Virgins – everybody was one of them once. A select few over the years at one point or another made their virginity known, and some even went so far as to exploit it for the sake of their bank account. In KoldCast TV’s clever 60-second soap opera, Luck and the Virgin, for instance, a seemingly naïve, harmless girl heads to Mexico with wads of cash tucked away inside an image of the Virgin Mary. It just goes to prove that beyond the surface, things are often far more complicated than they might seem. Though virginity is a difficult thing to prove, and doesn’t always work in your favor, we’ve complied a list of some of the most famous “virgins” – or so they claim.
1. Ed Gein
The lovely state of Wisconsin has produced an almost alarming number of serial killers over the years, and one of the most famous is Edward Theodore Gein. After leading a bizarre, lonely, and sheltered childhood Ed spent much of his adulthood fantasizing about being with women and developing an unnatural attachment to his mother. He then took to digging up corpses, skinning them, and doing everything from upholstering his furniture with the skin, to making himself vests. (And no, that’s not a joke.)
2. Britney Spears
Britney Spears made a name for herself as a happy, wholesome pop star that was saving herself for marriage. Unlike Ed Gein, in this case virginity was a means to a bloated wallet. Lawyer Eric Ervin, who worked with Spears as a teenager, later revealed that the “virgin” image Spears portrayed was, in his words, a “PR blitz.” In fact, it’s believed that Spears lost her virginity at 14 to boyfriend Reg Jones, and that she and Justin Timberlake were intimate from the beginning. Maybe Britney wasn’t actually a virgin, but it sure helped her career to be seen as one.
3. Hans Christian Anderson
Danish fairytale writer Hans Christian Anderson is believed by some to have had an interest in both men and women, though he never acted on it, and may have remained a virgin for the whole of his life. In an almost Freudian manner, Anderson channeled his sexual frustrations into his work, creating some of the absolute finest fairytale fiction ever written.
4. Bao Xishun
At one point in his life the Chinese born, Bao Xisun held the Guinness World Record for being the world’s tallest man. What many don’t know is that until he was married in 2007 to a saleswoman named Xia Shujuan he was also the World’s Tallest Virgin. On September 17, 2009, Turk Sultan Kösen overtook Bao as the tallest living man in the world, when he was measured by Guinness and found to be a whopping 8’1 inches.
5. Henry Darger
When the quiet, mild-mannered Henry Darger died in 1973, at the age of 81, his neighbors mainly knew him as a retired hospital orderly turned part-time maintenance man to pay his rent. Yet when Darger’s landlord, Nathan Lerner, cleaned out his tenant’s Chicago apartment, he discovered a body of images and writings that are recognized today as the work of one of the greatest (and oddest) of America’s self-taught artists. He too was a virgin.
6. Jessica Simpson
Like Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson used the idea of virginity to her advantage in the early stages of her career, and still claims to have remained one until her marriage to Nick Lachey in 2002. For the most part, it worked. Less then a year later however she had become a “sexpert” and happily shared her techniques for “keeping things hot in the bedroom.”
7. Joseph Merrick
As we’ve shown thus far, virgins are virgins for a wide variety of reasons. Some are socially inept, some only claim to be, and some just simply don’t have the time. Born with physical deformities resulting from a congenital disorder, Joseph Merrick (otherwise known as The Elephant Man) just had a rough go of things from the start. Constantly sneered at and taunted, he spent his young life in pain, loneliness, and hunger until finding work with a traveling freak show in 1884. For him, virginity was hardly a choice.
8. A.C. Green
During his years in the NBA, A.C. Green played more consecutive games than anyone in sports history – missing only three games during the whole of his career. This, however, wasn’t the only miracle streak A.C. managed to pull off – he was also reportedly a virgin. It wasn’t until the age of 38 that A.C. married and joined the other side. In 1998 he was asked by one of the, oh so many, doubters, if in fact his virginity was for real and Green responded with, “Hey, I know who I am and what I am, and that is a virgin. And with all of the risks associated with sex, I’m surprised you’re not.”
9. Queen Elizabeth the First
Perhaps the most famous of the virgins on the list, Queen Elizabeth is often actually referred to as “The Virgin Queen.” Not allowed to take lovers like a king, she was an unwed woman. Though she was said to have a rather “interesting” friendship with two men, Robert Dudley and Robert Devereux, and the public rumor of the time was that she had affairs with both of them at one point or another. Though it might never be known whether not she was an actual virgin, she knew how to play the courts – especially with her virginity – and use it to her advantage.
10. Lewis Carroll
The “virginity” of the author of Alice in Wonderland is a point of great contention these days. For a long while it was believed that Carroll – who had never taken an adult partner and was perceived to have a lack of interest in adult relationships as a whole – went to his grave with his virginity intact. At one point in his life though, Carroll became interested in photography and while the majority of his photos have been lost, some were retrieved and at least half of them contain photographs of underage girls (around the age of 8 years) in various stages of undress, including full or partial nudity. Weird pedophile or weird virgin – maybe the two go hand in hand.
11. Immanuel Kant
As a philosopher, the vastness of Kant’s influence on Western thought is immeasurable. Over and above his specific influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out from his day through the present in ways that have been irreversible. He was also, however, a virgin, and is believed to have died one on the 12th of February in 1804.
12. Sir Issac Newton
Not only was Sir Issac Newton a virgin, it’s widely believed that he apparently formed absolutely no romantic attachments over the course of his eighty-four years of life. So rigorously puritanical was Newton that when one of his friends told him “a loose story about a nun,” Issac immediately ended their friendship. As a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, he is considered by many scholars to be one of the most influential people in human history.