Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (14 page)

Bryan had worried about STIs “initially, but once we trusted that we both were virgins, then that really became no concern.” Eventually, Heather began using the birth control pill.

An opportunity to have sex spontaneously arrived when a friend threw a party while his parents were out of town. “A little bit of alcohol was flowing, and we all stayed over . . . that’s when it happened,” Bryan re- called. The experience unleashed a tumult of emotions:

When I was doing it, I didn’t know what the heck was going on. . . . It was just so unbelievable that this, like, this
thing
you talk about your whole life is actually happening. And honestly, I think that . . . it’s not as, like, as mind-blowing as you expect it to be. Because it’s just like, “This is it? I’m actually doing this, I’m actually, losing my virginity? . . . It’s as easy as this?” You know, it’s just so weird. . . . Afterward it actu- ally was better, felt better than while it was taking place. Just because, you know, wow, we had just shared this thing, and isn’t that nice. So . . . directly afterwards, it was very, very cool.

Bryan was, in fact, surprised to find virginity loss so positive and sat- isfying. For, despite hoping for a romantic and special encounter, Bryan harbored unusually low expectations for a gifter. He’d found it hard to imagine that the intimacy he would gain could outweigh his feelings of ir- revocable loss.

I didn’t expect anything good, honestly. Because you kind of think, “Wow . . . there it is, I just did it. Never do that again anymore.” So it’s not a very nice feeling to think about that. But then when you start thinking about, you know, with whom you did this, then you’re just like, “Well, I’m glad . . . that, for me, it was a nice experience.” Because I’ve heard so many horror stories that, you know, I’m glad that I did it right.
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Heather and Bryan continued to have sex after that first night, but “not very often. . . . [I] probably could count the number of times on all the digits I have on my body.” One reason they had sex so seldom was that the possibility of an unintended pregnancy loomed in the back of Bryan’s mind. “I would’ve shot myself,” he said. “It’s just terrible to even think about it.” It was also difficult to find suitable places for sex, since they both lived with their parents.

Bryan and Heather dated for 2 years altogether. “Some of the best times of my life were with her,” he said. In his senior year of high school, he decided to end the relationship in order to date someone else, “but . . . after I had spent a little bit of time with that person, I was like, ‘This sucks, I want to go back.’” Heather demurred, however, and Bryan even- tually “found somebody else.” When I met him, he’d been dating his new girlfriend for 5 months and knew he was in love. Like Kelly, Bryan saw sex with a second partner as a significant event, meriting the same care- ful approach as virginity loss:

I think that every time you get into a new relationship . . . you start at zero. . . . You’re with somebody and it’s, sex is something that you do between two people, so it’s like . . . the turning point happens in the re- lationship, not—rather than in the individual.

The similarities between Bryan’s and Kelly’s stories underline how much men and women who shared an understanding of virginity as a gift had in common. Yet, the gift metaphor has not shed its associations with femininity; it takes on different nuances when invoked by women and men. When young men choose to approach virginity as a gift, they are, in effect, rejecting a traditional version of masculinity for a more relational, sensitive stance. Insofar as this “new” masculinity seems feminine by comparison, it may connote homosexuality. I imagine that awareness of this connotation was one factor prompting Bryan’s emphatic assertions of heterosexuality at several points in our interview. However, only two of the gay men and one of the bisexual men I interviewed had ever inter- preted their virginity as a gift. This pattern challenges the popular as- sumption that gay relationships must mimic heterosexual ones, a stereo- type scholars and gay activists have long derided as a myth.
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Bryan’s tale also reveals how profoundly people’s sexual careers are in- fluenced by the historical context in which they come of age. Only 18 when I interviewed him, Bryan belongs to the same generation as Britney Spears and other paragons of Virgin Chic. The “younger” men and women with whom I spoke, just children when the HIV/AIDS crisis began, learned about sexuality and virginity entirely in the era of safer sex and “just say no.” They were, moreover, born after second-wave femi- nism had profoundly altered mainstream American ideas about gender and sexuality.
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Men born between 1973 and 1980 were nearly as likely as similarly aged women to have ever been gifters (about half had),

whereas only one of the men born 1962 and 1972 had ever favored the gift metaphor (compared with two-thirds of the “older” women). The “new” style of masculinity that evolved in response to the feminist and youth counterculture movements has, I believe, enabled young men to in- terpret virginity as a gift without sacrificing their masculine identities.
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Furthermore, group and individual efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, including the infusion of conservative Christian sexual ideol- ogy into popular culture and sex education curricula, have prompted young men to approach sexual activity with greater caution than in the past—for instance, by increasingly eschewing casual sex.
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The upbeat narratives of people like Bryan and Kelly do not hold true for all gifters. The following profiles explore the experiences of virgins whose paths diverged from their hopes and expectations.

“It Was Weird to Feel Like This Is Something That Might Be Bad, You Know?”

Although Karen Lareau shared Kelly and Bryan’s understanding of vir- ginity, she differed from them in one critical respect: she consciously chose to give her virginity to a man with whom she was not in love. A tall, White 21-year-old, Karen was the proud captain of her university’s var- sity volleyball team. When I spoke with her, she was just months away from receiving her bachelor’s degree in geography, an interest she attrib- uted to moving a lot while growing up.

Ever since she was a girl, Karen told me, she had thought of virginity as being “kind of like this special gift that you have to give to someone. And . . . besides the physical act . . . a lot of emotional things that go along with it.” Her beliefs about virginity had, she supposed, been shaped by the “family values and religious values” espoused by her parents. Devout Episcopalians, they took a traditional approach to family life—Dad did the breadwinning as an environmental engineer, while Mom took care of the home—and were not only young when they married, but also virgins. Mrs. Lareau in particular encouraged Karen and her sister to emulate her example; virginity was, along with romance, a frequent topic of their mother-daughter heart-to-hearts. Karen, who remained active in church during college, was not alone in tracing her views on virginity to her reli- gious identity. Among the people I interviewed, devout members of main- stream Protestant denominations and practicing evangelical and funda-

mentalist Christians were disproportionately likely to interpret virginity as a gift. Indeed, other researchers have found that devout and/or con- servative Christian youth are more apt to disapprove of premarital sex, and to lose their virginity at later ages, than their less-religious peers.
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Despite agreeing with her mother that a woman should give her vir- ginity to a man she truly loved, Karen wasn’t so sure that there’d be only one true love in her life. She also doubted whether it would be realistic to wait until she was married, given how much the world had changed since her mother was 21. Then, she pointed out, people “look[ed] down on you if you [weren’t] a virgin,” whereas now

it’s almost kind of the opposite. Like, people look down on you if you
are.
Not really look down on you, but ask you, “Well, why?” you know. “Why are you?” And just, it’s not a common thing anymore to be a vir- gin when you’re married.

Karen decided that virginity loss should happen in “a relationship where you can say that you actually love the other person. . . . Someone you’ve been with for a while and know that you’re hopefully going to be with in the future . . . even if you do sleep with one or two people before you find, like, the one that you’re going to be with.” Her friends in mid- dle and high school—in North Carolina and Texas, respectively—had agreed. In Texas in particular, Karen said, virginity was prized and ro- mantic relationships were slow-paced and serious:

You date, you see each other, things move slowly, and people are going more towards marriage. A lot of my friends down there are, like, seri- ously, seriously involved with someone. A couple of them are even mar- ried.

Karen’s high school had been small and so close-knit that everyone knew which of their peers were virgins—the vast majority—and which were not. Although she and her friends never lacked for dates, Karen was the only one who’d had a serious boyfriend, though not until twelfth grade. “I guess I would consider myself kind of late for starting a lot of this stuff,” she said, “because until my senior year . . . I’d only just kissed a guy.” Her “first experience with, like, fingering and stuff like that” was with her high school boyfriend, Jim. Looking back, she wondered if maybe she should have given him her virginity, too. “It was a great rela-

tionship that we had. . . . We were physically definitely very ready!” But, for a variety of reasons, Karen and Jim didn’t have sex.

I really thought about it with him. And we were right there a couple of times. But he didn’t press me on it and I just didn’t do it. It definitely wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I think it was just because he never really just said, “Do you want to have sex?” Because if he had said that, I probably would have said yes [laughs]. . . . And I think it was kind of like, I was kind of naive about a lot of those things, too. Like he was, like I say, my first time for a lot of that sort of stuff, so I wasn’t really . . . sure about a lot of things and, you know, never even had oral sex with him. . . . And there weren’t, you know, my peers around me weren’t re- ally having sex. And we were like the one really serious couple, so it wasn’t like I was comparing myself to anyone else.

When she left Texas to attend college in New Jersey, Karen found her- self surrounded by peers whose ideas about virginity differed sharply from her own. “Here,” she said, “things just go so quickly . . . guys move really fast and — really different from Texas.” Although her college friends
said
they saw virginity as precious, Karen thought their behavior

—especially their frequent casual sexual liaisons—suggested otherwise.

Gradually, she began to question her own beliefs. She explained:

It was weird to feel like [being a virgin] is something that might be bad, you know, ’cause it’s always something that I thought would be really good. . . . And none of my friends are like, “Oh, that’s bad that you’re not having sex.” They’re like, “That’s great that you’re still a virgin.” But you’d hear them talking about all their experiences and you’re like, “Wow, I’m missing out” [laughs].

Karen used several strategies to manage her conflicting emotions. Al- though she shared her feelings with close women friends who were sexu- ally active, she particularly sought the support and advice of fellow vir- gins. Her college roommate, also a virgin, was a key source of reassur- ance. “[E]very once in a while,” Karen said, they would remind one another, “‘Well, virginity is still around,’ you know, ‘It’s okay,’ you know?” With people she didn’t know well, or didn’t expect to become close to, Karen took advantage of the relative anonymity afforded by a large university and the widespread assumption that college-age virgins

are few and far between; most of her peers assumed she was sexually ac- tive. It wasn’t that she’d stopped taking pride in her virginity, she insisted, she just wanted to avoid being teased by people who saw virgins as so- cially backwards or boring. Intentionally concealing virginity was very unusual among people who saw virginity as a gift and unique to Karen among the women in this group.

Karen also practiced what many call “technical virginity.” While still a virgin, she said,

I’d done everything—well, not anal sex, but like—besides actually hav- ing vaginal intercourse. I’d had oral sex before [with four men] and a lot of just, like, heavy petting and, you know, stuff like that. . . . I’ve hooked up with quite a few people since I’ve been [at college], and they’ve all been on various levels of intimacy, depending on how long I’ve been . . . with them.

In short, she felt comfortable engaging in sexual activities she defined as foreplay with men she deemed unworthy of her virginity, so long as she always stopped short of vaginal intercourse. (Karen was one of six gifters who did “everything but” have sex while purposely remaining virgins.)

Like everyone who interpreted virginity as a gift, Karen felt she’d been choosy about her sexual partners. She carefully considered whether boys she dated might eventually merit the gift of her virginity. Physical and emotional “readiness” both figured in her equation as necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. On the one hand, Karen said, “There’s . . . sexual attraction. You know, that’s very important. . . . Otherwise, I wouldn’t even consider it.” On the other hand, she acknowledged, “A lot of peo- ple . . . I’ve wanted to have sex with [physically] but . . . it wouldn’t have been appropriate to have sex with them because it wasn’t a relationship or anything like that, it was just a hook-up.” She elaborated:

It’s like everything has to come together. If you just do one thing, like, emotionally you’re ready, but you’re not sexually attracted to them, then there’s no point in doing it. And, like, you’re usually sexually attracted to them but emotionally you know that it would be a stupid thing to do. You end up hurting yourself otherwise.

Karen was unusually cognizant of her sexual desires for someone who in- terpreted virginity as a gift. Remaining a virgin for several years longer