TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
This is what virginity on television looks like.
TV writer Willa Paskin has a good piece over at Salon about TV’s tortured virgins: “Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.” True, but what’s interesting about the three virgins she covers is how they react to the “shame” of being a virgin.
Two of TV’s most famous virgins are women: April Kepner (Sarah Drew) on Grey’s Anatomy and Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mament) on Girls. Both are surrounded by friends who are always having sex and both are self-conscious about their virginity.
April:
At the beginning of last season [of Grey's], the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.
Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.”
And Shoshanna:
A devotee of “Sex and the City” and books with titles like “Listen Ladies,” the abashed Shoshanna thinks of her virginity as an embarrassment, and her friends, though sweet about it, basically agree. When Shoshanna tells Marnie (Allison Williams) that “I am almost 22 and I am a virgin. Everyone and their mother has had sex except for me,” Marnie doesn’t quite know what to say. She tries to comfort Shoshanna by asking if she’s ever given a blow job, which is “basically the same thing.” Shoshanna hasn’t. Marnie, at a loss, then shares a story about how she hit a puppy with her car. Puppy killer and virgin, semi-equivalent mortifications.
But there’s another more interesting virgin on TV that Paskin covers: Sherlock Holmes, who returns this Sunday to PBS for the second season of the show:
Sherlock, it seems, is a virgin. Adler reveals that Holmes’ arch-nemesis, Moriarty, calls him just that (as opposed to on “Girls” and “Grey’s,” only Holmes’ enemies laugh at him), and when Adler asks Sherlock if he’s ever had sex, Holmes, for maybe the first and only time, looks uncomfortable. Prior to Irene’s appearance, this question wouldn’t have mattered to him at all. Sherlock, as a rule, doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, let alone thinks of him, but in the presence of a woman he’s actually interested in, even the great Holmes becomes a smidge embarrassed.
But this flash of insecurity and emotion is only temporary.
Unlike April and Shoshanna, Sherlock does not allow his virginity—and his sex—to define him. For April and Shoshanna, sex is what they’re always thinking about; it’s what they psychologically organize their lives around; it’s who they are. Sherlock, by contrast, is a detective first and foremost. While the virginity of the April and Shoshanna is equated, on their respective television shows, with naivete and inexperience, the same cannot be said of the cosmopolitan and sharp-minded Holmes. His virginity is not a scarlet letter, but it takes on a monastic quality. Being a virgin for Sherlock is a much more dignified experience than it is for April and Shoshanna. Sex and women are distractions from his greater, heroic calling.
Can you think of any other pop-culture virgins and how they react to their virginity on the big or small screen? (There's of course The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which deserves a blog post of it's own.) I'm specifically wondering if male virgins are treated differently than female virgins. My hunch is they are.
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Jun '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Back in the late 50's, early 60's, nobody thought about them in those terms, but TV was full of virgins, most of them female--school teachers, secretaries, maiden aunts. Naturally, if they'd never been married, they were, ahh...virgins.
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Not necessarily, of course. But if they weren't, they didn't want people knowing about it. Fast forward a few short decades and we're at a place where it's somehow shameful to be an unmarried virgin. Weird.
Sep '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
I've met some of these virgins in the video and they're so cool that they get interviewed by Oprah:
Nov '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Well, while it's not a moral exemplar of television, How I Met Your Mother had an episode that revolved around Robin's attempt to prevent her teenaged sisterer from losing her virginity too soon. It provided a retrospective of all the characters own first time.
While they were all played for laughs, the conclusion shown is that only Marshall and Lily (who marry each other and have a long-term monogamous relationship) have a worthwhile first-time because they found the right, and for each of them the only, person. It's a weirdly subversive moment for a show that treats relationships and sex so lightly.
May '12
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Isn't Tebow a prime example of a male pop-culture virgin? (And he's not even fictional.) I've heard him routinely mocked for it. One of the downsides of being male is that we are not always granted that status by birth. Simple expressions like "Man-up!" "Be a man!" "Be a big wheel!" "Give 'em [expletive]!" illustrate this quite well. Seemingly, one always has to prove his masculinity. To many, male virginity is the death knell of masculinity.
I wonder too if male virgins aren't anathema to a certain type of progressive feminist simply because they interrupt their narrative of victimization by breaking the false mold of sex-controlled brutes...
"Sherlock" is an interesting example, but I would hazard a guess that Holmes stands apart from the pack in most contexts. He has, in many ways, a fully-formed self, and does not need to engage in certain behaviors to prop up his self-image.
Jun '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
For years, that would be since my children were teenagers, I've become aware of the squirm inducing depravity of most TV story lines. And I don't even get cable.
In the real world a woman who waits for the right guy, and he's the guy she marries, is a woman with self respect and dignity.
May '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Also, there are so many more of them than Hollywood appears able to imagine.
May '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Your value is not in how many people you've bedded. You have intrinsic value just as a human being, and each individual can find their own unique value and meaning through their natural and developed gifts and talents, the activities they engage in, and the relationships they form.
To the modern sex-crazed culture, though, someone who has not engaged in sex, preferably with multiple partners, must have something wrong with them, and are therefore abnormal, less desirable, less valuable. It's traditional morality turned upon its head.
I've had exactly one partner, and we waited until we were married. Nothing weird or bad happened to us for reigning in and controlling our desires. If anything, it gives us more confidence in each other's faithfulness going forward, and it makes us value each other even more highly.
Jun '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
There's American Pie, a film that suggests that if you are male and you graduate from high school still a virgin there's something seriously wrong with you. Aside from the infamous scene involving a pie, the writer said the title refers to the fact that trying to lose your virginity in high school is as "American as apple pie."
Sep '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
For the antithesis to that, see the movie Easy A.
Nov '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Pull the other one - next you guys are gonna tell me that openly religious Christians get mocked! I'm fine with it; in a fallen world, if you're not getting ridiculed, you're not doing it right.
Still, I watch waaay too much TCM, and do often long for that world, where the old virtues are so foundational that they go as unnoticed as the air one breathes.
Dec '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. He is definitely treated as a strange and bizarre character - kind of a blend between Rain Man and A Beautiful Mind. The portrayal is of one who sees sex as revolting.
Nov '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
I think you'd be surprised by the number of 90s teen movies that don't assume promiscuity. Cher in Clueless defends saving yourself, and some of the other popular teen movies, which I am never going to admit to having seen, were more about innocent-type romances than sexual ones. I don't think even movies like that get made anymore (as kylez said, exhibit A is Easy A).
Also, I think there were at least two big hit songs when I was growing up in the 90s about kissing. These days they are about a whole lot more than kissing.
Edited on May 4, 2012 at 11:47pmNov '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
last post, sorry:
The thing is, if you defend chastity these days, women who aren't chaste are convinced you're personally insulting them; if you defend the traditional family, unwed moms are convinced you're personally insulting them; etc, etc, etc. (It's almost as if they feel guilty about something... )
Few people want to be confrontational, which is what any defenders of morality would necessarily be in this atmosphere, so instead they go along to get along, and we're left with today's world, where the good pretend to be bad to keep from hurting anyone's feelings.
Aug '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Holmes is a bit of an outlier. Throughout the books it was made pretty clear that he views all women as weak, unintelligent, and generally unworthy of his time. The attention he paid to Irene Adler was in part from pure surprise that a woman had wit (nearly) equal to his.
...of course the film and TV series have played this aspect of his character down. Potential love interests sell a lot better than frosty Victorian sexism. (As well as a mastermind constantly under the effects of a 7% solution, instead of only one who indulged in private bouts of boredom.)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said that Holmes was meant to be remote and unlikable, and that he was quite annoyed when fans of the stories actually liked the character.
Dec '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Hey a life of depravity is awesome until your sitting in a doctors office being told you cant be tested for an incurable disease. Its all in what you want I guess.
May '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
Although, to be fair, the movie is in many ways mocking this standard, and ends with the characters realizing by the end that there's more importance to the occasion than simply losing ones virginity for the sake of the cultural pressure. Which is about as considered a view as you'll probably ever get from a late 1990s teen comedy.
Aug '10
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
In Sherlock, Holmes is a self-described "high-functioning sociopath."
As such, he might not be any better of a role-model than those silly girls.
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
katievs
Also, there are so many more of them than Hollywood appears able to imagine. · 4 hours ago
There are even some colleges at which no student would be at all surprised or dismayed to discover that another student is chaste. I have been teaching at one such institution for five years now. At the last place where I taught, however, the university placed condom machines in the dormitory bathrooms. This caused one trustee -- Steve Largent -- to resign from the board.
May '11
Re: TV's Virgins: The Tortured Kind & the Dignified Kind
the Irene Adler episode of Sherlock is outstanding from start to finish