Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (2 page)

icans have long viewed virginity loss through more than one lens, ever since my days as the rebellious teenager of a frustrated mother—and even before.

The uneasily coexisting stances that had my mom and me at logger- heads in the mid-1980s were the legacy of the sexual “revolution” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A convergence of social forces at that time— the youth counterculture, women’s and gay rights movements, prolifera- tion of effective birth control methods, and climbing divorce rates, to name but a few—had helped make sex before marriage widely acceptable for men and women, albeit without wholly eradicating the erstwhile con- sensus that people, especially women, should remain virgins until they married.

By the mid-1980s, another series of developments had begun to work a dramatic transformation on sexual life in the United States. Starting in the mid-1970s, conservative Christians mounted a moral crusade in- tended to restore pre-1960s sexual norms, especially among adolescents.
4
They won a key victory with the 1981 passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which mandated the inclusion of pro-abstinence in- struction in federally funded sex education programs and bankrolled cur- riculum-development efforts. Then, in 1982, the HIV/AIDS epidemic began. Viewed at first as a disease primarily affecting gay men, by the late 1980s HIV was recognized as a threat to heterosexual adults and teens as well. Quick to capitalize on public concern about HIV, as well as their growing political clout, moral conservatives redoubled their efforts to promote abstinence-focused sex education.

Not surprisingly, entertainment and news media in the 1980s and early ’90s were bursting with positive images of virgins—even as they cele- brated sexual activity. Popular movies like
The Breakfast Club
(1985) and
Boyz N the Hood
(1991) prominently featured teens weighing the pros and cons of virginity loss.
5
The most famous virgin in the fictional firmament was Donna Martin (Tori Spelling) on television’s teen hit
Bev- erly Hills 90210,
which aired from 1990 to 2000. Season after season, good-Catholic-girl Donna professed her desire to give her virginity to her husband, and various boyfriends tested her resolve, until she made love to future spouse David (Brian Austin Green) in the show’s seventh year.
6
But for every Donna, there was a Brenda (Shannen Doherty) or Brandon (Jason Priestly): whatever their gender or religious convictions, none of Donna’s friends remained virgins past the show’s fourth season. Print media—from the
Washington Post
and
Mother Jones
to celebrity glossies

like
People
and fashion magazines for women of all ages (
Seventeen, Cos- mopolitan, Essence
)—likewise teemed with stories about the resurging popularity of virginity, even as they tended to depict “normal” young sin- gles as sexually active. Young America’s stance toward virginity appeared to be nothing if not ambivalent.

My interest in virginity loss as a sociological phenomenon was sparked by this rising wave of popular fascination. In 1994, when
Newsweek
’s story on virginity hit the stands, I was in my second year of graduate school and eager to launch a study of my own. The mostly anecdotal ap- praisals of virginity loss then proliferating raised more questions for me than they resolved. Just how widespread was “virgin chic” among Amer- ican youth? Did it resonate chiefly with women, as
Newsweek, Cosmo,
and
90210
seemed to suggest? Or did the smattering of virgin men now in evidence herald the imminent erosion of long-standing opposing stan- dards for men’s and women’s sexual behavior? Social surveys reported that the average ages at which young Americans lost their virginity (de- fined by researchers as “first vaginal sex”) had been steadily declining— from about 18 for men and 19 for women in the early 1970s to between 16 and 17 for both genders in 1995—while the average age at first mar- riage had risen, from 23 to 27 for men and 21 to 24.5 for women.
7
By these measures, at least, premarital virginity didn’t seem destined to be- come either gender’s new status quo.

But knowing the ages at which women and men began having sex couldn’t tell me what virginity loss
meant
to them. Nor could such figures tell me how teens and young adults made decisions about when, where, and with whom to lose their virginity. Surely a girl who cherished her vir- ginity might opt to lose it at age 14 if she were in love, just as a boy who felt ashamed of his virginity could reach 23 before finding a partner will- ing to deflower him. Furthermore, by simply equating virginity loss with first coitus, most scholars sidestepped the possibility that virginity loss could be defined in different ways. I had personally known too many peo- ple who disputed the mainstream definition of virginity loss not to see that the very definition might need to be revised. Whether giving or re- ceiving oral sex was tantamount to virginity loss had been much debated in my high school; and the pornographic magazines my classmates and I occasionally caught glimpses of often spoke of the various “virginities” available to a single person, distinguishing, for instance, between vaginal- sex virginity and anal-sex virginity.
8
In college, hearing my lesbian friend, Nora, and her girlfriend joke about their respective sexual histories re-

vealed a parallel lack of consensus in the lesbian and gay communities. Nora would periodically tease, “You’re a virgin, you’ve never had sex with a man,” to which Janelle would reply, “Of course I’m not, I have sex with you all the time!”

Once I began to research the topic, I found that the scholarship on early sexuality was largely silent on the meaning of virginity loss, and even more so about its definition. This silence surprised me, given how consistently American institutions — mass media, medical science, schools, religious institutions, public policy organizations, and the gov- ernment—depicted virginity loss as one of, if not
the,
most meaningful events in an individual’s sexual career.
9
As one advice manual for teen girls puts it, “Losing your virginity is something you’ll remember your whole life.”
10
In fact, of all the sexual “firsts” people can experience, only virginity loss is designated by a special term. Most of the published ma- terial I found focused fairly narrowly on the timing of first coitus or on attitudes about premarital sex, neither of which is wholly congruent with the cultural phenomenon called virginity loss.
11
Many studies, moreover, seemed uncritically to lump nonvirgin teens (so designated if they’d had vaginal sex) together with their alcohol- and drug-using peers as being “at risk” for negative outcomes from unintended pregnancy and STIs (sexu- ally transmitted infections) to academic failure and low self-esteem.
12
Yet common sense suggested that, although sexual activity
can
pose dangers to health and happiness, many adolescents lose their virginity with few if any untoward consequences.

Ultimately, I uncovered about a dozen studies concerned with the meaning and subjective experience of virginity loss. Strikingly, none scru- tinized virginity loss as a cultural phenomenon important in its own right; rather, each issued from a larger project concerning the broader contours of sexual or community life.
13
While commendable in many other re- spects, these studies shared two critical shortcomings. First, they dealt al- most entirely with virginity loss prior to 1990, and often much earlier. Yet it stood to reason that recent changes in sexual culture — particularly HIV/AIDS, the political empowerment of moral conservatives, the rise of third-wave feminism, and the unprecedented visibility of gay and lesbian life—might have dramatically altered young people’s approaches to vir- ginity loss.

A second serious shortcoming was that the researchers typically fo- cused on women to the exclusion of men, or targeted heterosexual peo- ple while neglecting lesbians, gays, and other sexual minorities.
14
Both

patterns of omission, and the resulting narrow focus on heterosexual women, reflect enduring trends in the scientific study of sexuality and in social efforts to control it.
15
More often than not, experts, scholars, and lay observers have seen sexual activity and virginity loss among young women as problematic while considering such activity to be normal for young men. The roots of this discrepancy lie partly in women’s biological capacity for pregnancy. Many have argued that if sexually active women have children outside of sanctioned relationships, a society’s entire fam- ily and kinship system are threatened. It also stems from the persistent be- lief that women are fundamentally less sexual than men, a view that in- evitably suggests that sexual women are deviant and dangerous. In prac- tical terms, these tendencies have prompted the collection of extensive data on young women’s sexuality and the development of many ways of trying to control it.

The perception that sexual prowess is fundamental to masculinity has, in contrast, deflected attention from male virginity loss. Cultural stereo- types about masculinity and femininity are reflected in the customary de- finition of virginity loss as occurring the first time a person has vaginal sex, an act commonly seen as something an (active) man does to a (pas- sive) woman. This definition privileges men’s experience of sexual inter- course by, in effect, requiring the presence of a penis. Some people even contend that men do not lose their virginity unless they have an orgasm; orgasms for women are seldom part of the equation.
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Yet men them- selves have clearly found some aspects of sexual activity—not least, its absence—problematic and have seen virginity loss as a significant, posi- tive life transition. Popular tales of young men’s quests to lose their vir- ginity, preferably before it becomes an intolerable embarrassment, are le- gion, appearing in films from
Summer of ’42
(1971) to
American Pie
(1999), novels and plays like
The Last Picture Show
(1966) and
Biloxi Blues
(1986), and “gentleman’s” magazines like
Playboy
and
Penthouse Forum
(1953 to present). Periodic crusades to improve public health or morality by promoting male chastity notwithstanding, sexual activity and virginity loss have rarely been seen as carrying dire consequences for het- erosexual men—at least before the HIV/AIDS epidemic began.

By a similar token, social institutions and individual observers have tended to accept as normal sexual expression between different-sex part- ners while marginalizing or pathologizing sex between same-sex partners. When they have not ignored gay people altogether, researchers interested in virginity loss have usually assumed that lesbigay youth define virginity

loss in terms of vaginal sex.
17
Studies of early sexuality may, therefore, in- clude gay youth who have had vaginal sex (without noting their sexual identity) while summarily categorizing those who haven’t as sexually in- active. Conversely, studies that explore lesbigay sexuality in early life typ- ically focus on initial attractions, first same- and different-sex encounters, and coming out, but rarely ask about virginity loss. Yet, recent anecdotal and popular accounts suggest that, as young gays, lesbians, and bisexuals come out at ever-earlier stages in their sexual careers, they may increas- ingly opt to challenge the prevailing definition of virginity loss as hetero- sexist.
18

In short, despite its enduring importance on the American cultural landscape, virginity loss has largely eluded scholarly attention. A great deal remained to be discovered when I began my investigation. On the in- dividual level, what did virginity loss mean to young Americans—and how did those meanings shape their actions and experiences? How was virginity loss related to earlier and later sexual encounters? How did men and women define it in the first place? For what reasons did people fa- miliar with multiple ways of interpreting virginity loss prefer one over an- other? Were some interpretations more conducive to physical and emo- tional well-being?

On the societal level, I had even more questions. In what ways had the changes of the late 1980s and 1990s—the HIV/AIDS epidemic, resur- gence of moral conservatism, growing lesbigay visibility, backlash against second-wave feminism and the emergence of its third wave—affected per- spectives on virginity loss? What, for instance, of “virgin chic”? Had gen- der differences in beliefs and experiences narrowed or widened in this new social terrain — and were women or men the authors of these changes? Had an increasingly self-aware generation of lesbigay teenagers rejected virginity loss as relevant only for heterosexuals or redefined it to fit their own experiences? How did race, ethnicity, social class, and reli- gious background enter into the mix? Studies suggested that racial/ethnic, class, and religious differences in average ages at first vaginal sex had di- minished in recent decades, even as differences in subjective aspects of early sexuality persisted. Finally, what factors make virginity loss such a significant social phenomenon today, considering that many of the his- torical reasons for its importance have been eroded by far-reaching changes in social and sexual life?

I hope the questions I have asked, and the answers I offer here, shed some much-deserved light on the meanings of this sexual turning point

and its place in the lives of diverse young men and women in the United States as a new century begins.

Asking Questions about Virginity Loss

To find out how young Americans understand and experience virginity loss, I asked a number of women and men from a variety of social back- grounds to share their personal stories with me. Over the course of 18 months in 1997 and 1998, I interviewed 61 young adults in great detail.
19
They included 33 women, of whom 22 self-identified as heterosexual, 7 as lesbians, and 4 as bisexual, and 28 men, of whom 17 described them- selves as heterosexual, 9 as gay, and 2 as bisexual.
20
They ranged in age from 18 to 35 and came from diverse racial and ethnic groups, social- class backgrounds, and religious traditions.
21
All but 5 were no longer virgins when I met them. Most lived within 2 hours of Philadelphia when we met, but nearly half had grown up and begun their sexual careers else- where in the United States.