrative. It is a very new term, one not currently officially recognised by institutional arbiters of language such as the Oxford English Dictionary, but its emergence—the need for a word to describe people only attracted to those with whom they share a strong emotional bond—signals the way in which some underlying societal assumptions are becoming visible. (11)
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In this chapter, after a brief overview of the history of the scholarship on romance, I examine historical romance fiction; that is, romance fiction written by contemporary authors set in the past, often in nineteenth-century England. In the next chapter, I examine the contemporary category romances published by Harlequin Mills & Boon. (132)
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When reading virginity loss scenes in the historical romance, we must be cognisant of this fact: while the society defined, per Regis, within the novel is historical, the governing paradigm is modern. This is arguably one of the key pleasures of the historical romance, and before we can move on to examining virginity loss scenes more closely, we must consider the implications of the historical setting. (142)
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as the genre has developed, historical heroines have become more and more comfortable both expressing and acting on their sexual desire. This growth in sexual agency has distinctly affected the way in which virginity loss is portrayed.
This is perhaps clearer nowhere than in the growing amount of historical heroines who willingly engage in premarital sex. [...] While the social rules that govern appropriate female sexual behaviour within the texts remain essentially the same, the evolution of contemporary sexual politics are mirrored, allowing even the most virginal of heroines to become desiring agents. (151)
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historical romance, despite being set in the past, presents an image of love that is essentially modern. Compulsory demisexuality is imposed on the historical setting, and is thus figured as universal and transhistorical—as the way romantic love was, is, and always will be. (169)
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In the 1980s, we also begin to see the growing popularity of the non-virgin heroine. Some romance lines began to require that the heroine had previous sexual experience—for example, Berkley’s Second Chance at Love line focused on heroines who were not virgins. However, there was still an emphasis on a specific sexual morality. (198)
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To put it in simple, irreverent terms: the sacrificial function performed by the virginity loss scene becomes crucial to the narrative, because this is where the heroine gives the hero love as a sexually transmitted disease. (205)
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simply to write Bella off as passive is to miss one of the key textual pleasures of the Twilight saga, one that I contend is key to its popularity. Bella is a desiring subject: she is open, explicit, and unashamed about her desire for Edward, and is the sexual aggressor for most of their relationship. In this sense, she is active, not passive. The work of sexual resistance so often ascribed to girls is taken off her shoulders by Edward, who takes on the role of gatekeeper. There is an innate conservatism to the girl’s desires being placed so firmly in male hands, and it can be read, like so much other cultural discourse, as casting girl sexuality as a problem that needs to be controlled and restricted. However, the radical removal of this burden of culturally required resistance also allows Bella to be open in her expressions of desire and her pursuit of pleasure with Edward. (220)
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What is particularly interesting when we look at these reviews is that few of them come from the girl readers that are the locus of all this concern. Instead, the impetus behind many of these reviews is to invoke this concern, positioning the reviewer in an educated space above the ignorant virginal reader. Even where reviews are purportedly by girl readers, many seek to set themselves apart, worrying about whether or not these books are appropriate for their age bracket. (222)
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While, taken literally, there are certainly problematic and pernicious aspects of both Twilight and Fifty Shades, the cultural anxiety expressed over these texts is largely concern over the effect they might have on virginal readers. It casts the virgin as passive and exploitable, denying her agency and capacity for intelligent decision, and instead insists that the texts she consumes be didactic, full of culturally approved messages when it comes to sex, lest she be duped by the portrayal of the romance it is assumed she so desperately desires and jeopardises her capacity to, in the future, inhabit the retrospective identity of consummate virgin. (235)
Here's the abstract:
See in particular the section on "The Virgin Heroine in the Romance Novel" which contains "This Modern Love: The Virgin Heroine in Historical Romance Fiction" (pages 131-167) and "Middle Class Morality: The Virgin Heroine in Contemporary Category Romance Fiction" (pages 169-209). Another section which may be of particular interest to romance scholars is "Virginity Loss in the Twenty-First Century and Reactions to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey" (pages 213-242).
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