Mapping Virgin Territory
Carson Brown / WINTER 2000
I SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM OF THE STD CLINIC, WONDERING if my fellow patients knew my secret. As I pored over pamphlets, I felt terrified that I was giving off some virgin pheromone that nonvirgins could smell a mile away. Was it written all over my face that I was an imposter and trespasser?
The week before, my can-I-call-him-my-boyfriend-yet boyfriend had reported some burning when he pissed, and when his results came back positive but curable, I was told to get checked out, just in case, even though we had never actually done the deed. So there I was, nineteen years old, far from home, trying to see my foray into gonorrhea’s grotto as a learning experience. My beau had assumed I was deflowered, and I let him. The moment of my maidenhood that separated ripening from rotting had passed. I was too old to be both a virgin and cool.
A nurse called my number, and I followed her into a small room for questioning. I breezed through the early rounds: Travel in Africa? Blood transfusions? Intravenous drugs? Innocent on all counts. I was on a roll. But then: “Date of last intercourse?”
This woman had heard it all before: hundreds of partners, multiple abortions, religious beliefs disallowing condoms, everything. But when I peeped, “Never,” and she looked up from her clipboard for the first time, I
could tell this was a new one. Mine was the right answer for church or grandparents, but here, I was wasting time and tax dollars.
She stared, waiting for me to revise my answer. Finally she repeated, “Never?” I shook my head sheepishly. After a pause she asked, “Oral contact?” I nodded emphatically. She went on: “Mutual masturbation?” I nodded again, having never actually heard that term before but getting the idea and wanting to please her. She led me into an examination room and instructed me to strip from the waist down and wait. When the doctor entered—a woman, to my relief—she offered, “So I hear this is probably your first examination?” and I cringed, imagining the chuckles she’d shared with the nurse. “Not to worry.” She sat on a stool at the end of the table, told me to relax (yeah, right), and ducked below the V-shaped horizon of my thighs, peeking up momentarily to add, “Lovely sweater.”
As I tried to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, the doctor proclaimed, “My, what a large hymen you have!” “Thank you,” I squeaked out, realizing quickly that it wasn’t really a compliment.
“Can you get a tampon in there?” she marveled, taking a close, incredulous look where no man had gone before. “I would offer to give it a little, you know, clip, but I would worry you would never go to the gynecologist again! Ha-ha!”
“Ha-ha!” Translation: It would hurt like a bitch! Meaning it was going to hurt like a bitch when …
“It’s really up to you, sweetheart,” she continued, suddenly maternal. “Maybe it would just be easier to do it now?” No telltale blood, I thought. No pain to hide. But here? Now? This woman? And Jesus, was she really asking me what she was asking me? “Shall I?”
MEANWHILE, MY FRIEND ANNA WAS STUDYING IN PARIS AND had found a Frenchman willing to cash in her V card, which had apparently been her intention all along. I didn’t know Anna that well at the time, but I certainly hadn’t figured her for hymenically intact: Her drama major, twenty-something age, perpetually tousled hair, exotic looks, older ex-boyfriends, and unconventional lifestyle all pointed to experience. But when it was discovered that Jacques was also servicing a woman down the hall, she seemed disproportionately devastated (if naively surprised). Her reaction made more sense when she told me, in a heartbroken e-mail, that he’d been her first.
But recover she did, and started talking constantly about diversifying her sexual portfolio, aiming to boost the count onto two hands. Over a year’s time, the club’s ranks swelled to four members—“three men and one woman,” she would footnote. I consulted my sources and discovered that she had been seeing a woman before she departed for France. I thought it through: She’s only ever been involved with one woman, she’s slept with one woman, she was seeing this woman before she left, yet she lost her virginity across the pond. The upshot? Anna counted this woman among her partners, but though she came chronologically before the lecherous monsieur, she didn’t claim Anna’s virginity.
Anna’s mathematical maneuvering brings up a number of issues: Why should virginity loss be based on the presence of a penis, automatically relegating same-sex activity to a lower status? For the sake of argument, I’d almost say that maybe, technically, the hymen defines the event. But if that were true, then some random gynecologist holds the key to my chastity belt. Not very romantic. I wanted to choose my own moment as the end of my maidenhood, and Anna should get to do the same. (However, she can’t have it both ways: If she can’t deal with the fact that she lost it to a woman, then she can’t use that woman to pad her numbers.) Most important, though, what is it that makes virginity so uncool these days?
The stereotype is that virgins are timid, old-fashioned, meek, boring, cautious, unattractive, repressed, narrow-minded, and naive. They have low self-esteem or bad body image. They can’t participate in fun conversations about sex. Basically, they aren’t rebels. Most products and experiences are marketed to us by equating the hip with the subversive: This is the antiestablishment car to drive, the alternative soft drink to drink, the anticelebrity celebrity to copy. In the end, rebellion is transformed into conformity, and so it goes with sex. How are companies supposed to market their stuff if people aren’t actively pursuing sex? How are they supposed to sell cars, clothes, beers, breakfast cereal, perfume, makeup, or travel on the premise that their products will get you laid if people are content to not get laid? So the market pulls out all the stops to ensure that we will remain sex obsessed, so that we’ll buy things. Businesses want virgins to feel horrible about themselves, because if virgins were happy being virgins, they would be horrible consumers. As long as they are virgins desperately trying to ditch their virginity, fine. But abstinence undermines economics.
Virginity bias tacks a confusing corollary onto historical social opinion about the sexual behavior of women. Not so long ago, a woman had only to hold a nickel between her knees to avoid slut status. Easy enough. But since the sexual revolution, she can also be slapped with the equally damning “prude” label. We’ve strayed from the original intent of women’s liberation and limited women again, trading in the old prescription (sex will ruin a woman) for one that seems more modern (lack of sex will curdle her). We can’t seem to shake the need for a formula, constructing a narrow sixmonth window around a girl’s seventeenth birthday (if that’s early enough) as the approved defloration moment. We’ve led a woman I know to plan, one drunken night, to seduce her twenty-six-year-old cousin rather than go to boarding school a virgin at age sixteen.
While virgins are by no means an actively persecuted group, the prejudice our culture perpetuates against them is insidious. Signaling the near-complete shift from the old-fashioned “men want virgins” mentality, the 1970s bestseller
The Sensuous Man
, written by “M” during the heyday of the sexual revolution, includes a section titled “Hints on Sacrificing Virgins.” The author calls virginity “one of woman’s most hideous afflictions” and confesses a “general prejudice against women who have managed to keep their virtue intact.” He wishes that virgins were forced to wear badges to prevent men from accidentally seducing them, stating that “the term ‘virgin’ has almost become a gross insult to a woman’s sexual attractiveness.”
I WAS RECENTLY A BRIDESMAID IN A HIGH-SCHOOL FRIEND’S wedding. She’s twenty-three and Christian, and was a virgin on her wedding day—a dying breed—as was her fiancé. In fact, her first kiss was the night of their engagement, and they didn’t lock lips again until the altar. And it showed. Truly, it was the most atrocious “You may kiss the bride” moment I have ever witnessed: He went in for the smooch, she leaned in unexpectedly, they bumped mouths. He pulled back, startled; she swayed in for a little more, but it was over. I covered my mouth, horrified that these two thought they were going to do the nasty that very night.
Of the people onstage during the ceremony, I was one of three who knew carnal pleasure. My sexually active compatriots were the bride’s partnered lesbian Christian sister and the married pastor. Unmarried and not virginal, I was the only one living in sin (well, except for the sister’s minor gay issue).
The pastor’s talk that day centered on a line from my friend’s self-written vows that said, “I know you [my husband] will never fully satisfy me, that I must look to God alone to complete me.” Now, I had thought her comment was not really in the spirit of the day. But the pastor said that she was onto something—they both had to realize that God is the most important person in their marriage. To illuminate this nuanced point further, the pastor offered an image: “Marriage is like a God sandwich.” I blushed: This kinky talk from a pastor! But as I looked out into the audience, I saw all the Christian couples nodding. My friend one piece of bread, her husband the other, and God as the meat, always there in the middle. A veritable menage à God.
Suddenly everything the pastor said took on a sexual meaning to me, all the years of suppressed desire coming out in religious doublespeak. It was all merging, joining, intersecting, and satisfaction, and God was always there in the thick of it. The Holy Trinity had become the holy threesome. It was as if they didn’t really love each other, but they both loved God, and that was the ticket. And, in fact, it cast a weird light over the loss of virginity in general because they weren’t really making love to each other directly, but rather through God. Even within the union of marriage, when the whole abstinence bet was supposed to be called up at long last, sex was still dirty, base, or empty unless it was mediated by God.
When I tell people this story, it solicits unanimous outrage. Most recently, a woman responded, “What if the bride was allergic to her husband’s sperm and didn’t even know it?!” The sex-positive brigade thinks my friend is doomed to a lifetime of unsatisfying sex, she’ll never have an orgasm, she’s ashamed of her body, she’s repressed, she’s scarred, she’s guilt ridden, she’ll never masturbate, she needs to see a shrink, she wants attention, she’s a lesbian, her husband’s gay, it’s my responsibility to educate her, her father or priest molested her, she’s been brainwashed by evil forces. Hmm. Sounds to me like she’s pretty deviant—these are the sorts of comments usually reserved for queers, trannies, prostitutes, porn aficionados, S&M enthusiasts, and the rest of the freaks. Sounds like a Christian good girl just became “alternative.” And where does that leave all the formulas?
IF CAPITALISM AND ADVERTISING ARE TELLING PEOPLE THEY have to want sex, Christianity is telling them the opposite. For every woman trying to jettison her cumbersome chastity, there’s another who desperately
wishes she hadn’t given it up. And for every Christian young person who walked the pure walk all the way to her or his wedding day, there are ten who gave in to temptation along the way. To serve them, the secondary-virginity movement was officially launched in 1993 by the Christian abstinence organization True Love Waits, which invites teens to pledge celibacy until their wedding nights, often announcing their new path at ceremonies where parents place pledge rings on their child. Parallel efforts sprang up, such as Sex Respect, which coined the snappy slogan “Control your urgin’—be a virgin.”
The secondary-virginity folk are going for a few good things here: first of all, the idea that people have the right to choose their own moment of defloration, that the label of “virgin” is actually arbitrary. If you did the deed but feel horrible about it, you should be able to call a do-over. Revirginizing allows you to define your own existence based on your current behaviors, saying, in effect, “I am who I conceive myself to be.” This is a very powerful and potentially very feminist—notion. Of course, unlike True Love Waits, I would also encourage the flip side: If you’ve been very physically intimate but haven’t technically had intercourse, you should be encouraged to define yourself as a nonvirgin if you want to.
Also, the secondary-virginity model is more gender fair than other sexual rule systems. Here, sex is a no-no for both sexes—zero room is allowed for statements like “boys will be boys.” And proponents don’t buy the whole “teenagers have such strong sex drives that they just can’t control themselves” thing. They respect young people enough to know that they have brains, they can be responsible for their actions, and they can stick to decisions they really want to make. They ride the fine line of accepting and repairing mistakes while setting high standards for behavior, which is, in theory, what Christianity in general does. But the problem with the secondary-virginity movement is that it still says, as loud and clear as any advertising campaign, that there are right and wrong ways and times to have sex, and asks people who do it wrong to deny that part of their lives.
Is sexual terrain really so treacherous that we need strict instructions from the church or the secular gods that are movie stars and models? If we must have a formula, why can’t it be that you “pass the test” by doing whatever it is that makes you ultimately happiest? Of course, it’s not easy to differentiate what makes me happy from the perks that society awards me
for conforming. And it’s much simpler to rely on prepackaged identities—whether people are virgins or not, whether they are gay or straight, whether they’re loose or frigid by reputation—than to figure out if they’re satisfied with their lives. So how can we create a culture free of virginity obsession and outdated dichotomies? It may be time for a third term, a social creature even more unlikely and elusive than virgins: ourselves as individuals.