Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [50]
Perfect, I thought as I sat in front of my computer, peering down from my wobbly perch in middle age at what appeared to be a disturbing new trend. Just what our culture was missing: another talent-free route to fame and riches through self-exploitation! As I began to drown in alarming visions of what it would feel like to be a young woman who had set herself up for an intimate encounter with some unsavory ne’er-do-well, I also started scrutinizing the barrage of quotes from the eerily articulate Ms. Dylan. Her words were more rational than I’d expected, which made me even more uncomfortable.
“Like most little girls, I was raised to believe that virginity is a sacred gift a woman should reserve for just the right man,” she said to an interviewer at the time. “For me, valuing virginity as sacred is simply not a concept I could embrace. But valuing virginity monetarily—now that’s a concept I could definitely get behind.”
Since the beginning of recorded history, civilizations in all parts of the world have assigned immense immeasurable and mystical worth to virginity. The vestal virgins of ancient Rome were thought to wield such otherworldly powers that a condemned criminal needed only to accidentally lay eyes on one during his march to the gallows in order to have his life spared. Joan of Arc’s vow of virginity at fourteen was so highly regarded by God that He chose her to lead France in battle against England in the Hundred Years War. (Okay, yes, this was according to the voices in her head. Then again, we all know the bio of the woman God is said to have picked to become the mother of His kid.)
Even today, all these years later, having had sex remains one of the few things a young woman gets status points for not accomplishing. She will never, for example, get the same praise and positive reinforcement for not graduating from high school, not losing weight, or not learning to cook. Her window of opportunity for collecting rewards for her sexfree life remains very specific, however. The mystical powers ascribed to her purity have never been thought to grow stronger with age. Even back in 700 B.C., a vestal virgin who was recruited at the age of ten was out of a job permanently by the time she hit thirty. (On the plus side, at least in ancient times older virgins could all breathe a sigh of relief when decisions were being made about who to throw into a volcano.)
“Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” is one of those ridiculous homilies I remember hearing as a kid. It was, I suppose, a way for adults to scare hormonally charged girls like me into keeping their underwear on. But it never made sense to me because … were my friends and I supposed to be the cows in that scenario? I’d never thought of myself as a cow. Then again, it had never occurred to me to think of a cow as the CEO of a small milk-distribution center.
Considering how hard it always has been to get a good job right out of high school, to say nothing of how ridiculous tuition and interest rates on student loans have become, I could certainly see how this virginity-entrepreneur idea might begin to snowball. And so, of course, in the last couple years a teenager in Germany closed a deal for $13,000, and a New Zealander who called herself Unigirl aced the full $32,000 she needed for college tuition.
Contemplating this whole notion on the one hand made me queasy, while on the other it left me marveling at the improved level of self-esteem among these young girls relative to my own at that age. Because as coldly calculating, reckless, and unromantic as they appeared to be, my own loss-of-virginity story seemed, in retrospect, a lot more disturbing.
Natalie Dylan, Unigirl, and their fellow virginity saleswomen were the granddaughters of the sexual revolution, raised in the era of personal branding. This enabled them to view their various abilities as commodities worth a tidy sum. Whereas I, who grew up an interested but not too active soldier at the dawn of that revolution itself, could only see my own