Table Of ContentJ
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“Virgin Territory addresses an important issue in a society obsessed with abstinence M
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programs and born-again virgins by offering witty, insightful, and profound o
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examinations of the portrayal of virginity in film. This volume is a fascinating a
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read and a groundbreaking addition to film and gender scholarship.”
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—Rebecca Bell-Metereau, professor of English at Texas State University and author of
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and sexuality. This volume explores how films reflect patterns of sexual i Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film
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expectations and behaviors from a new and exciting perspective.”
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—Hilary Radner, foundation professor of film and media studies in the Department of e Violating Sexcess Vi Cinema an Construction
Media, Film & Communication Studies at the University of Otago and co-editor of r Decision Making rg Horrord Ridgemont
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Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series in Performances Don’tns irgin
Fi Wasn’t Broad Old virginity
Cover concept based on a word cloud from www.wordle.net lm
Cover design by Maya Rhodes Sexual Genre Movie
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edited by
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Wayne State University Press
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
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Virgin Territory
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu
General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University
Advisory Editors Tom Gunning
Robert J. Burgoyne University of Chicago
Wayne State University
Thomas Leitch
Caren J. Deming University of Delaware
University of Arizona
Anna McCarthy
Patricia B. Erens New York University
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Walter Metz
Peter X. Feng Southern Illinois University
University of Delaware
Lisa Parks
Lucy Fischer University of California–
University of Pittsburgh Santa Barbara
Frances Gateward
Ursinus College
Virgin Territory
Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film
edited by
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Virgin territory : representing sexual inexperience in film / edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald.
p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3318-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Virginity in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. I. McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.
PN1995.9.V55V47 2010
791.43’6538—dc22
2009037066
ISBN 978-0-8143-3695-3 (e-book)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Gaylyn Studlar
Velvet’s Cherry: Elizabeth Taylor and Virginal English Girlhood 15
Ilana Nash
The Innocent Is a Broad: American Virgins in a Global Context 34
Timothy Shary
Virgin Springs: A Survey of Teen Films’ Quest for Sexcess 54
Rebecca Sullivan
Postwar Virginity and the “Marjorie” Phenomenon 68
Alisia G. Chase
One Very Chic Hell: Revisiting the Issue of Virginity in Bonjour
Tristesse 83
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Performances of Desire and Inexperience: Doris Day’s Fluctuating Filmic
Virginity 103
Pete Falconer
Fresh Meat? Dissecting the Horror Movie Virgin 123
v
CONTENTS
Nina Martin
Don’t Touch Me: Violating Boundaries in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion 138
Greg Tuck
Orgasmic (Teenage) Virgins: Masturbation and Virginity in Contemporary
American Cinema 157
Lisa M. Dresner
Love’s Labor’s Lost? Early 1980s Representations of Girls’ Sexual Decision
Making in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Little Darlings 174
Shelley Cobb
Was She or Wasn’t She? Virginity and Identity in the Critical Reception of
Elizabeth (1998) 201
Andrea Sabbadini
The Window and the Door 223
Carol Siegel
Irreconcilable Feminisms and the Construction of a Cultural Memory of
Virginity’s Loss: À ma soeur! and Thirteen 238
Celestino Deleyto
The New Road to Sexual Ecstasy: Virginity and Genre in The 40-Year-Old
Virgin 255
Bibliography 269
Filmography 281
Contributors 287
Index 289
vi
Acknowledgments
This edited collection has had a long gestation and has thus garnered a
similarly long list of people to whom I owe a debt of thanks. Richard Dyer
encouraged me to investigate all things cine-virginal during the years of my
doctoral thesis. Robin Larsen, Alisia Chase, and Peter Thomas helped me
work through issues of virginity and anthology organizing during and after
a lunch at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in Atlanta.
Barry Keith Grant and the anonymous reviewers at Wayne State University
Press provided very helpful feedback. To all these I owe my thanks and ap-
preciation.
Colleagues and students at Birkbeck College, University of London,
Warwick University, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, Ox-
ford Brookes University, and the University of Kent, as well as at various
film studies conferences, helped by hearing my ideas as they developed and
bore with me as my fascination for disproving Doris Day’s perennial virgin
status showed no sign of waning.
I am indebted to the chapter authors for their patience with my edits
and their high levels of enthusiasm for the project. Special recognition and
gratitude is owed to Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press for her
keen interest and support throughout, and to the Press’s Maya Rhodes and
Carrie Downes Teefey and copyeditor Mary Tederstrom for their inesti-
mable assistance in getting the book to print.
And, of course, it is to my family that I owe greatest thanks: my mother
for taping odd films for me late at night; Chloë for helping me check the
bibliography; and Chloë, Jessica, and Paul for sitting through innumerable
bizarre genre products with me because they had some tenuous relation to
virginity (The Dunwich Horror again, gang?). My love and thanks to you
all.
vii
Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Introduction
Does she or doesn’t she? Is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? Should
she or shouldn’t she? Should I surrender? Have you been bad? As these lines
from books, articles, advertisements, and films from the cusp of the 1950s
and 1960s demonstrate, virginity resists scrutiny and provokes interroga-
tion.1
Although these queries in the popular media can be dated from the
1953 publication of Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, popularly
known as the “Kinsey Report,” a moment that propelled the figure of the
desirable and desirous female virgin into the public eye, it would be wrong
to assume that this was the first or only incidence of virginity becoming a
hot, and hotly contested, topic in popular culture. As chapters in this book
explore, virginity was already an important social trope during the early
decades of the twentieth century as well as during the years of the Second
World War, and it remains so today, despite superficial assumptions about
permissiveness.
Indeed, virginity has had a long and vexed history and has never been
a simple matter of an ontological either/or. It most often has a chronologi-
cal, medical, legal, religious, or moral dimension to its loss; frequently its
maintenance is seen as being as problematic as its relinquishment. While
virginity may seem an “old-fashioned object,” it nevertheless remains one
of perpetual currency within popular culture and the various cinemas that
serve it.2
This collection thus considers examples of virginity as produced and
marketed in film in order both to prompt discussion about the topic’s
wider significance within culture and to consider the specific problems
1
