The High Cost of Hymen

From the UK Telegraph article:

Natalie Dylan, 22, claims her offer of a one-night stand has persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.


Last September, when her auction came to light, she had received bids up to £162,000 ($243,000) but since then interest in her has rocketed.


The student who has a degree in Women's Studies insisted she was not demeaning herself.


So my initial reaction to this is: "And what?" We live in a culture where "virginity" is part of the brand image of a host of young Pop-Tarts (& I mean you, too, Jonas Brothers) and marriage is fodder for Reality TV. "Dylan" is selling hers off to one person, one time... Brittany and Co. sold theirs to Western Culture en mass and are still getting royalties.

& what kind of loser pays someone for their virginity anyway? What are they going to 'do' with it?

But then I got to thinking...

Dear Ms. "Dylan",

I don't think what you are doing is going to earn you any points with "nice" society, but you know that all ready. You also know that the same men who write degrading things about your character will log off the Internet and merrily go off to a strip club or Hooters or whatever with nary a thought in their minds about it being in any sort of contradiction with what they say about you. I'm a Women's, Gender, and Sexualities Studies major too, so you and I share an understanding about the nature and significance of sex that is fundamentally different then most of the population. Bluntly, they (tend) to think it is 'real' in the "essential" sense that "iron" and "gravity" are real, and we (tend) think of it in a multidue of ways but rarely as anything so solid. But this mutual understanding also means that I know what you are up to.

You say to the Telegraph: "It's shocking that men will pay so much for someone's virginity, which isn't even prized so highly anymore." Please, Ms. "Dylan," pull the other one its got bells on it. I've gone to some academically "soft" schools in my day, but unless they give out Women's Studies degrees based on attendance at Sacramento State, you are being blatantly disingenuous. You could tell me the worth of virginity in several cultures in several periods of time, organized by the structural organization of said societies and stratified by race and class. You've probably written papers and papers on it. You've probably made jokes about hymens in boxes and hymen reconstruction for the amusement of your academic advisers. That isn't a condemnation. I make jokes about douching with Lysol and the ability of Sex & the City to impregnate teen girls and Lucille Bogan to MY professors all the time.

So I am confidant that you know that you are not really selling YOUR "virginity" and certainly not "sex" -though those are two obvious externalities to the exchange. What you are peddling is a 'masculinity-enhancement' to some pathetic man who is $243,000 worth of deluded and insecure. And so far you have had 10,000 bidders. And people say it is feminists that have a low opinion of men! I say you have 10,000 bids and $243,000 that say men are totally on the ball with devaluing themselves.

Then you tell Telegraph... this really slays... "My study is completely authentic in that I truly am auctioning my virginity but I am not being sold into this. I'm not being taken advantage of in any way." You, Ms. "Dylan" are not the one being taken advantage of and that anybody would suggest such nonsense shows that they majored in something that lacked a post-modern theory component. As a hymen-and-all virgin, you avoided the mutual masturbation that is sex in high-school, and the drunken nonsense that is sex-in-college. Your reward for such chastity is that you are going to get a nice check for what is usually an awkwardly mediocre-at-best sexual experience. What you are taking advantage of is a cultural preoccupation with, and fetishization of, "virginity" as well as a thoroughly debased concept of masculinity. 10,000 bids say the road to masculinity is this girls mucus membrane.

The funniest part of all this is that we both know that there is no such thing as a virginal Women's Studies major. There are plenty with hymens, no doubt, but is it really that bleeding little scrap of membrane that is so attractive? I don't think so. Afterall, these are the same people who are terrified of menstrual blood. It's the image of dewy innocence and tender insecurity they are after, and what it says about them. He is the only man who has ever touched her, the only one that has made her feel this way. She gazes up at him above her, her eyes and body wanting even as her lips twitch with a hint of anxiety about what is inevitably to come. "You'll be gentle, won't you?" she asks him bashfully, "It's my first time." Right. I don't think Women's Studies majors do that. Except for when they are role playing, and probably always with a safe-word. Once upon a time virginity in females was prized because it ensured paternity, but I don't think $1 of that $243,000 is going towards the purchase of a legitimate heir.

It's ok, Ms. "Dylan," I'm not going to tell any of your bidders, and I doubt the current owner of the million you have been "saving" your "precious flower" for reads this blog. The thing that gets to me, more then your bidders, is the reaction you have engendered. In a private e-mail, once youngish man expressed his contempt to me regarding your "auction" saying that what he found "contradictory and appalling" was that you "want to choose from among the top bidders... whom gets to perform the deflowering." He didn't like that you set conditions for the auctioning off of your virginity, and accused you of the horrible crime of attempting to "to maintain some semblance of dignity in the process". He also accused you of wanting to have your cake and eat it too, "[a]s with most adolescent minded modern women". He then launched a tangent on "homoghey culture," which I will use as a label in future posts because I thought it was so cute. Can you blame him? He isn't a Women's Studies major!

You know what though, Ms. "Dylan," I don't think he really meant any of it. I think girl-virginity meant something special to him, either about femininity or masculinity, and that the concept of your virginity-auction hurt his feelings. As Women's Studies majors, we know how huffy people get over anything that problematizes the discursive systems in which their identity-politics are embedded. For anybody who isn't a Women's Studies major, that sentence just means that when you call into question people's idea of themselves (as a heterosexual, man, Cuban, queer, Christian, liberal, etc) it makes them very uncomfortable. Why shouldn't it? People say that "we all die alone," imagine the profound alone-ness of somebody who cannot say "I am X, I am Y, I am Z,"to themselves. They have to just "be," they can't name themselves. One of the first stories in the Bible is about Naming!

Anyway, Ms. "Dylan," people are saying mean things about you and they won't stop, and I may not offer you a Morality Award, but you aren't in need of one from me. I get what you are doing. You are causing major trauma to some pernicious, useless, but deeply held beliefs about masculinity, and though I don't think this will be a learning experience for the men you are effecting, you are doing it AND turning a profit, which is something that Women's Studies majors rarely do. I'd love to read your paper.

Sincerely,
Jane Awl

1/28/09: Update

Good blog on this at the Feministing Community.