Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (16 page)

said, shaking her head. “But I later found out that he hadn’t been, and he was just telling me that so that he would look . . . more like a boy, I guess.” Julie was, along with Kelly Lewis, one of three women in this group who eventually found out that their boyfriends had pretended to be nonvirgins before they had sex, suggesting that the boyfriends saw vir- ginity as a stigma (concealing virginity from sexual partners is character- istic of men in the stigma group). Approaching virginity loss from appar- ently different perspectives had few, if any, repercussions for Kelly and Dave; but it mattered a great deal for Julie and Scott.

Despite Julie’s initial refusal, Scott continued to pressure her for sex. She vividly remembered his entreaties, and the subtext underneath them:

He was like, “Oh, Jule, you know you really should because.” Uh, what was the reason? Something about . . . the end result of it was, “If you don’t, then I’m going to leave you.” . . . I mean, I think that had a lot to do with it. But I think it was more phrased like, “Then you’ll show me that you really care about me.” You know? I think that was more of what the phrasing was. But it was that underlying, you know, “If you do love me then you will, if you don’t then you won’t.” It was that kind of thing.

In their first 5 months together, Julie and Scott became increasingly sexually intimate, until genital petting was a part of almost every date. This routine, and what Julie saw as its inevitable conclusion, was one of the reasons she decided to give Scott her virginity. She explained:

I remember we talked about it a lot. . . . And I remember, we’d go to the movies and, you know, we’d be kissing and whatever. And it just seemed like, you know, we had gone so far, and there was like, nothing else to do. We obviously could not get married at that point in time [laughs].

The fact that Scott’s affection for her seemed to intensify with every sex- ual encounter further convinced Julie that he would be the right boy to receive her virginity. Sexual desire played little part in her decision; in fact, it was virtually absent from her recollections.

What happened when Julie acquiesced to Scott’s request left her stunned and upset. Physically, she found vaginal sex neither pleasurable nor painful; and she didn’t worry about pregnancy because they used a condom. Nor did having sex alter Julie’s state of mind. She said:

I thought it was going to feel a lot different, and I thought it was going to be more painful. I thought that . . . like, the floods were going to open and blood was going to, you know. I thought it would make me feel dif- ferent.

What really surprised her was Scott’s reaction. Rather than being grate- ful, he questioned her truthfulness!

After it happened, he was like, “Are you bleeding?” You know, it was like, “Is it happening? Do you feel different?” And I was like, “No, not really” [laughs]. . . . And he was really upset about that. Because he thought for sure that I lied to him. And that he hadn’t been my first. And I remember thinking back on that and saying like, “You dick,” you know? ’Cause, I mean, it, at the time it meant a lot to me. That I was . . . doing this with him. But then again, it was like, “You know what? You think I lied to you.” So. You know, “Why, obviously it didn’t mean that much to you, ’cause you don’t trust me enough to believe me.”

Scott’s behavior, if less than admirable, nonetheless makes sense in light of social expectations for gifts. As Julie’s boyfriend, Scott may have felt that he deserved the gift of her virginity, and thus that she cheated him out of it.
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Or he may have disagreed with her as to which of them gave the first truly significant gift—was it the affection and commitment Scott bestowed as Julie’s boyfriend, or the virginity she presented out of her feelings for him?—and therefore about who owed what to whom.
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What ensued between them suggests that, when exchange partners disagree about the sequence or value of gifts, the interpretation of the more pow- erful party—in this case, the older, more popular, male Scott—will pre- vail.

Furthermore, because givers typically proffer gifts that reflect the re- cipient’s value to them, Scott may have taken Julie’s ostensible failure to give her virginity as a sign that he wasn’t worth very much to her. Because receiving a valuable gift enhances a person’s social status, some men and women may even seek to increase their own worth by “taking” someone’s virginity. Tony Halloran, a 21-year-old busboy from an Italian-Irish fam- ily, told me about just such a scenario. Despite personally seeing his vir- ginity as a stigma, Tony was still a virgin at age 20. When the older sister of one of his friends discovered his status, she asked Tony to give his vir- ginity to her. He said:

The way she phrased the question was, “Can I be the first one? Can I take your virginity?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And she . . . felt special, I guess. And even afterwards, I remember her saying that I would always remember her. Because she was my first.

Several gifters suggested a less mercenary reason for seeking to be a re- cipient: having enjoyed their own virginity-loss encounters, they wanted to give someone else a similarly positive experience.
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Julie was deeply hurt that Scott believed she had deceived him. She was also devastated to find that, contrary to her expectations, her gift neither enhanced their love nor strengthened the bonds between them.

I thought it would make me feel differently about him. I thought it would make him feel differently about me. I thought it would make
me
feel differently about me. But it didn’t really. . . . Because he assumed that I lied to him. It certainly didn’t change our relationship. It didn’t make it better, it didn’t make it worse.

When I asked how she had expected their relationship to change, she said she thought

that it would be different, there would be a lot more caring. . . . I think I thought it would make me maybe feel love for him that I knew I didn’t have. Maybe it would, like, give us a fresh connection that we didn’t have. Whether it be physical or mental or. . . . You know, there was, there was nothing added to the relationship. No more caring, no more nurturing, no more nothing!

Nothing Julie could say or do seemed to change Scott’s mind. Yet he made it clear that he wanted to keep dating (and having sex). Julie strug- gled to cast aside her feelings of distress and impotence; she even had sex with Scott a few more times. Though he had behaved reprehensibly, she reasoned, the fact that she’d shared a special part of herself with him made it worth trying to stay together. Efforts at maintaining unsatisfac- tory relationships are, in fact, one of the less savory consequences of per- ceiving virginity as part of the self—especially for people who feel, like Julie, that transferring that part entails an irrevocable loss.
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When, for example, Danielle Rice, a 27-year-old White heterosexual telecommuni-

cations technician, told me that she spent 6 years with the “very abusive” boyfriend to whom she gave her virginity, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she had, on some level, been reluctant to leave him because he possessed what she described as “something of mine . . . that I can only give up once,” a part of herself she would be forced to abandon along with him.

When Julie’s anger with and distrust of Scott hadn’t subsided after a month, she decided to end their relationship. Ashamed of her poor judg- ment in choosing him, and sure that it would reflect badly on her, Julie kept her virginity loss secret from everyone but her two closest girlfriends, to whom she turned for sympathy and advice. Her reaction mirrored that of every woman whose partner failed to reciprocate her gift.

A few months later, Julie started dating a new boy at high school. Though less popular than Scott, Dan was far more considerate and re- spectful. He and Julie made sure they were really in love before they even contemplated having sex, and they dated for more than 2 years in all. Yet this positive experience did not dispel Julie’s sense that the way she lost her virginity had fundamentally changed who she was as a sexual being. Scott’s failure to recognize or return her gift showed Julie just how little control she’d had over their sexual liaisons, and she carried that sense of disenfranchisement into later relationships. Having given away her vir- ginity to someone who clearly didn’t appreciate it, Julie felt diminished in value, so much so that she believed she was no longer special enough to refuse sex with less than special men. After Dan, Julie went through what she described as a “pretty promiscuous” phase. In college, she recalled, “I had a roommate that, she was a virgin, and she’d [be], ‘Jule, how can you sleep with that guy? . . . You just met him!’ But I’d do it, you know. It did- n’t really matter much to me.” Such feelings of lost self-worth are a major hazard of perceiving virginity as part of the self.

By the time I met her, Julie was trying to take what she hoped was a healthier approach to sexual relationships. She explained:

I have accepted myself and I’m happy with myself. And I think I know at this point that I don’t need somebody else to make my life, you know, complete. . . . [Now] I don’t want to be involved with anybody until I find someone that I’m really happy with. You know, somebody that I want to have sex with mentally and physically. . . . It’s not just going to be like, wham, bam, see you later.

In ultimately deciding to postpone having sex until she met someone re- ally special, Julie resembles those who describe themselves as secondary virgins—but she declined to apply that label to herself.

Although she declared herself glad to have learned a lot from the way she lost her virginity, Julie’s regret and disillusionment were palpable 10 years later. In a plaintive voice, she said, “You know, you had asked about, was there anything I would change. Well, I wish I could have felt more... I wish it would have been, like, this so special moment in my life.”

Julie’s story underscores the tremendous importance of reciprocity for gifters and demonstrates the degree to which a virgin’s sense of having controlled her own destiny could color her subsequent sexual career. In a society in which many people do not view virginity as a gift and where informal social control is relatively weak, recipients enjoy power over givers, specifically the power not to reciprocate. Virgins who favor the gift metaphor therefore run the risk that their
partners
will determine what happens when they lose their virginity. I found that people whose partners reciprocated their gifts, like Kelly, and those who personally chose to forgo reciprocation, like Karen, were generally satisfied with their virginity-loss experiences and went on to approach later relation- ships much as they had their first—for instance, by continuing to predi- cate sex on love and commitment. In contrast, virgins who felt taken ad- vantage of by nonreciprocating partners described themselves as Julie did, not only as emotionally upset by their experiences, but also—and more disturbingly—as unable to assert themselves in subsequent rela- tionships as well.

Julie was one of four women who told me that they felt disempowered sexually after their “special” boyfriends refused to reciprocate their gifts of virginity—gifts the boyfriends had coerced or tricked them into giving. It appears that these young men more or less consciously used the dual nature of gifts, as voluntary yet obligatory, to their own strategic advan- tage.
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When Scott pressured Julie to give him her virginity, he stressed ro- mantic partners’ obligation to give one another gifts while ignoring the definition of gifts as voluntary. Julie was effectively trapped between two conventions of gift giving; and the understanding that prevailed was, sig- nificantly, the one promoted by Scott, the more powerful partner by virtue of his gender. In this way, the gift metaphor tends to reproduce cur- rent patterns of gender inequality.
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A man’s greater power prevented a fifth woman from controlling her virginity-loss experience in a different way. Miranda Rivera, a 29-year-

old Puerto Rican lesbian who works as a teacher, lost her virginity at age 21 when she was raped by an acquaintance. She had already come out as a lesbian to herself, but not to all of her friends. Miranda was angry and bitter that she hadn’t been allowed to determine when — much less whether—she gave her virginity to a man. (She was the only lesbigay per- son I interviewed who believed that a woman could only lose her virgin- ity with a man.) She said:

It was like a double kind of a transgression, you know? Because I hadn’t had any sexual experience before, with a man or a woman, and there was the physical thing of it, [the] invasion and, the virginity thing. . . . This guy took the choice away from me.

Because Miranda lost her virginity through rape it would have been im- possible for her to have had a positive experience; yet her belief that vir- ginity is a gift appeared to magnify her dissatisfaction.

Unlike Julie, Miranda did not feel sexually disenfranchised
following
virginity loss. In fact, the experience strengthened her resolve to have sex only on her terms. Several years after being raped, and after two serious sexual relationships with women, Miranda decided to intentionally give what had been taken from her. “Virginity then became a matter of, like, going to sleep with someone willingly,” she explained. “So . . . I did have a sexual encounter with a guy for, just for the sake of saying, I’m taking this, nobody else is.” Although “not pleasurable” physically, Miranda found her voluntary virginity loss, with a close male friend, “enjoyable” because “it was very important for me to be in charge” and because it “kind of erased the first.” Coerced sexual experiences were, in many peo- ple’s minds, the one exception to the rule that virginity could be lost only once.
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Many believed that someone who had been raped hadn’t had sex, and so couldn’t have “lost” her or his virginity.

Although Julie traced her feelings of impotence in later relationships to the lack of control she felt at virginity loss, I wondered whether a single sexual encounter is likely to have such lasting effects. Perhaps Julie merely used her unhappy virginity-loss experience to justify her subsequent promiscuity; perhaps she would have followed the same course regardless of Scott’s behavior. Taken together, the interviews I conducted suggest that, while virginity loss need not inevitably affect future events, it can have long-term repercussions when people invest it with tremendous sig- nificance. For people who perceived virginity loss as an event of unparal-