Thrusting Toward Maturity: a hetero sex polemic

"The myth of the virgin land is also the myth of the empty land, involving both a gender and a racial dispossession. Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason. Within colonial narratives, the eroticizing of "virgin" space also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights and white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void."
--McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest 1995, pg 30.

This passage fully contextualizes my aversion to the term "virgin" as a descriptor for women's sexual development. The term assumes a dichotomy (pre-/post-penetration) and a necessary progression in an andro-centric and -determined direction: thrusting toward maturity. It belies the non-virgin (read: "experienced") figure's assumption of a conquering role where he inscribes his (sexual) values on the subordinate's body, planting a (phallic) flag in the valley of female power (the site of life force generation). This "male insemination of history, language and reason" that McClintock describes is the recreation of the "virgin" in the conquering male's own image, where the mile-marker of maturity is placed, according to his will, in the threshold of this tired "transformation." The history of the woman in a heterosexual union is rewritten, her identity is overhauled so she can now speak (however limited) from the privileged place of full "womanhood" accorded to her through this (w)rite of passage. A new language is also accorded: those who have been penetrated by authority speak with authority; she is authorized. Because she has demonstrated (or been ushered into) socially determined and sanctioned desire, she is no longer an irrational being outside of heteronormative culture. She fills her pre-determined role in sexual conquer-culture.

Heterosexual men bound to a hierarchical ordering of sexuality need to convert women, need them to subscribe to their language, their history and reason, or else they will be forced to admit a multiplicity of erotics and aims. When I was sixteen I was dating a guy named Rich who was older than me. When his insistence on sex was not met he was forced by his subscription to patriarchy to develop explanations. He asked if I would rather have a girl finger me. He asked if I had been molested as a child. His hypotheses at once threatened his seat of power (wedded to the chronology of sexual progression) yet simultaneously cast me as a dismissible Other (lesbian, molest victim/survivor) in order to shape my resistance (or natural state and aboriginal claim to my own body) to fit into his narrative and reasoning. The thought process: The only reason a girl would not have sex with me is because she is damaged (read: lesbian, assaulted, etc). He once told me that if he learned I were queer that he would finally accept that God exists so that he would have someone "to punch in the face." The failure, in essence, could not be his own. Therefore, even at the cost of his own philosophical underpinnings (atheism), he would look for a higher authority to blame for the rupture of his monolithic (godless) reality in order to avoid developing a critical erotic praxis.




*Please note: I am not addressing physically coercive sex or sexual assault in the piece above; I am in no way making the case that such an experience renders the subject "privileged because of the encounter." On a separate note however, psychic coercion is often the impetus for pseudo-voluntary participation in sexual conquest-culture and while the "privilege" of experience can be claimed, the silences inherent in her claim stem in part from the social script that necessarily casts her as converted, a receiver, and assigns her, ultimately, to subordination.