Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

A N

IN T IMA T E

P O R T R A IT

O F

F IR S T

S E X U A L

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X
P E R IE N C E S

Virginity Lost

Virginity Lost

An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

Laura M. Carpenter

a

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

new y ork univer sity press

New York and London www.nyupress.org

© 2005 by New York University All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carpenter, Laura M.

Virginity lost : an intimate portrait of

first sexual experiences / Laura M. Carpenter.

1. cm.
   

   Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–1652–6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN–10: 0–8147–1652–0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–1653–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN–10: 0–8147–1653–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
   

   1. Sex—United States.
      

   2. Sexual behavior surveys—United States. I. Title. HQ18.U5C35 2005
      

306.7—dc22 2005011619

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Like virginity loss, writing a first book is a rite of passage. I am immensely grateful to everyone whose support and guidance helped me accomplish it. It has been my exceptional good fortune to be mentored by two out- standing and outspoken feminist sociologists. As my main adviser at the University of Pennsylvania, Robin L. Leidner taught me volumes about the science and art of sociology and showed great faith in my promise as a scholar. Constance A. Nathanson, who sponsored my Social Science Re- search Council–Sexuality Research Fellowship Program postdoctoral fel- lowship at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, further schooled me in the sociologies of sexuality and gender and gave generously of her knowledge, advice, and time. I am honored to

call these women my academic forbears—and my friends.

As a graduate student, I benefited enormously from the instruction of professors Demie Kurz, Harold J. Bershady, and Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania. My colleagues and friends in the De- partment of Population and Family Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins also contributed to the development of this project (and of me as a scholar). More recently, I have received valuable advice and support from sociologists Sam Kaplan, Meika Loe, and Jennifer Reich and from my colleagues in the sociology department and gender studies program at Vanderbilt University. Among the latter, Jennifer C. Lena and Alison Piep- meier deserve special mention.

Among my most constructive critics and steadfast supporters have been the scholar-friends I made at the University of Pennsylvania: Gloria

Y. Gadsden, Jacqueline Hart, Heidi Hiemstra, Sara B. Kinsman, Eileen Lake, Sangeetha Madhavan, Shara Neidell, Amanda Nothaft, Eva Sku- ratowicz, and Patricia Stern Smallacombe. Heather King Shamp and Mick Choder, friends from my undergraduate days, also helped in nu- merous ways.

vii

This book would never have taken its current shape without the tough love of Ilene Kalish, my editor at New York University Press. Her critical acumen, encouragement, and considerable patience have been crucial to my ability to realize my vision for this project. Every author should be so fortunate. Salwa Jabado provided technical and emotional support. I am also grateful for the comments of anonymous reviewers at NYU and other presses.

Although my promise of confidentiality prevents me from mentioning them by name, the women and men whom I interviewed for this book de- serve my deepest thanks. Many of them shared their sexual secrets with me in the hope that doing so could help make virginity loss a more posi- tive experience for others. May their hopes in some small part be realized. I am grateful to every colleague, acquaintance, and stranger who helped me identify potential study participants; special thanks go to Carrie Ja- cobs and the Youth Planning Committee at The Attic.

Needless to say, I would have been lost on this journey were it not for my family and friends. Catherine Jellison and Pamela DeGeorge Hawe have seen me through more than a few rites of passage, not least the kind featured in this book. My father and stepmother, David Carpenter and Sarah Carpenter, my aunt and uncle, Barbara Carpenter Rowe and Peter Rowe, and my uncle, James Windham, have each supported me, with love, in their own indispensable ways. Peter Wittich entered my life just as this project was taking shape and has been by my side ever since. I am filled with joy and gratitude that he has chosen to accompany me across the difficult, strange, and wonderful terrain of life as a scholar and as a human being.

Finally, I want to thank my mother, Carole Windham, for shepherding me through the sometimes thorny pastures of adolescence with love. Al- though we’ve never seen eye to eye on the meaning of virginity loss, I hope that she, more than anyone, is proud of the woman I have become. I ded- icate this book to her.

Introduction
‌

The First Time

The headlines read: “A is for Abstinence” (2001), “Choosing Virginity” (2002), “Like a Virgin (Sort Of)” (2002), “More in High School Are Vir- gins” (2002), “1 in 5 Teenagers Has Sex Before 15” (2003), and “Young Teens and Sex” (2005). News stories about adolescent sexuality appear in the popular press like clockwork. Almost all of them focus on virgin- ity and virginity loss, the touchstones of American conversations about young people and sex. In some stories, what is news is that teens are los- ing their virginity; in others, the point is precisely that they’re not. More than a few accounts pause to ponder the conflicting ideas that character- ize American sexual culture. As Nina Bernstein noted in a 2004
New York Times
front-page story, today’s adolescents

cannot escape mixed messages about sex, or the complication of decid- ing if, when and how to sample it. They are picking from a new multi- ple-choice menu, where virginity and oral sex can coexist, and erotic rap makes the case for condoms.
1

Whatever their focus, news stories about virginity loss often suggest that teens are approaching sex, especially first sexual encounters, in ways their parents can barely comprehend—in some cases, wanting to have sex at earlier ages and, in others, pledging abstinence and “saving” their vir- ginity for marriage. Though the tone of these stories is often one of shock, or at least unease, regardless of whether teens are or are not having sex, these struggles over how, when, and under what circumstances one might “lose it” are actually nothing new.

In fact, what first got me interested in the topic was one such media story. A little over a decade ago, I was floored to see a
Newsweek
cover story proudly bearing the headline: “Virgin Cool.” This pronouncement

1

knocked me for a loop. When I was a teenager growing up in suburban Maryland in the mid-1980s, the last time virginity ranked among my per- sonal concerns, being a virgin was the antithesis of cool. Virginity, if it was spoken of, was implied by my peers to be socially backwards, prud- ish, undesirable—but never cool, and when Madonna’s saucy song “Like a Virgin” came on the radio, friends and I winked and sang along, know- ing that “like” was the operative word. I vividly remember gloating with one of my girlfriends that, should President Reagan’s foreign policies trig- ger a nuclear war, at least we wouldn’t die virgins—not like some unfor- tunates we knew. Virgin cool? No way.

Still, try telling that to the pair of adolescent women whose photo- graph appeared in my copy of
Newsweek.
Pretty and posed in body- flaunting outfits, they smiled defiantly beneath the provocative headline, as if to say, “We are too cool!” Reporter Michele Ingrassia had clearly an- ticipated reactions like mine. “A lot of kids are putting off sex, and not because they can’t get a date,” she began. “They’ve decided to wait, and they’re proud of their chastity, not embarrassed by it. Suddenly, virgin geek is giving way to virgin chic.”
2
The article went on to profile ten teenagers—eight women and two men—all heterosexual, diverse in race and religion. Some planned to remain virgins until they married, others until they were older or in love; their reasons ranged from religious be- liefs to fears of unintended pregnancy and HIV. Perchance some nonvir- gin readers longed to attain this novel form of chic, Ingrassia even ten- dered the option of “secondary” virginity, a state of renewed chastity available to “any person who . . . decid[es] to change.”
3

Had things really changed so much since I was an adolescent? That they had was, of course, the central claim of the
Newsweek
story and what qualified it as news. Many adult readers then would have assumed, as I did, that reverence for virginity was, if not quite a thing of the past, then a thing of a prim, perhaps devoutly religious, minority. As a teenager, insistent on my right to enjoy every liberty that men did, I intended to value sexual activity for its own sake, rather than for the love it might rep- resent, as I imagined my mother’s generation had done. “What if I don’t want to get married?” I remember challenging my mother, then a recently divorced opponent of premarital sex. “Does that mean I should never have sex?” I could also remember reading about secondary virginity in a pamphlet from my mother’s church. At the time, I couldn’t fathom the possibility that anyone who’d finally gotten rid of her virginity might want to regain it. Apparently, I was wrong. All of which is to say, Amer-