Not Pynchon but Chaucer

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Eamon Aemon wrote: (quotes:)
> 
> In Who Was Saved? Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in
> Pynchon's Vineland, N. Katherine Hayles writes:
> 
> Losing ones virginity signifies inscription into a system of
> representations that structure relations, interpret
> responses, delineate oppositions. The expression
> paradoxically constructs refusing to do something as a
> presence, while making sexuality an absence or loss. Seeming
> to impart value to virginity, it also defines power
> relations between gendered partners that reveal how
> vulnerable women are in a patriarchal society. The male is
> the seducer; he wins if he can pop the cherry. The female is
> the seduced; symmetry requires that she win if she can keep
> her virginity in tact. In fact her virginity is useful only
> as a bargaining chip, for if she hangs on to it for too long
> it becomes useless, a sign of a spinster that no one
> desires. Virginity is thus valued only as long as it is
> imperiled. Let the pressure diminish and it loses its
> currency. Like money and information it needs to circulate
> within a system of exchanges to exercise its value. Unlike
> them it is a coin that can stand only one transaction before
> disappearing. Properly speaking, it signals an initiation
> into the exchange of money and information that follows. 
> 

Good post, Terrance but  can anyone explain what this quote is about?  Not
Pynchon or Vineland, is it? Seems strangely remote not only from P and
Vineland but from Virginity itself. Traditionally a designation of Virgin
is of value to a woman (mortal or divine) if she wants her offspring to be
considered Divine. The father needs to have been a god in otherwords. This
is certainly the point for the Virgin Mary. A woman aspiring less high
would want to lose whatever virginity she was born with as quickly and
painlessly as possible. All the movies tell us this. The author of this
quote should have immersed herself more in Marx--Groucho that is--who
wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. This
is a better explaination for seduction and rejection than absence
as a presence quickly followed by presense as an absense.  And nothing to
do with Virginity IMHO.

Don't mind me everybody. Just being silly.

			P.