"... pathological sexuality is a terrible plague for its victim, who lives in constant danger of violating the laws of the state and morality, or of losing his honor or even his life."
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Morality always has a political aspect about it. The "terrible plague" above is not the effects of the actual supposed "pathology" but rather of the harsh things that society will do to someone who doesn't fit the norms. There are moral ideas we are all expected to stand up and salute when they get run up the flagpole or else suffer estrangement or even criminal punishment. Our ideas about these things change. Kraft-Ebbing, who wrote the above in what was a commonly used manual for judges to help them understand sexual perversion, believed that all recreational sex was perverse. When he wrote this about a century ago, a girl caught living the way most female university students do today would have found herself condemned to an asylum.
Purity was the word that summed up how girls and women were expected to act sexually. We can be certain that actual purity was pretty thin on the ground but women were expected to live their lives as if they were pure whatever they did or didn't get up to when no one was looking. And they were largely willing to do so until relatively recently. The thing that still needs explaining is why did girls and young women swing so massively, and seemingly suddenly, from thinking that it really mattered to be thought pure to not thinking so anymore.
The moral logic underlying purity had long been dispatched before the sexual revolution. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles for example, Hardy doesn't set out to convince his 19th century readers that purity is an unfair double standard, he expects them to already agree with him on the matter.
And we can go back further and ask John Donne:
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
And yet, for all that, women and men continued to respect the taboo.
And so it remained until relatively recently. If you'll pardon me for saying so, I doubt many of the women in Kate Middleton's family over the last two or three generations were virgins on their wedding nights either. What stands out with Kate is that she cares so little that everyone knows she wasn't. And it isn't just that they lived together before marriage but also that it's a pretty safe assumption that William was not her first prince.
If I might be so indelicate as to ask, how far down the list of "suitors" does William have to be before you'd think ill of Kate? If I were William (and thank God I'm not) I wouldn't dare hope for more than that the total number of predecessors be in single digits. More likely, he'd want to hope that she'd always been careful enough to pick guys who are unlikely to be running around trying to peddle stories about how good, bad or indifferent they found her to the media.
And that is a good cue for us to wipe the scales of the Princess-wedding fantasy away from our eyes a moment. Do you think that a woman like Kate would normally be interested in a dweeb like William if he didn't have the word "prince" in front of his name? The real value of the Kate-William wedding as an example, and something that you apparently need a Y chromosome to see, is how utterly mercenary the thing is. And it says a lot that purity was of no value at all to Kate in these manœuverings—for you can be sure that she would have used it if she'd thought it was going to buy her anything. Women abandoned purity because it ceased to matter politically; that is because it stopped having much effect on how others saw them.
What, if anything, did purity protect?
Political morality is always shame and honour morality. Guilt can be removed through repentance and forgiveness. Shame cannot and requires harsh punishment for political reasons. As any mean girl in high school can tell you, the point of shaming another girl is not so much to hurt that girl (although it will hurt her plenty) but to force all the other girls to pay hommage to the values the mean girl wants them to. (If you just want to eliminate someone, you can chop their head off in a dungeon. If you want to use shame as a political weapon, you do something more dramatic like hang him from a cross on top of a hill where everyone can see.)
And thus it used to be a hanging offense to have unmarried sex with a woman whose children might be in line for the throne. It's not hard to guess one possible rational for such such a law. But if we hang around and think about it too long, we'll soon recognize that the people who passed such a law didn't have high expectations of women being terribly pure.
In any case, the logic that insisted that a woman be a virgin on her wedding night for reasons of assuring parentage was beyond wobbly. For who was better placed to cheat and get away with it than a married woman? The King who managed to have his wife conceive a son on their first night together could be certain but no one else. And even in that unlikely scenario, how would he really know? The married woman could no longer expected to remain a virgin and while she couldn't be absolutely careless about possible pregnancies, she was much better off than the unmarried woman should she find herself pregnant.
No, the requirement that women remain pure lay elsewhere. And here the whole thing gets necessarily indelicate but I will try to be as delicate as I can about it. For, really, the desire for a woman to be a pure, really translates into a desire for a woman whose sex drive is very weak and whose sense of decorum is strong enough that even that weak drive will never overcome it. A man who seeks to marry such a woman does not expect much sexual pleasure out of or for his wife. This sort of arrangement is driven by an need to avoid shame so strong that it is willing to eliminate what most of us now would consider to be one of the prime good things in marriage.
As I've mentioned before, there is a bit in Samuel Pepys diaries where he is having sex with his wife—this in between endless tales of his adventures with other women—and he notices, to his horror, that she is rather enjoying it. And he puts a stop to that right away.
What was sought was protection against shame. The fear of seeming like a cuckold whose wife had sought pleasure (or greater pleasure) elsewhere was stronger than the desire for good sex. Men, of course, had access to all sorts of extra-marital sex at places such as brothels. And women played their part in that arrangement largely because they had to.
And thus we can see why girls and women are no longer interested in purity. It was always a standard that served men's interests and not women's. The second they gained any sort of real freedoms, women were going to drift away from purity. They had been long before the late 1960s and early 1970s; that was just the tipping point.
By way of examples of how some things never change, we might consider that young William and Kate's first date involved him coming to see her model for a charity fashion show where she appeared in a see through dress. Well, and how wonderful that it should be for charity. It would seem just a little less okay if she'd done it for money. And even less so if, as has recently been revealed about her sister, she'd had a few drinks and danced around at some party in her undies for the sheer pleasure of it.
Funnily enough, though, the fact that Kate showed the entire world her lingerie is almost protective of her exclusiveness. Anyone else who'd seen her in her lingerie before this moment can no longer claim to have experienced anything special can they? In an odd way, the whole episode protects him from shame.
On the other hand, what did she offer instead of purity? That is a subject for an other day. For many other days actually.
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