Racy stuff indeed, even where it's cultural and not necessarily political -- Favorite Daughter is poring (or pouring, as in olive oil?) over it right now.

Virginia, the first English settlement in North America, was named for Queen Elizabeth I’s most celebrated attribute (which makes me wonder whether the state’s tourism officials want to reconsider whether Virginia really is for lovers).

. . . Blank gives the history of the so-called “virgin cure,” the belief that men could be cured of sexually transmitted diseases by having sex with a virgin. . . In 18th-century London, one in every five capital rape cases involved children under the age of 10, and the rapists commonly cited the virgin-cure myth in their defense. . . . it persists in southern Africa and is a major contributor to the escalating AIDS crisis.

The thrust of Blank’s book seems to be that for many eons, in patriarchal societies, women needed to prove they were virgins so that their deflowerers could be assured of paternity and thus take care of the offspring — and that, gee, that was kind of miserable and sexist. Under the Roman Empire, fathers had the right to kill their daughters if they had sex before marriage (or outside of it later), and the right to kill the offending male as well.

. . .In an era marked by a “chaotic maelstrom of virginities,” Blank’s book is a useful, if sometimes clumsy, antidote to our confusion.