Signs of Virginity

Abstract

The notion that bleeding “should” accompany the “loss” of female virginity—a mode of thinking about virginity that encourages male sexual aggression—is so widespread that it is often taken for granted. Yet, Michael Rosenberg argues in Signs of Virginity that this idea is a specific product of Deut. 22:13–21. Deuteronomy’s violent virginity has held sway in Jewish and Christian circles more or less ever since, but Rosenberg points to two writers—Augustine of Hippo and the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud—who, even as they perpetuate patriarchal assumptions about female virginity, nonetheless attempt to subvert the emphasis on dominance bequeathed to them by Deuteronomy. Unlike the authors of earlier Rabbinic and Christian texts, who modified but fundamentally maintained and even extended the Deuteronomic ideal, the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine both construct alternative models of female virginity that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity, encouraging men to be gentle, rather that brutal, in their sexual behavior. Indeed, this vision of masculinity as fundamentally gentle fits into the broader idealization of masculinity propagated by both the Babylonian Talmud’s authors and Augustine, who reject what the latter called a “lust for dominance” as a masculine ideal.