Formally trained as a classical musician,as well as an historian, she has been a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, and was the 1991 recipient of the George Whitfield Chadwick medal.Īlthough Ms. She has been the Scholar of the Institute at the Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, Towson University, Maryland, and has taught at the university level at institutions including Brandeis University, Tufts University, and Whitworth College.

Blank has appeared on the campuses of many universities and colleges, as well as at national and regional conferences of various types and centers for adult learning. Blank's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, NYLON, Entertainment Weekly, and many other periodicals, and she has been widely interviewed on radio and television in Australia, the US, UK, and Canada, including being featured on National Public Radio, BBC 4, and on the acclaimed Canadian program SexTV. Her short fiction and essays are frequently anthologized. Periodicals which have featured her work include Penthouse, In These Times, Southwest Art, Lilith, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, the Baltimore CityPaper, the Boston Phoenix, Santa Fean Magazine, and others. In this fascinating work, Hanne Blank shows for the first time why this is, and why everything we think we know about virginity is wrong. She tackles the reality of what we do and don't know about virginity and provides a sweeping tour of virgins in history-from virgin martyrs to Queen Elizabeth to billboards in downtown Baltimore telling young women it's not a 'dirty word.' Virgin proves, as well, how utterly contemporary the topic is-the butt of innumerable jokes, center of spiritual mysteries, locus of teenage angst, popular genre for pornography and nucleus around which the world's most powerful government has created an unprecedented abstinence policy.

Why has an indefinable state of being commanded the attention and fascination of the human race since the dawn of time? In Virgin, Hanne Blank brings us a revolutionary, rich and entertaining survey of an astonishing untouched history.įrom the simple task of determining what constitutes its loss to why it matters to us in the first place, Blank gets to the heart of why we even care about it in the first place.

Virgin by Hanne Blank