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This piece arose out of my personal discomfort, as both an asexual woman and a politically liberal woman, with the connotations of "virgin" any my being labeled as such. I also have Asperger's syndrome, which means (among other things) that I am a terrible liar and therefore have not been able to keep up with sex conversations by supplying fictional narratives, the way some of my peers have. My goal was to explore, and ultimately put to rest, my own insecurities about the stigma of virginity as well as its patriarchal implications.
This project also relates to transgender in that I am transitioning - in this case, a lateral transition from one kind of female-bodied, birth-assigned female ("virgin") to another ("not-virgin") - by declaring myself something ("not-virgin") that I, medically and experientially, am typically considered not - just as the MTF transsexual declares herself "woman" even though the medical community sees her as male (or at least "not-woman") and even though some of her experiences have been from a male perspective. The ability to self-define and self-identify is at the forefront of transgender theory, as transpeople overstep the essentialist categories once thought to constitute identity.
Two papers influenced the creation of this project. The first is "Toward a Theory of Gender" by Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, specifically the authors' theory of the cultural genital. The genitals someone is believed to have typically influence our perception of that person's gender more than the genitals they actually have, since people are usually clothed in public. A transwoman who has not undergone SRS might have a physical penis, but she does not have a cultural penis, either because she passes as a genetic woman or because her gender presentation indicates to others that she is female-identified: "I know that Greta has a penis, but that's irrelevant, since she's really a woman" (Kessler and McKenna, in The Transgender Studies Reader, p. 177). This believed genital is what Kessler and McKenna call the cultural genital. The cultural genital influences not only how we interpret person's gender, but also how we expect hir to behave (owners of penises are expected to be more dominant and assertive whereas owners of vaginas are expected to be more nurturing and receptive, say). By confessing that I have not had penetrative sex, I give myself a cultural hymen (whether or not a physical one is present). With the cultural hymen comes an expectation of innocence, naïvete, social awkwardness, repressive religious views, prudishness, and/or physical unattractiveness. By voicing my distaste for the virginity system and my belief that labels of "virgin" and "not-virgin" are inappropriate classifications for an asexual, however, I hope to radically change the cultural hymen, part of my cultural genital, into something different. I call this third category the political genital.
The political genital, born out of aggressive self-definition, has far-reaching implications. Our hypothetical transsexual woman, asserting her political genital, need not, then, perform a hyper-feminine gender in order to be read as possessing a cultural vagina. She need only declare her womanness - through activism, art, poetry, visibility. Ideally, she would not need to pass to be read as female. Similarly, an asexual woman who has opted out of sexual culture, and therefore out of the virgin/not-virgin binary, need not possess a cultural broken hymen in order to be read as experienced, socially competent, freethinking, and/or attractive, and she should be allowed to embrace these qualities without having to prove herself.
The second paper is "Transforming Feminine Categories: Genealogies of Virginity and Sainthood" by Susan E. Stiritz and Britt-Marie Schiller, which discusses the valuing of virginity in an historical context as a system used by men to police the activities of their daughters and sisters, in order to preserve their desirability as brides. The equation of "saved" virginity with female desirability is still so strongly imbedded in many cultures that cosmetic surgeons will surgically restore a woman's hymen after it is broken - meaning she gets to experience again the pain of first penetration, while her partner gets to experience the increased pleasure of a "tighter" vagina. The parallel with the practice of infibulation, which is wholly condemned as mutilation by most Westerners, is striking: both practices alter female genitals to improve sensation for the male partner while making intercourse painful for the female. Ironically, so much normal variation occurs within the structure, size, shape, thickness and presence or absence of the hymen, and in the amount of stretching, tearing and bleeding experienced by each woman at or before first penetration, that some theorists assert that its identification as an organ is a misnomer, a re-inscription (by male-dominated medicine) of an innocuous part of the vagina as the only honest physical token of a woman's sexual trespasses. The myth of the hymen is quite convenient within Western science, a tradition which values "proof": the state of the hymen proclaims the truth about a woman's behavior, even when her words do not.
On a more visceral level, this piece is about stigma. My film features a character so determined not to be clad in white - that is, not to be labeled "virgin" - that she discolors her white clothing with household items. Just as her clothing has become colored by staining, she has been colored throughout her life by her experiences. She is not a blank slate or a sealed receptacle, and she will not be seen that way regardless of her lack of penetrative sexual experience. Although it is easy to analyze away the social construct of virginity (or race, class, gender, disability, et cetera), it is impossible to erase the effects of stigma on real-life subjects.