Escapes: Sworn Virgins

Helen has a few good posts up right now that were prompted by the Times's article on the decline of sworn virgins in Albania. Helen's take:

There is a difference between fulfilling traditionally male responsibilities and adopting a masculine manner and masculine patterns of thought, and insofar as the Virgjineshe realize that you can't do the former without also doing the latter they're smarter than, say, American feminists. The mental quirks associated with masculinity (an obsession with pride, aggression, competitiveness, etc.) developed (partly) in response to male responsibilities, and I think there's something to be said for insisting that, if you're going to play patriarch, you should go all the way with it. Gender isn't a buffet bar; be one or be the other, but pick.

I'm inclined to agree with Helen on most counts, but I don't see sworn virgins as any closer to a solution than gender neutral proponents. Sworn virgins, girl geeks, and gay best friends, when neutered sexually, undermine the idea of gender as a non-arbitrary construct by divorcing the gender role from some of its roots.

After all, why go all the way to Albania, Helen? These behaviors are common in high school. I was treated as one of the guys on stage crew, (not that surprising, as I had no one to be one of the girls with), but more interesting was the situation in my AP Computer Science class. The class was split 8:3::male:female. The other two girls were girls, tank tops, pedicures, lazy coding and any other archetype you care to project. I was still one of the boys, the only girl in the class whose coding was respected, and I was even invited to play Dungeons and Dragons with the boys and then chosen to run the game as Dungeon Master in the summer.

Being accepted as one of the boys meant I was accepted in all spheres of manhood. I heard all the stories about their girlfriends, and the guys felt comfortable talking to me about their conquests and seduction techniques without the slightest discomfort. Because they never treated me as a female, they never thought of me in a sexual context. In fact, the only time that my feminity became an issue was when I wore a non-baggy shirt to school that revealed my figure. The boys proceeded to mock me for this for the rest of the year, in front of the teacher. I hadn't upheld my end of the deal, but the transgression would have been just as heinous if I had leered with them at one of the other girls.

This is what I find particularly interesting about the Albanian sworn virgins. When they become men, they never have sexual relationships with men or women. The Albanian women aren't men, they are neuters. In the U.S., there's a parallel role for men: the (neutered) gay best friend. This isn't as simple as performing a different gender, since it isn't allowed to be performed wholeheartedly.

This shilly-shallying does as much to erode gender norms as equality=sameness feminism. You still retain, as Helen said, the mental quirks of masculinity, which arose in response to male-type responsiblities and objectives. To retain the behaviors while removing one of the motivations undermines the framework in which it makes sense to see these behaviors as related and co-dependent, rather than options to mix and match.

By all means, pick a gender and stick to it, but if you divorce sexuality from these behaviors you didn't pick a side, you're just in a nonsensical no-man's-land.