Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How To Fake Virginity

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Why, just why, would one put a leech up their .. you know where? It's all in the name of virginity, or the faking of it.Kate is joined by Dr Julia Martins to find out why virginity was so necessary to Early Modern people, and how they went about faking it.Julia can be found at juliamartins.co.ukThis episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cade Lister. You are you, I am me and this is Betwix the Sheeds. So I think you know what's coming your way. That's right. It is the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, Pokemon, my adults, other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering range of all subjects. You should be an adult too. We do that so everyone just feels a little bit safer, a little bit more prepared for what might be about to go into their lug holes. Right. On with the show. thinking about getting married, are you?

Mmm, and this woman that you have in mind, well, what are we to make of her? Does she dress properly in public? Is her dress not a little bit short? Is her top not a little bit low? Is she a little bit too friendly, a little bit too flirty? And are her nostrils not a little bit too big?

I think they might be. And you should be careful, because she might not be pure. Oh, if there's one thing, big nostrils will signify is that a woman has loose morals, apparently. I wonder when she lies in bed next year, will she snuggle up, or will she be repelled across the room by some invisible force like the unchaste woman she is?

Honestly, that happens to me all the time. You should probably check her purity, her chastity, her virginity, but how are you going to do that? One of the tests that you could use, and more importantly for this episode, how do you go about faking it in the first place? Right? On with the show. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex Scandal, in society with me, Kailister.

Viginity has, for some reason or another, been so important throughout most of history. But what is it really? I mean, what do you lose? The idea you lose something where, oh, the thing's gone, where's it gone? I can't get it back now. It's all bollocks.

It's just a social construct. But it has been very important throughout most of our history and it's still important around the world to this very day, unfortunately. So there have always been ways to fake it. And today I'm joined by Dr. to Julia Martins from living history to find out more about the early modern people

and how they would fake their virginity, whether for their wedding night or to please a paying customer. Bloomer's off, betwixters, let's do it. Well, hello and welcome to betwixt the sheets. It's only Julia Martins. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you, Kate. How are you? I'm so excited to be here with you. Oh, well, I'm thrilled that you are here. In fact, I'm surprised that we haven't had you on earlier, quite frankly, because you are a historian of, well, primarily of the body in early modern history, would that be right? Yeah, I'm interested in all things to do with gender and sex and medicine. So I've been listening to the podcast for a long time and it's been so incredible. So I'm so excited to be a part of it. What brought you to this area of study? It's a

fascinating area. And we're going to get on it and we're going to be talking specifically about virginity and the body today. But how did you end up studying? the body in the modern period? I was interested in translation at first. So for my master's at first, I was doing this program in France and Italy and seeing how medical recipes were translated from one language to another and what changed in the process of translation. So recipes for remedies, abortion formulas, all kinds of things.

And then from there, I started noticing that even more than alchemical recipes, the recipes that I was really interested in, were to do with the body, the female body, reproduction and all of that. So I gradually started gravitating towards how those recipes were translated and how they were censored or corrected, quote, and how sort of the knowledge about the body was reshaped as it was translated and spread. So I came, yeah, through book history and translation. It's fascinating. It's interesting because you wouldn't think that the idea of the body would change all that much because bodies have remained pretty constant. I mean, It's the same for me being a sexistory. It's like what goes in where and who does what to

who's kind of constant. But it's amazing how much actually changes. Yeah. And the way how we understand body parts and functions and sex and all things is so culturally constructed that is constantly changing. Even virginity, which we're talking about today, it's not, it can be an elusive concept. It seems straightforward when you think about it at first. But in reality, what is virginity? What even is it in terms of definition? It's not as easy as you might expect, right? That was going to be my first question, actually. That was my first. I've written it down here and everything. Like, Julia, what is virginity? Which, again, it's so deceptive that question. When I taught sex history to students, I used to love throwing that one at him. Like, what's virginity? And everyone would be dead confident and they'd start, I know what it is. And then we'd sort of pick it apart. And then in the end, you're like, I don't know what it is, actually. What do you define it as? I think it really depends on the source material you're working with, the primary sources and how they understand virginity. Because for some of these Italian texts about virginity, you can kind of lose your virginity to yourself.

So you can quote and quote corrupt yourself. How'd you do that? Pleasureing yourself, right? So that is something that can happen. But that can vary a lot, a lot through time. And I actually came across a passage by St. Augustine. And so he's writing in the fifth century, CE, so a long time ago. And he's writing about theology and about virginity, which, as we know, has been very important in Christianity.

And he actually wrote that a midwife could destroy a girl's virginity while trying to ascertain it. So it's a very, it's tricky, right? Because by trying to see whether someone was still a virgin, you could kind of corrupt them, quote unquote, in the process, right? So, yeah. So what counts, right? Like homosexual sex, does that count? Sex with yourself, does that count? Or with objects and props and things?

And what about anal sex and all things to do with other practices, oral sex? It does depend. I mean, I suppose traditionally we think of it as penis and vagina sex, don't we? Yeah, true. It tends to get very patriarchal, very quickly, I think. But even then, how do you ascertain it? How do you make sure someone is or isn't a virgin? I think that's a tricky question, right?

And it's very gendered, very binary gender thing, because we don't seem to care that much about men's virginity, or maybe I'm wrong in that. Has there been a point in your research where men's virginity has been as important as women's? No, not nearly. No. I mean, I'm not really.

I mean, I think there are, in the medieval period, there are some religious men who become known as being virgins and all of that. but I don't think it's ever to the same level. It's never to the same extent of scrutiny that women have gone through in history. And I think it's mostly to do with having children, right, and the legitimacy of and inheritance and property. So I think very quickly it becomes about property and passing on your family wealth, inheritance to the right people, quote unquote, and not so much about moral ideas.

I think it's more practical concerns in a way. What do you think? Oh, I mean, that's the question, isn't it? Anthropologists have been rowing about this one for a while, is what is the obsession with virginity? And not just virginity, by extension, women's sexual behaviour. Why is it policed so much more heavily than men's who just seem to get a free pass?

And it's like, help yourself. And then we get in this really weird situation where men are expected to have lots of sex, but women are expected not to have sex. And then we get mad at the women for having sex with the men who are supposed to have lots of sex. I say, what on earth are we doing? Yes.

It's a cash 22. There's no way you can win, basically. You can't win. You absolutely cannot win. I mean, when you strip it all back, it's about control, really. It is. Yes. That's what's going on here.

It is about control. Yeah. I think I do buy into the theory that you put forward there, that it's about ensuring legitimate issue and about money, because money is ultimately power, isn't it? And this obsession with a woman being a virgin when she gets married is ultimately to ensure. sure that the bun in the oven is her husband. Yeah, definitely. Though having said that, I came across a book. It's a 17th century French book that has been translated into English as the mysteries of conjugal love revealed, which great title. But there's a passage that says,

so very like lenient towards women in a way. It says, might it not be allowable for a woman who has passed some years of her life in unlawful pleasures to secure her husband's good or opinion on the wedding night by taking up some blood, which she treasured up before, and putting it into the privities, end of quote. So it's kind of, I don't know, there's some leeway there, right? Yes. You know, well, maybe the woman is trying her best and the peace in the home and whatnot. I don't know. I thought it was surprisingly like understanding for a 17th century text to talk about the preservation of peace in the family. That's talking about faking of virginity then. Yes, yes. Okay. So,

We're into like a theological discussion about what is virginity anyway? Like what is it supposed to be proving and when you start to pull it apart? It's actually, it doesn't really mean anything. And you get into loads of small, small, weird small print with it about, well, fingering's okay, but like having sex isn't and this kind of weird thing. Definitely. But when we're talking about proving it, they have some very clear ideas. So what is it that they're trying to prove and how do you prove it?

So I think throughout history, there have been lots of different. ways of kind of trying to test virginity, but it's never straightforward because even the hymen, this is something that I was really fascinated by when I started reading more about it. And Helen King is someone who, I'm sure you've read her work, she's someone who writes a lot about that, about how the female body has been understood in different ways throughout time. And essentially, the hymen isn't really talked about before the 15th century, right? No. Though people do write about blood.

So there's this idea that virgins are going to. to bleed and that's normal and expected, but there's not the idea that the bleeding comes from rupturing the hymen, which I found interesting because then it's about, well, it's about the friction and rough handling and all things unpleasant, things like that, but also ruptured vessels in that area. So there's this idea that you are going to bleed and that's normal and expected, but it's not necessarily because your hymen is being ruptured until the 15th century. And even then there's no consensus because some doctors don't even think there is a hymen. So it's kind of not everyone agrees, not even the doctors agree with each other. What is a hymen? Just as a real start question

for this stuff, like what exactly is that? So again, I think it depends on who you're asking. And I think it can get very frustrating trying to define terms like that because people have understood them in different ways. So hymen, the word itself means membrane, right, in Greek. But before there was the hymen as like what we're talking about right now, the word hymen was used to talk about different membranes in the body. So you could have the eyes or the heart, all kinds of membranes, but not the one we're referring to. And this I learned from learning Helen King. I thought it was really interesting how there were hymins, just not the one we're talking about right now. And yeah, so theoretically, that's the idea that it's a membrane, but some people don't have it,

Some people are born without. Some people have thick hymins or flexible hymins, all kinds of things. All bodies are different and unique. And so I think that's the thing that Renaissance doctors realized was that if you do bleed on your wedding night and your hymen is ruptured, then yes, or a virgin. But if you don't bleed, it doesn't mean that you're not necessarily a virgin. Maybe you were born without. Maybe you did something else that broke your hymen, you know. Nicholas Culpepper, who was a medical person.

popularizer in the 17th century. He was writing all kinds of popular medical books, right? And he said that bad humors could essentially kind of break away your hymen. So, you know, maybe you're not to blame. Maybe you are a virgin. You're just not bleeding. But having said that, some people would be expecting the blood. So you might resort to kind of faking it. Because that's a tall order, isn't it? The hymen myths are still with us. Like, was it the World Health Organization that within the past few years has had to like put out notices about? virginity tests around the world today to remind people that it's nonsense it is it is awful it's a human rights violation really like virginity testing and having said that if you Google like fake hymins

artificial hymonds you can get them so it's it's capitalism and it's worse right so I think that's the thing is and in many cultures there are concerns with virginity testing and we know it's awful and what are you even testing for because how reliable can that bear like are there any clinical uses for that. No. I doubt that, right? No. There's this idea, and this is the myth, this is the nonsense, that the hymen is almost like a Tupperware lids that goes over a pot that's completely intact until the point of penetration and then they'll be, it's just nonsense. It's just absolute cobbler's that. Yeah. When you think about it for longer than five minutes, I think it all becomes very silly, very quickly. And of course, I don't want to make light of,

because it causes real harm, this concern with virginity and hymins. But it all, it's, is a bit silly. Like I said, it's like a Tupperware lid. And the names that Hyman's have had throughout the centuries, like seal or they give this idea of like lock and key and or a lid or something that is close. But yeah. Because you hear a lot about virginity tests or throughout history, about women having their virginity checked, like Joan of Arc had her checked and like various regal people before they got married had it checked. And I always think, what exactly are they looking for when they do that because they're very sparse the sources. It just says that, oh, they were found to be intact. I'm saying, well, what were they looking for? They're just going to open their legs and then, like,

music by Enya would play or something. Or it's just, it's like, there's a best before date stamped on it. Like, what is it? And I've no idea. Do you know what it was that they were looking for? I think before the Heimann became a thing. I think it was mostly tightness that people were looking for. Well, that's scientific. Brilliant. Usually it was the kind of two-finger test, which sounds horrific and it was horrific, of course. But it's this idea of, you know, how narrow, how tight is the passage. Brilliant. Yeah, it is. It is ridiculous.

But that explains why so many of the ways of restoring or faking, quote-unquote, virginity have to do with tightness in making things narrow for the men so that they feel that they are the first ones there. I'll be back with Julia after this short break. We've talked to cover a little bit like why this was so important, but there's clearly an enormous amount of pressure on women to show up. Even if they were virgins, they must have been panicking that they would somehow not be able to be proven to be so. So you do get people fake in it, don't you? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think so.

And I think it's to be expected. Yeah, the stakes are high. And I think there are basically two groups of people who could fake it potentially. You have wives or women getting married, girls getting married, who are not virgins anymore, or who are virgins, but are afraid that they won't perform their virginity the way that they're supposed to. So this is one group and they might resort to lots of different methods and recipes and things. And then you have the other group, especially in Italy and then later in Britain. And that's something I know you've written about quite a bit. about sex workers and about how they would perform virginity for their clients. And so both these

groups would kind of use these recipes and these formulas in different ways, right? Because if you're a wife and you're going to essentially perform your virginity once, then you could potentially use more theatrical methods or something that might cause a little bit of injury to your body because it's just going to be the ones, not justifying it obviously, it's horrific, but it's something that you would do once. Whereas if you're a sex worker who would be doing something like that more often, then you want to be careful, right, of how you're going about it so that you're not injuring yourself, hopefully, right? Yeah. So I think those are kind of the two groups that would fake virginity in a way. How would you do this? And what do the sources tell us? So I think in the medieval period,

in the Trotula texts, which are very interesting. And if people haven't read them or taken a look, I really suggest Googling them, and Monica Green is a historian who has worked a lot with this, and they're really fascinating texts about the female body. And so in these texts, there are, I think, 10, 9 recipes about how to fake it, essentially. Some of them are milder using, like, berry juice. It doesn't sound great having berry juice inside you, but it's not, it doesn't sound as bad, I guess. It's not the worst of hurt, no, okay. I mean, it could be worse, right?

and some of the other recipes are worse because one of the methods would be using a leech. So, of course, we always come back to leeches in the history of medicine, don't we? It's like, you try to stay away from the leeches, but if you're interested in the history of medicine and sex, you'll eventually

come back to the leeches. But, yeah, so if you had a leech inside of you, which would cause a wound, essentially, eventually that would be a scag, right, over the wound. And then with friction afterwards, you would take the scab off, you would bleed, so it would be, you know, so it's just fake because it's not blood from rupturing the hymen, but it is your blood, you are bleeding for

your husband, so I think, honestly, I think it should count. And you've put a leech up your hoo-ha. I mean, that's commitment. Honestly, yeah, it's horrific, it's awful. And all the formulas in these texts are about making things tight, right? So, like, constrictive formulas using, like, plantain, like all different kinds of herbs, comfrey roots. Alam turns up a lot, doesn't it?

Yes, especially because it turns red as well. I didn't know that. So yeah, there's lots of ways in the Trotula, so medieval medicine. And then later in the Renaissance, and this is how I first came across the subject, was reading this Renaissance writer, Jean-Battista della Porta, so he was Italian, and he was writing about like the wonders of nature, secrets of nature, magical things. And by natural magic, what he meant was marvelous things that kind of went against what you would expect in nature and ways of manipulating nature to create like marvelous, wonderful effects. And one of the things that he found incredible was restoring virginity.

So he listed lots of different formulas. Yeah. And yeah, so these formulas became available to everyone essentially because the book was translated. It was written in Latin first, same as the trotula. So you would only have few people reading essentially. because not everyone read Latin, right? But then as it starts getting translated, then it's available in Italian and in French, other languages,

and then more and more people have access to this. And it was quite controversial because with more readers having access to this problematic material of faking virginity and potentially deceiving your husband, it becomes controversial very quickly. And he also had lots of other recipes about flying witches and things like, so he faced the Inquisition twice.

which is not surprising. I didn't think you were going to go there. Okay. Wow. Yeah, because he had this formula called the witch's ointment. It sounds like a phrodisiac, but it had hallucinogenic properties as well. And so, according to him, witches would use this to fly to their sabbets and have odges with the devil, all kinds of things. How was he writing about this then? Because I can understand, like, he's going to get in trouble for this kind of stuff. And he must have realized that this is quite, he can't have written in a book of going, hey, a woman, if you want to fake it, here's how you do it. How does he write about it? Does he write about it and go,

this is an awful thing that you definitely shouldn't do and then gives you all the information? How does he talk about it in his book? Yeah, so in the first edition, I think he's not that careful. He doesn't really add too many caveats. He just says, like the witch's formula, he says he learned it from a witch. So, you know, not great, not a great start.

Oh, dear. Oh, come on. It sounds made up, really. But, yeah. So he says that. And then very quickly, as he starts getting, of criticism with the new additions, the recipes start being censored heavily. Recipes for abortion, for flying witches, for faking virginity, for making a man impotent, all kinds of things that shouldn't be mainstream according to the church. And so in the following editions,

translators censor heavily. And they add passages like, so that evil people can't do evil things, we have omitted this passage. And the author himself does that later on, with new additions saying like, no, this is not the good kind of knowledge that I want to share, so I'll just not say anything. Someone's backtracking. Well, yeah, I mean, wouldn't you? Yes, yes. I mean, after talking to the Inquisition people, I think I would reconsider what I was writing,

honestly. All right, okay, so he's got his mad ideas. Yes. There's lots of stuff about bathing in alum and kind of strange, like, things to make it things to fake blood. Like sometimes you find descriptions of like giblets inside the vagina, so blood will be produced. That sounds like rather that than a leech, I think. Oh yeah, yeah. Though ideally neither, but yeah. You could have like a fish bladder because that was kind of small enough and you would fill it with blood. Pigs blood looks very similar to human blood.

So pig's blood would be a good choice. And then you would have that inside you. And then with intercourse, it would explode, it would erupt and then you would bleed out. It's all very unpleasant. It's all deeply unpleasant and almost completely useless, but I suppose it could be a good deceiving trick, because is it true that you would have to show blood on the sheets in order to prove virginity? Is that, or is that something like a historical myth? Have there been cultures in times that did that? I think it's not a myth, but it's not as widespread as we tend to believe. I think in some areas, it lasted quite a long time. I think in Britain, because of the Reformation, this became associated with Catholicism and with Catholic practices.

So it wasn't Protestants frowned upon the Sheets thing for a bit. But that doesn't mean that people weren't interested in seeing the blood and all of that. And I think afterwards with the restoration and the Libertines and all of that, then it becomes all about seeing, about deflowering virgins and seeing the blood. It becomes kind of a cultural fever, really. It really does. They get like, by the time you get into the 18th century, I mean, I don't know what it was like in the early modern period,

but certainly in the 18th century, you get this fascination with virginity, with de-flowering young girls. I mean, I don't know if it's just because pornography is being more widely produced at this time so we can accurately trace it. But they have a real thing about de-flowering young girls. And you've kind of got to look at that. Well, that's not really about protecting patriarchal inheritance rights.

No. That's something else is going on here. I mean, I think from the medical side of things, I think it's got to do with venereal diseases and especially syphilis, because as syphilis starts to spread, the only kind of safe sex you could have for the men, I mean, not for the woman, but the only kind of safe sex that the men could have would be with a virgin, right? Someone who probably doesn't have like gonorrhea or syphilis or anything like that. So that's bad enough. But there's also this idea that by having sex with a virgin, with someone who has not been corrupted, quote, unquote, by sex and potentially by disease, the disease could go from your body to hers. So you could kind of heal yourself through that. Isn't that awful? And I mean, there are some records in the old Bailey rape cases in which several of the women or

girls raped had been raped by men who had syphilis and they hadn't in an attempt to kind of heal themselves, which is absolutely horrific. But it was a belief that people had. So I think the kind of defloration mania, if we can call it that, I think it had to do with that as well. I think it's pornography and chip print talking about all things to do with sex work. It becomes very popular to read about that. And medical manuals, sex manuals become really popular.

You can buy them cheaply anywhere. But I think the simplest thing plays a part in it, sadly. Definitely does, doesn't it? And yeah, you're right. You do see that account of the virgin being seduced into sex work and then repeatedly losing her virginity. You see that cropping up all time. It's in Fanny Hill. It's in numerous erotica of the time. And there's descriptions there about like they use like a small knife to make a cut or they like they use like pigs blood or something like that. I think a lot of this is about the male ego as well. I think a lot of it is about like, look how mighty my penis is. That it can

produce blood, that it can literally change somebody from being a virgin to now not being a virgin, that you've ruined someone, you've corrupt, that it's that important. And I also think that there are parallels to be made with imperialism as well, because this is, you know, there's the idea of like virgin territory, virgin lands, conquering virgin areas, virgin women in the United States, Virginia, right? Like, after the virgin queen, after Elizabeth, of course. But there's this idea of men going into virgin land territory and making their mark. So I think, I don't think it's a coincidence that this happens at the same time as the British Empire is quickly, violently spreading and becoming more powerful. So I think there are lots of layers of symbolism there to be sure,

but I think it is, you're right, it's, it is about violence and dominance and power and male egos and that's why I love reading the accounts in which the sex workers are essentially tricking men and laughing at them. I think they're brilliant because it's like the men wanting to be horrible and then you have someone like Fennie Hill who's just so clever. She has this, I think it's a little drawer right, in her bed post or something. And she has, she has Pix Blod, she has a sponge or something. Yeah, sponge soaked in blood and it's just a quick, slight hand. Yeah, it's brilliant. And obviously going, oh, ow, that hurts. much. You're so big. Exactly. Oh my God. Yeah. And that's the thing, because even going back to the

medieval period with like signs of virginity, because we spoke about like anatomical things that may or may not be there or the way that the body can present itself, but there's like behaving like a virgin, right? So there's the modest like glands downwards. You have lots of, lots of things that are not really to do with the body that much, but they are more about how do you. behave like a virgin. So if you are a sex worker and you're performing virginity, besides the props and the blood and all of that, you would of course be like, oh my God, you know. I can't remember who said it, but they said that what's the most flattering thing that you can say to a man in bed? And the answer was, ouch. Oh, my God. That's so sad. That is so depressing.

There is a story called the London Jilt, which is a sex worker or the politic horror. Great title again. And there's this character, Cornelia. And she says, for there is nothing more advantageous to a woman that drives this trade, so prostitution, than to appear to be a novice in it. And she keeps on going, though she has been a whore these 10 years, yet she must still pretend to be young at it, and seem as if she had scarce seen men before, for there are great many fools. So basically, it's part of your job to fool men and to pretend to be impressed and all of that. And I guess in that sense, I mean, when you think about sex work and, you know,

In other periods, including today, there is still a lot of that, right, performance. There was a madam in the 18th century called Charlotte Hayes who wrote her memoirs, and she said of virginity that it was as easy to make as a pudding. That you just created it, you just made it, you just fakes it. Well, she said she lost hers like hundreds of times, right? She did. She said it was sold hundreds and hundreds of times over. I'll be back with Julia after this short break.

You know, when you find these accounts of women kind of playing the game backwards, and sort of making fools of men. Like that's a kind of almost like a nice, yeah, but sort of belying that is this awful system and idea of sexual purity and this idea that you had to, as you were saying, perform virginity. Because it wasn't just like looking at vulvas or checking for tightness. Like there was weird tests that you can take as well. But in the modern period, like urine tests and things that they would look at.

Yeah, because your urine as a virgin was supposed to be really clear. Sometimes it's described as white or even sparkly, which I find a bit puzzling to imagine. Honestly, I imagine it like kind of, I don't know, like Prosecco vibes, I guess. I don't know. It's very weird. I don't know. But I guess the idea behind it in terms of like the clarity of the urine is that if you had had sex, if you had semen inside you, it wouldn't be clear because there would be traces of it. Hashtag science. There we go. Yeah. I mean, not very scientific, as we know, obviously, but in the medieval period. And early modern, it was all about. the urine and urine tests for everything, right? So, and some of them made more sense than others,

right? But there were also other silly things like the color of your nipples, the way they pointed, whether up or down, which, okay, brilliant. Lovely. Also, your nostrils. What? There is this idea of a sympathy between the mouth and the nose and the vagina and the vulva and all of that. And that's why we have terms like the mouth of the womb, the neck of the womb, the cervix. We the cervix, the neck cervix, right? And then we have cervix. So there is this kind of association between the upper body and down there as well, right? So there is this idea that if you had sex, your nostrils would be somewhat bigger afterwards. I suppose it depends where you put it. I mean, yeah, yeah. But I mean, that was one of the signs that people would look for. And the same

thing with your neck, it was supposed to get a bit wider. But then when you read accounts of, And this is written by doctors. It's not folklore. It's serious, quote-unquote, doctors. And they are writing about that. And I always wondered, okay, so let's assume that your nostrils and your neck change after sex. Fine. Like, where's the control?

You have to check for them beforehand to measure before and then afterwards to see if there's a difference, right? But if you're meeting her for the first time, how would you know? Like, what is a white neck? It all becomes about policing women's bodies, right? and control. And the more you read about it and you look into it, the more ridiculous it becomes. It's so silly, but it caused real harm to people, right? There's real consequences. It did cause real harm. And particularly in, you know, rich people, because they're the records that we have left, is we know that there were times when husbands, Henry VIII, doubted the

virginity of some of his brides. And the reason that he gave, not thinking out of Cleaves was a virgin, was because the skin on her belly was saggy. I think that's what he said, wasn't it? Yeah, he just wanted to get rid of her, honestly. He wouldn't have said anything. But I actually think that that in itself is a really important point, is that he was just trying to get rid of her, because all of this is just trying to control women.

It's all just like you're not walking like a virgin. You don't have nostrils like a virgin. You don't talk like a virgin, act like a virgin. Your vulva doesn't look like a virgin. It's just like none of it really means anything, but all of it was used to so powerfully control people. Yeah, it's awful. And that's the thing.

Like when you read accounts of the madams or the sex workers who were able to sort of not thrive, but sort of survive in this system, good for them, but it's still a horrible system. And the way that they did well sometimes was by exploring other sex workers, right? When you had a sex worker who was becoming older, who became a madam, sometimes they had saved to open their own brothels. It's at the expense of other women. So even when they're getting sort of the other women, And women are still victimized in the process, right?

There's the BBC show Harlots, right? I think Charlotte Hayes is a character in it. And you see that, right, trying to survive in this patriarchal system that was very much built to keep women down. So I admire the creativity, but yeah. But a nasty game to play all the same. But I don't hate the player, hate the game. Yeah, true. It's interesting to talk about the concept of virginity in the past and the early modern period.

And it's very easy to laugh a lot of this stuff. because you just want to sit them down and go, did you really think that virgin's urine sparkled like Prosecco? Can we just behave ourselves? But the idea of virginity is still with us and it's still very powerful today. And it's still a nonsense. So the idea that you can test for it, which is still done all over the world, is still faulty science. And it still happens to this day. Even reconstructed, because I mean, with an infamous lover's knot or husband stitch,

the idea that you could go back to your... virginal state after given birth. It's horrendous, but it's again going back to that idea of tightness and making it tight for the man to feel that he's the first one there and that nothing else has happened before him. So, yeah, it's very theatrical, but it's horrific. Well, the thing is very theatrical. I mean, you get like groups in America that have virginity pledges and they wear virginity bands around their arm to prove their virginity. And like, it's still with us on your you always think like, what do you count? Because wasn't it, it's a couple of years ago when it turned out that, I think I want to say that it was Mormons, but I might have got it wrong,

is that they'd worked out that if they had penetrative sex but didn't move, that didn't count. Yeah. But I mean, that's the thing. Like, you can, depending on how you define things, you can always find a technicality, a way of getting around things. As someone that studied the history of this, where do you see us going in terms of virginity in the future? Oh, that's a great question. I wish. I hope. we're going towards a place where it doesn't matter and it's not a part of your identity, it doesn't define you or your worth ideally. And then if you want to think of yourself and your body in whichever terms you relate with or identify with, then that's great. But I think the

idea of being labeled externally one way or another and having that assigned value to you, I think that's the problem. But having said that, I try to be optimistic about the future always, but it's tricky because we do see so many surgeries about hymenoplasties and like design of vaginas and things like that. And they're all about the same thing, aren't they? They're all about neatness, tightness, remove any external proof that you might be a woman and not a Barbie doll. Yeah.

And it's all the same thing. And the same scrutiny never applies to male bodies. Well, I don't want to say never, I'm sure they're men, but like hardly ever. It's usually about female bodies. You don't see men worried about what they look. like most of them, I don't think, down there. I think they're all like, fine. You know, I know I'm sure some men do worry about it, but it's something that it's gendered. They worry about size, but then we're back to the same argument, aren't we, about how it has to be so big that it inflicts

pain. Yeah, but there's also the idea that has also gone on forever that the more women a man has sex with, the more value, quote-unquote, he has. And for women, it's the opposite. But if we are talking about, like, heterosexual sex, the maths are not mething. Like, how's that possible? It doesn't make sense. But I think that's the patriarchal world we live in. And hopefully we are moving away from it. Or you get this nonsense narrative that I've heard sometimes in the manosphere that the more sex a woman has, the bigger her vagina gets until it's just this great big, gaping, pulsating, triffed trying to eat men. Honestly.

It doesn't make any set. Like, this is complete. It doesn't make it, the men who say that I have never seen a vagina, I don't think, or the wonderful things vaginas are capable of, honestly. I used to volunteer at the vagina museum, so I'm very much like, I find that so silly because vulvas and vaginas are incredible. And it doesn't happen like that, that things just go all saggy and it's so silly. No.

And the logic of it does make sense because by their logic, If one woman gets with one man who stays with her entire life but has sex every day, then her vagina will stay tight. But if another woman has sex with different men every day, then somehow that has an impact. It's just bullshit. And it's the same stuff as getting women to piss in flasks to see if it's fizzy. It's just gibberish. For sure.

But what I find interesting about reading different stories about this and different time periods is that you can see that even though women tend to not get. get the best outcomes in terms of how much power they have. There's never a consensus anyway. So even in periods where, because people sometimes talk about like the importance of the hymen for virginity, and they talk as though it's always been a thing, it's always been important, and it's not, it's not true. And then you have the ancients weren't talking about that. And it took a long time for the hymen to sort of become something that is important. And that's why I find so interesting studying the history of sex and medicine and gender,

you see how some things that are talked about as though things have always been this way have actually been constructed fairly recently in time. And it's the same when people are talking about abortion being something that has always been unlawful. And that's just not true. We know that's not true. So I think that's why it's important. You go back and you see there are so many examples of how things were understood differently or the signs were others.

Like when you talk about virginity and nostrils or the fizzy wee, it sounds ridiculous. but, you know, it was considered as serious as other signs that have aged less, in a less ridiculous way, shall we say. So, yeah, so I like to see that there's no consensus and you get widely, completely different accounts depending on who's writing the text. If it's satire, if it's a doctor, if it's pornographer, you know. Exactly. Julia, you have been wonderful to talk to.

I knew you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So I have a YouTube channel called Living History by Dr. Julia Martins, and I have a blog with the same name. I have content in text format and video format because I know some people prefer reading, some people prefer watching or listening. So yeah, so people can follow me there and Instagram and all of that. But yeah, I just wanted to say thank you so much for having me because I've been a long time fan of the podcast. Thank you so much. You've been an absolute treat. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Kate. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't try any of it at home for goodness sake, but do like review and follow along whatever it is that get your podcasts. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Thomas Delagi and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwix the Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society,

a podcast by History Hit.