I noticed that there has been some recent conversation regarding incels, and while skimming a few comments I noticed an interesting exchange revolving around the inadmissibility of prostitution as a means of escaping virginity in the incel ideology, as well as other musings about the nature of virginity in manhood. As such, I would like to present: On The Construction of Virginity, an essay that examines (from a largely psychosexual viewpoint) the symbolic and ideological foundations of virginity and the objectification of women that I hope may either shed some light on what may be lurking behind certain incel rhetoric, or at least spark a new direction of thought.

Anthropologically, in many societies (this does not apply universally, however the societies it does apply to are the ones that have the deepest ties to cultural ideas of virginity) the shift to accumulative wealth structuring came in tandem with a shift to patrilineal title and inheritance. In order to ensure the purity of patriarchal lineage, it became essential to guarantee the sanctity of the womb from the spectre of the Other, the Usurper.

Now this doesn’t fully explain our current understandings of virginity—for instance, pre-marital virginity is unnecessary under this model, with all that matters being that after marriage the womb is consecrated to the Husband—but it deeply informs how virginity is structured in the cultural psyche.

This imposition of patrilineal title, the adoption of, in Lacanian terms, the Name of the Father, is the inculcation of the Law of the Father into the successive generation, which serves as the reproduction of the Father. The Son is the image of the Father, securing a legacy, and thus a form of self-reproduction and self-reincarnation. How this is instantiated and then reinscribed successively through the generations in the psyche is part of what gives rise to modern virginity.

Without going too deep into psycho-sexual production, the establishment of the ego, thus the individual, first begins with the Name. From there a series of identifications and taboos, reinforced through strictures and punishment, and thus pain, set the boundaries of the psyche’s projection within the borders of the skin. The most famous and oft-cited of these taboos, is, of course, the Oedipus complex.

The first caring and committed relationship, the first identification, is with the Mother. In the earliest development of the ego, the self must be differentiated as a separate body from that of the Mother. Because of the heteronormative drive of the patriarchal superstructure, the Naming and the first relationship with the Mother becomes the site of the violent enforcement of sexual differentiation.

For the Son, it is required that sexual identification with the Mother be strictly punished to establish identification with the Father. This identification with the penis as the crux of sexual morphology leads to the inscription of the Phallus in the imaginary as the symbol of the Universal Subject.

At the same time, the Son sees the relegation of the Mother beneath the Father in the patriarchal hierarchy as a threat. The Mother is stripped of personhood, and the reason for this refusal of a place as a Subject is the lack of the Phallus. This is the obverse of the Oedipal complex: the Castration complex. To identify with the Mother is to be castrated of the Phallus, and thus to lose position as the Universal Subject and instead become abjected, to become an Object.

There are two important consequences to the workings of these dual complexes.

Firstly: the establishment of the Phallus as the symbol of the Universal Subject. In this way, Woman is always already a sexual Object, for the lack of the Phallus negates her ability to be taken as a sexual Subject in her own right.

Secondly: the establishment of the Mother-Whore dichotomy in sexual relations. The Mother is the caretaker, respected and loved. However the Mother is stripped of sexual identification. This creates a sexual tension between the Son and the Woman. To be respected and loved is to be elevated to the role of the Mother, a role which cannot fulfill the sexual desires of the Son. Therefore in order to have sex, the Son must first degrade the Woman, to separate her from the role of the Mother and thus reassert her position as a sexual Object. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Circling back to the role of the Phallus: the Phallus is that which the Son (we have now moved past the place of early psycho-sexual development, so from here-on I will refer to the Man) possesses. The Woman exists as the negation of the Phallus, the receptacle which generates the Phallus through its own negation. The implicit threat of castration and thus emasculation, while simultaneously the site of masculinization and reinscription of the Man’s status as sexual Subject. Only through the Woman’s lack of Phallus is the Man’s Phallus ensured, and thus the sex of Man comes to exist through the sex of Woman. In this way, the Man possesses the Phallus, while the Woman is the very Phallus that the Man possesses.

This is reinscribed in sexual relations with the Man taking sex, getting sex from the Woman, while the Woman is the sex itself, the Woman is that which is taken. This leads us to the establishment of virginity.

For the Man, to be a virgin is to have not yet possessed the Phallus. Only through taking sex, and thus possessing the Phallus, can the Son transcend childhood and become the Man, ie. The image of the Father. And so a virgin Man is an emasculated Man, or at least a not yet masculinized Man, and thus the threat of castration, of losing the position of Subject and becoming abjected, looms.

If the Woman is the sex that the man must take, then we see how a prior loss of the sex devalues the sex. For every partner the Woman has, sex has been taken from her, and thus less sex remains. To take the sex of a virgin then, is the ultimate masculinating act, for the virgin has a full and unspoiled sex. To take the sex of a not-virgin then, is to come into possession of a diminished Phallus, to be less masculine. In this way, the Man sees the not-virgin as an affront to his own masculinity, for it is his own Phallus—the Woman-- which has been diminished.

In this same way, the Woman is degraded and devalued through having her sex taken, her position as a sexual Object reinscribed. This brings us back to the Mother-Whore dichotomy. In order for a Woman to be taken as a sexual Object, she must be degraded, removed from the role of Mother and relegated to the role of Whore.

This is compounded in a society that has belief in Woman as the source of sin, Original Sin, and even further in those who elevate the role of virgin Mother to the divine. Even without the theological trappings, there is a distinction between the Mother, a role that is inherently virginal, and the Whore, the role of sexual Object that is always already degraded. In the role of Whore the Woman is considered to be the public Phallus, the Phallus that can be taken. It is a diminished Phallus, and confers diminishing masculinity, and is thus not deserving of respect.

The role of Mother is, conversely and seemingly contradictorily, a virginal role. A Woman who is degraded is not extended love and respect, which is reserved for the virginal Mother. In this way, the Man seeks a partner who will be degraded for the sexual act, conferring sex to the Man and elevating his masculinity, abjected and shown her place as sexual Object. It is integral to the patriarchal superstructure, then, that this Woman be the sole possession of the Man, that he take a whole and complete Phallus from her, that he may separate the degradation of their sexual intercourse from her elevation into the role of the virginal Mother (when she occupies this role, the Man will often look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction).

There are, as I mentioned, theological justifications for these roles, though the theological justifications stemmed from the formation of the roles to begin with, in a cyclical reinscription that reified the dynamics successively through the generations and naturalized them as being always already human nature.

I want to talk again about the role of the Whore. Where the Mother is the private Phallus, the owned capital within the patriarchal household that confers a total Phallus to the Man, the Whore is the public property, the public and diminished Phallus, always already degraded. This conception of nonvirginal women is integral to the project of masculinization, for a man requires taking sex and possessing a Phallus even before marriage, and after marriage once the Woman assumes the virginal role of the Mother.

With the rise of the enclosures, Woman was relegated through these coercive relationships to an abject position as sexual Object, as property (private or public). Virginity served as a sexual enclosure, barring women from the communal lands of sexual intimacy and pleasure, removing them from the realm of sexual Subject at the same time they were removed from the realm of economic Subject.

The economic degradation of Woman mirrors the sexual degradation. The two functioned in tandem to ensure the compliance of Woman in the new economic and sexual system. Not only was Woman degraded to sexual Object, Woman was degraded to economic Object.

The public Phallus, the public Woman, the public sexual-economic Object: this was the role of the Whore, and this role became, quite literally the only position that many women could fill. This gave rise to sex work as an economic field of activity for large swathes of disenfranchised women. Always already degraded, theologically and thus morally cast as undeserving of respect, unable to be loved, and lesser than others, the Sex Worker was stigmatized.

The way that stigmatization works is like a disease, that is to say that stigmatization is communicable, that it is sticky. The Marked trait that is stigmatized is sticky, which is to say that association with one who is Marked can cause the stigmatization to transfer to the one who associates. For an example, think of the way that the Marked trait of being queer is stigmatized: those who associate with queer people run the risk of that queerness sticking to them. By associating with queer people, someone might also be stigmatized as queer themself, or at least queer-adjacent.

To be associated with the Sex Worker, then, is to submit to the potential for being stigmatized in turn. There grew within society a cultural association between the Sex Worker and being unlovable, unworthy of respect, and ultimately unclean.

In the Victorian period, as the enclosures increased, as economic abjection came to encompass the entire class of Woman, sex work exploded. There were unprecedented levels of impoverished and disenfranchised women turning to sex work to feed themselves and their families. Because the Mother is meant to be virginal, the Sex Worker was demonized as an unfit Mother, and the family of the Sex Worker was stigmatized as morally unclean. With such large-scale association with sex work among the working poor, however, this tactic began to lose its efficacy: too many people associated with sex workers, visited sex workers, and were related to sex workers for the stigmatization of being morally unclean to have the cultural hold it once did.

This is when the problem of sex work was relegated to one of public health. As part of a wider expansion of state policing, public health was enfolded into the surveillance and administrative regimes of the state. This marked the shift from the stigma of sex work as morally unclean, to the stigma of sex work as physically unclean. This discourse was quickly disseminated, aided in part through actual sexually communicable diseases.

However, the shift to Sex Worker as unclean was not one driven by a desire to protect health, it was one driven by a desire to reassert stigmatization, control reproduction, and reinscribe the virginal Mother as the desired role of the Woman, suppressing her economic Subjectivity by vilifying sex work as a carrier not only of communicable stigma, but of communicable disease. This time period marked also a rise in conversations about the purity of blood, and an increase in cultural fears of corrupted blood and corrupted bodies. The Sex Worker, in this climate, was always already corrupted, a body that could never be pure and never clean.

This has fed into the pathos that demands a virginal Woman, a whole, pure, uncorrupted Phallus. A corrupted Phallus became not only less masculinating, but now carried with it the threat of a tainted Phallus, an emasculation through an act that is meant to do the opposite. The Woman who was not-virginal, then was not only a source of diminished sex, but was a source of potentially corrupted sex, bringing with her a diminished Phallus and the threat of castration, that originating complex that features so heavily in the assumption of the Phallus as the Universal Subject. To possess the notvirginal Woman is to risk taking possession of the corrupted Phallus, and brings with it fear of castration, a fear of the destruction of the penis.