<i>Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film Kyra Hunting (bio) Tamar Jeffers McDonald. Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2010. 296 pp. $27.95 (paper). The last fifty years of American and British history has seen rapidly shifting mores regarding sexual behavior, particularly youth sexuality. These changes are characterized by more explicit representation of youthful sexuality but also by a backlash exemplified by abstinence-education initiatives and “purity” movements. Film has played a central role as a chronicler of these shifts and countershifts. Film scholars have attended to these shifts in studies of films’ representation of homosexuality, female sexual agency, and sexual violence. In the introduction to the new anthology Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, Tamar Jeffers McDonald argues that virginity—a key site of controversy and contradiction—has not received the same deserved level of critical attention. Virgin Territory is intended to fill this gap. The book, international in scope, forgoes the usual thematic clustering of articles in favor of a loose chronological order. But distinct themes emerge. Of particular concern is the problem of depicting on film something that is virtually unrepresentable. This is addressed most explicitly in Gaylyn Studlar and Ilana Nash, who look at films made under the Production Code, by which the word “virgin” was itself unutterable. These and other scholars addressing this period of American cinema discuss the cinematic “signs” of virginity and the ability of such signs to be faked. At issue is the suitability of the state of virginity—as opposed to the act of losing that state—as the subject of a camera lens that more easily captures acts than states of being. Nearly all of the authors present the cinematic text as the object of study rather than using production- or audience-centered methods. Still, the book displays a variety of approaches within this broadly unified method. Several contributors, instead of focusing on a single film, look at a cluster or cycle of films. Ilana Nash’s “The Innocent Is a Broad: American Virgins in a Global Context” illustrates how 1940s films Janie and Kiss and Tell and 1960s films One, Two, Three and Take Her, She’s Mine connect the behavior of teenage girls and the securing of their virginity to two global conflicts, World War II and the Cold War. Nash shows that teen virginity was identified with national security. Teenage girls were represented as both the epitome of patriotism and as a potential threat to national stability. Timothy Shary’s “Virgin Springs: A Survey of Teen Films’ Quest for Sexcess” begins with a wider survey of teen sexuality in films dating as far back as 1926, but his main focus is the teen “sex quest” comedies of the early 1980s. He looks at several key, somewhat libertine films centering on the loss of virginity, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Once Bitten, and The Big Bet. Shary argues that later films, from those of the late 1980s through 2007’s Juno, geared to the post-AIDS moment, repathologize teen sex. The most ambitious essay is Andrea Sabbadini’s, which draws on Freud for an analysis of filmic representations of virginity. Click for larger view View full resolution Other contributions focus on stars whose personae were tied up with conceptions of virginity. Gaylyn Studlar’s “Velvet’s Cherry: Elizabeth Taylor and Virginal English Childhood” reads Taylor’s career as a child star in National [End Page 67] Velvet, The White Cliffs of Dover, and Jane Eyre as one defined by a sexualized preadolescent virginity that exploited the star’s “womanly” qualities. Taylor’s performance style and physical features resulted in sexual undertones that destabilized the conceit of the “pure” child. Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s essay examines the “perpetual virginity” that defined Doris Day’s star persona, using Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back as the key examples. These two contributions are among the strongest in the volume. Other essays take the more familiar form of studies of individual films. Nina Martin explores the relationship between virginity and mental instability in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. (This theme is picked up in Greg Tuck’s chapter on masturbation...