Tanya’s virginity is crucial to the plot, and everyone in this film is banking on this girl’s cherry remaining intact. Charles and Mary need this quality in order to live; without it, there would be a hysterical punchline to a horror film when they attempt to suck out her life force. I mean, really, what would that life force look like – black opposed to blue? Would they cough and choke on it? Would the taste get compared to month-old pizza left out in the sun on a beach? (To be fair, I know plenty of people that still would with that pizza.) The way in which this is tested and proven, though, points an accusing finger at the social construct as opposed to the biological fact of no intercourse. Mary asks her son with a knowing tone, “Is she… nice?” at least three times, as though to test the fact that she’s virginal in a form of trial by reputation. The description is rather telling: “nice” becomes a socially acceptable euphemism for “virgin,” alluding to the notion that if she’s had sex before marriage, Tanya is somehow a bad person. Charles refers to her as “pure” in his description, and vets her to his mother as, “What kind of girl would go out with a guy she just met?” as further evidence of an intact hymen. Even Tanya’s mother makes sure to lecture her daughter on appropriate behavior, to the point that the girl cracks a joke about packing extra diapers for her date. Going on a date with the cute boy that just showed up at school is a rite of passage, and she wants to explore her sexuality, even if it doesn’t involve full-on vaginal penetration. This is normal, and yet she is hounded throughout the film for her continued virginal status. The heavy emphasis of this film lies in the social aspect of her virginity: she needs to have that “purity” in order to be of value not only to society, but to the continuation of life around her. The world is banking on Tanya being a virgin, whether it’s to keep up appearances or go on living. Her vagina is a life or death situation. (Sidenote: never thought I’d type that.)

Which is total bullshit if you factor in the sexual escapades of Charles, who bangs his mother like a screen door in a hurricane. Charles and Mary are hidden away from society, yet this hiding is in plain sight. No one questions the woman that lives quietly with her handsome teenage son, who never ventures out of the house on our watch. Likewise, Charles presents a face to the outside world that is strangely reassuring: a polite young man that goes to the movies, writes moving short stories, and dates the town good girl. In a sense, this is a type of social insurance: no one is going to question the nice guy that wouldn’t harm a fly, despite that we know that he’s actually a literal monster. The world that Charles and Mary inhabit is fairly twisted upon closer inspection: the insecure Mary has to constantly ask her son for reassurance of her physical beauty and desirability. Charles, for his part, has to tease his mother by asking her if she’s jealous; Mary responds by assuring him that his hesitation doesn’t mean that he’s in love with Tanya, which would be an act of betrayal toward her not only emotionally, but in terms of her ability to survive. Then there’s the actual sex itself, which starts off as romantic dancing and/or cuddling. The look on Mary’s face during the sex scene is telling: pure joy, which is something you’d see with a lover that’s age-appropriate and not genetically related to you. On one hand, their pairing makes sense: as the suspected last of their kind, Mary needs someone that is like her and understands her. On the other hand, she’s doing her son, and does so in the privacy of her own home. No one really bothers her because she’s assumed to be a widow with a teenage son. In this respect, she’s done her social duty: she’s married, had sex and produced a child. For all intents and purposes, no one cares about Mary’s sex life because she’s already initiated in the “proper” order of things.

It’s this setup that allows the story to make a broad commentary on the social construct of virginity. The sleepwalkers need a virgin in order to remain alive, citing the desired purity of a clean sexual slate as the main staple that keeps them going. Let’s be honest: virginity is a social construct that’s designed to measure the value of a young girl in relationship to the notion of determining how much value she has upon marriage. No one really questions male virginity unless if it’s for bragging rights; there’s no real way to check to see if a male has lost his v-card, no special area of the penis that suddenly changes color once it’s made its way into a vagina. For girls, though, there’s always the quantifiable aspect in that the intact hymen signifies that no one has boldly gone there before, meaning that, in theory, there’s a way to render a young woman a label of non-use. While we know now that this small piece of flesh can be torn at any time, it used to function as a way to provide evidence that no one could claim property violation for a marriagable young woman; after all, if someone else had sex with the young bride, there was a potential to claim that property of her father should go to someone other than her husband, especially if a bouncing baby popped out after the encounter. Like it or not, an intact hymen meant that no one had test driven the car before, and that made it a more attractive and iron-clad sale. Point here is that Tanya gets the full brunt of this judgmental thinking, and with mixed results. After all, as the lone survivor, the virginal girl was able to live until the end. Conversely, though, while she’s constantly prodded and teased about not having had sex, no one questions the oddball relationship between Charles and Mary. No one says, “Why don’t I see them in public? And why are they so handsy? Jesus, is that his tongue in her mouth?” This is apparently negotiable. Tanya, though, has everyone from cops to monsters to her parents all up in her business, whether any possible sex was consensual or not. Don’t believe me? What’s the first thing the rookie asks at the cemetery crime scene? If her parents know that she wasn’t raped. Not that someone tried to kill her; if Tanya managed to avoid sexual assault. And therein lies the true value of this character: to those around her, even the humans, what matters most is what has and hasn’t been in her vadge. Hundreds of years of hunting virgins, and the sleepwalkers were able to continue on because they knew that society still held its virginal females on a pedestal.

The grand irony of Sleepwalkers? Mary was just as capable of going out and getting some life force as Charles. In the modern age – even in the early 90s when the story takes place – Mary had perfect capability to go out and find a young, inexperienced lesbian (I’m not even going to touch the penetration issue and its implications. You’ll never get rid of me.). Yet she relied upon her son to do the dirty work of this action. Why? Social convention. Mary needed this to match the courting aspect so that she wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and worse yet, because she knew damn well that female virginity was still prized. It wasn’t a matter of can’t. It was a matter of won’t and manipulation of what society holds on high. In essence, the social contract set Tanya up to be dinner. And that was just fine, so long as she wasn’t raped in the process.