attempting to conclude whether or not a child has been sexually abused." Perhaps with time and study there will be another Vesalius, another skilled and lucky anatomist who is able to detect something we currently cannot, and reveal to us some of the mysteries of this notoriously inscrutable piece of tissue. Until then, all we can say with certainty about the hymen is that it remains an open book, its diagnostic usefulness as much a puzzle to us now as its very existence was for our ancestors.
* Although it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the many variants of this belief in depth, this is not as far-fetched an idea as it may seem. Similar notions have arisen in many cultures around the world. Even in the twentieth century, among indigenous Central and South Americans like the Cubeo of the Colombian Amazon, the Kayapo and Bororo of Brazil, and various rural Mexican populations, menstruation is often explained as the moon having sex with a woman, deflowering her so that she bleeds. Unlike a man, the moon only opens a woman partway, so that the moon must return to her and reopen her body each month until she marries. In these cultures it is believed that while the moon only opens the woman temporarily, a man opens her for good.
CHAPTER 5
The Virgin and the Doctor
"I tried to tell her once more," said the grandmother, "that marriage and children would cure her of everything. 'All women of our family are delicate when they are young,' I said. 'Why when I was your age no one expected me to live a year. It was called greensickness, and everybody knew there was only one cure.' 'If I live for a hundred years and turn green as grass,'
said Amy, 'I still shan't want to marry Gabriel.' "
—Katherine Anne Porter, "Old Mortality"
I HAVE, MORE THAN ONCE, seen young unmarried women, of the middle classes of society, reduced, by the constant use of the speculum, to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner, under whose care they fell, to institute an examination of the sexual organs," wrote physician Robert Brudenell Carter in 1853. The vaginal speculum, the infamous duck-billed contraption that features as best supporting actor in most gynecological exams, has been with us in one form or another since Roman times, holding open the vaginal walls so that physicians can see inside. It took the nineteenth century's sexual paranoia to turn the vaginal speculum into a weapon of mass feminine destruction.
The nineteenth-century controversy over the use of the speculum contains all the classic elements of interactions between virgins and doctors. Medical and moral claims regarding access to the body coexisted uneasily. The act of examining the genitals by touch was only barely acceptable by the mainstream medical standards of the day, and then only when absolutely necessary. It was by no means clear what sorts of medical need could excuse the more invasive speculum examination. Using the speculum was seen as intrusion into the vagina, not only by an object but by the male gaze, making every woman a potential victim not only of the speculum but of the presumably voyeuristic "speculumizer."
The use of the speculum did not, in other words, merely represent the possibility of a physically disrupted hymen, although that fear certainly accounted for some of the controversy. It represented a wholesale breach of the hortus clausus, the "enclosed garden" of the feminine body, the supposedly inherent purity and modesty that tradition generally, and nineteenth-century mores particularly, attributed to women.
As such, the speculum was seen as a first step on a perilously steep slope that could lead straight from purity to perdition. It physically opened a body that was supposed to be closed to all men save a woman's husband. Worse, the insertion of an object into the vagina was thought to give women ideas they
* Although it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the many variants of this belief in depth, this is not as far-fetched an idea as it may seem. Similar notions have arisen in many cultures around the world. Even in the twentieth century, among indigenous Central and South Americans like the Cubeo of the Colombian Amazon, the Kayapo and Bororo of Brazil, and various rural Mexican populations, menstruation is often explained as the moon having sex with a woman, deflowering her so that she bleeds. Unlike a man, the moon only opens a woman partway, so that the moon must return to her and reopen her body each month until she marries. In these cultures it is believed that while the moon only opens the woman temporarily, a man opens her for good.
CHAPTER 5
The Virgin and the Doctor
"I tried to tell her once more," said the grandmother, "that marriage and children would cure her of everything. 'All women of our family are delicate when they are young,' I said. 'Why when I was your age no one expected me to live a year. It was called greensickness, and everybody knew there was only one cure.' 'If I live for a hundred years and turn green as grass,'
said Amy, 'I still shan't want to marry Gabriel.' "
—Katherine Anne Porter, "Old Mortality"
I HAVE, MORE THAN ONCE, seen young unmarried women, of the middle classes of society, reduced, by the constant use of the speculum, to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner, under whose care they fell, to institute an examination of the sexual organs," wrote physician Robert Brudenell Carter in 1853. The vaginal speculum, the infamous duck-billed contraption that features as best supporting actor in most gynecological exams, has been with us in one form or another since Roman times, holding open the vaginal walls so that physicians can see inside. It took the nineteenth century's sexual paranoia to turn the vaginal speculum into a weapon of mass feminine destruction.
The nineteenth-century controversy over the use of the speculum contains all the classic elements of interactions between virgins and doctors. Medical and moral claims regarding access to the body coexisted uneasily. The act of examining the genitals by touch was only barely acceptable by the mainstream medical standards of the day, and then only when absolutely necessary. It was by no means clear what sorts of medical need could excuse the more invasive speculum examination. Using the speculum was seen as intrusion into the vagina, not only by an object but by the male gaze, making every woman a potential victim not only of the speculum but of the presumably voyeuristic "speculumizer."
The use of the speculum did not, in other words, merely represent the possibility of a physically disrupted hymen, although that fear certainly accounted for some of the controversy. It represented a wholesale breach of the hortus clausus, the "enclosed garden" of the feminine body, the supposedly inherent purity and modesty that tradition generally, and nineteenth-century mores particularly, attributed to women.
As such, the speculum was seen as a first step on a perilously steep slope that could lead straight from purity to perdition. It physically opened a body that was supposed to be closed to all men save a woman's husband. Worse, the insertion of an object into the vagina was thought to give women ideas they
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