Read Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences Online
Authors: Laura Carpenter
Altogether, I interviewed three men—Bill and Dan Levy included— who were so harshly derided for their virginity or sexual ineptitude, which they had tried to conceal, that they subsequently forswore sexual relationships for a year or more.
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That all three were men who lost their virginity with women is significant, for it suggests that, among stigma- tized virgins, feeling stripped of sexual agency depends not only on the power dynamics fostered by the metaphor, but also on the genders of the virgin and the partner. Social norms positing virginity as more stigmatiz- ing for men than women, the belief that women are sexually passive com- pared with men, and women’s relative disinclination to engage in casual sex all increase the chances that men who see virginity as a stigma will feel disempowered at virginity loss.
“I Just Did
Not
Want to Be a Virgin”
Stigmatized women approached and experienced virginity loss much as men did, with one exception: women tended to be empowered by the very expectations for gender and sexuality that tended to disenfranchise the men. Emma McCabe’s story reveals both dynamics in action. When I in- terviewed Emma she had just turned 24, but with her slight build, quirky manner, and spiky bleached-blond hair, she could have easily passed for a college junior. She was single, child free, and worked at a small pub- lishing house, where she hoped to be promoted from assistant to full ed-
Emma’s father and mother, both of whom came from large Anglo- Catholic families, felt it was important to raise their daughter as a mem- ber of the Church. But at the same time, befitting their scientific training (in electrical engineering and psychology, respectively), they encouraged her to take a critical stance toward Catholic doctrine from her first day at parochial grammar school onward. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in spite of the Church’s prohibition of premarital sex, Emma had, as a teenager, been determined to do away with her virginity. She recalled:
My initial perspective was [that it was] just something I wanted to get over with. I just did
not
want to be a virgin. . . . And looking back, that wasn’t particularly intelligent or mature. . . . But at the same time, that was how I viewed it when I was a virgin.
From her standpoint, the embarrassment attached to virginity depended on the age of the virgin. “It’s weird,” she said. “Like, in my mind, 15 was a little early, 16 was on time, 17 was late, you know. . . . There wasn’t much leeway as far as that.” She was one of many people in this group who spoke of a “window” of time during which normal people lost their virginity.
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Being a virgin before that age wasn’t stigmatizing, but re- maining a virgin afterward would be.
The Catholic Church was only one of Emma’s sources for information about sexuality. Before she turned 16, Emma had seen dozens of movies that dealt with sex—she vividly remembered teen flicks like
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
— and read countless issues of
Seventeen
and
Cos- mopolitan,
as well as teen novels like
Forever.
The materials she found most compelling emphasized the pleasurable aspects of sex and down- played virginity’s purported glories. Emma had no doubt that these media informed her determination not only to lose her virginity “on time,” but also to cultivate her skill as a sexual partner. “I thought . . . that to be, you know, a good sexual partner was cool,” she told me. “To give a good blow job was like an ego rub for me.” She had also looked forward to ex- ploring sex with a variety of partners once she was no longer a virgin. “I don’t think you should just sleep with one person,” she declared. Her friends had, for the most part, agreed.
During her first 3 years of high school, Emma was never at a loss for dates, but none of her relationships progressed much past friendship.
That fact didn’t trouble her, but it
did
bother her that, by the summer be- fore her senior year, her entire sexual history amounted to “basically just kissing” and “a little heavy petting maybe, but nothing that intense.” Emma started to worry: “I felt not horribly, but a little later than I wanted to be.” Looming beneath this concern was an even more disagreeable prospect: “I didn’t want to go to college a virgin.” In feeling increasingly stigmatized by virginity as she drew nearer to high school graduation, Emma was typical of people who shared her views. (It’s no coincidence that Francis Cornworth’s creators placed him on the cusp of his senior year.) Her vague hopes of losing her virginity with a boyfriend rapidly took a back seat to her anxiety to be free of virginity’s clutches.
Fortunately, one of Emma’s friendships soon turned into something more. Jonathan was 18, a year older than Emma, but also a senior. As friends, they had “a very close . . . emotional relationship,” and “very strong physical chemistry, like if we were just standing next to each other.” Chemistry aside, however, “Before we’d done anything sexual, he was just a friend. . . . I just didn’t think about him in those ways.” One afternoon, Jonathan invited Emma to join him in bed, ostensibly to take a nap. “Real smooth,” she laughed, remembering. Within a few weeks, they progressed from kissing and touching to fellatio and cunnilingus. Sex wasn’t on the agenda every time they met, but their exploration sessions were far from infrequent.
Emma made it clear that she wanted to take things further, but Jonathan seemed reluctant.
I had been bugging him for a while. Like, I wanted to have sex and he didn’t. ’Cause he—he was in love with somebody else, number 1. And like, the other woman was who he had lost his virginity to. So there was that kind of emotional weight going on there. . . . And . . . there’s this whole weird dynamic going on, ’cause he was a really good friend of mine, and so I cared about him. But at the same time, he was not trans- ferring the kind of emotional bond we had as friends into our physical relationship.
Because of their friendship, Emma knew about Jonathan’s previous sex- ual exploits—in addition to the relationship in which he’d lost his vir- ginity, he’d had oral sex with a male acquaintance—and Jonathan was aware that Emma was a virgin and hoped he’d help remedy her predica- ment.
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In seeking her friend’s assistance, Emma pursued a favorite strat-
How much sympathy people express for the stigmatized is, however, mitigated by other factors. Most notably, given prevailing gender ideals, female virgins like Emma are more apt to be regarded favorably than males. The virulence of a stigma may also be tempered by the personal characteristics of its possessor and by her acceptance of the social norms from which her stigma derives. Like Marty, Emma was physically attrac- tive, relatively young, and eager to lose her virginity. These factors worked together to Emma’s benefit such that, even though she saw her virginity as degrading, Jonathan’s reaction left her feeling anything but. In retrospect, she surmised, “I think he did get off to some extent about being my first”—precisely the sentiment Bill Gordon observed among his male friends in high school.
A stigmatized person cannot, of course, attempt to capitalize on oth- ers’ sympathy if they aren’t aware of her stigma. This fact discouraged Emma from concealing her virginity, as did several features of the social world in which she moved. Although she would have preferred that her high school friends think she wasn’t a virgin, they had known one another since childhood and therefore knew each other’s romantic histories well enough to discern who had (or hadn’t) had the opportunity to have sex. Since Emma wasn’t willing to lie to her friends, she resigned herself to being honest, if reticent, with them. Indeed, people seldom hide stigmas that can easily be discovered or are relatively mild.
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In less-familiar cir- cumstances, however, Emma was happy to feign knowledge about sexual matters (as did Bill and Marty) and to hope that people would assume that a pretty, popular 17-year-old wasn’t a virgin (Kendall’s strategy). These were prudent decisions, for people are typically penalized more harshly for hiding stigmas from their intimates than from strangers or ca- sual contacts.
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About 6 months after Emma’s first encounter with Jonathan, her per- sistent pursuit paid off.
So I’d been bugging him for a while and, like, his body wanted to, but he was trying to control himself and stuff. There were a couple times where we came close, but he was just like, you know, “I don’t have a condom, we can’t do this.” And then finally one night—it was around Christmas,
Their long friendship and openness about their sexual histories signifi- cantly reduced the disincentives to use a condom. Indeed, safer sex was the almost-universal rule among women and men who lost their virginity with friends or romantic partners who knew the truth about their stig- matizing status.
Emma kept having sex with Jonathan “off and on” for 4 or 5 more months—a time frame typical for people who lost their virginity with a friend or someone they were dating. She’d wished she could discuss this new dimension of their relationship with her friends but felt unable to do so because they were Jonathan’s friends, too. As it turned out, her caution was justified. “I didn’t tell anyone in my high school class until, like, a year after the fact. And people flipped out, like really . . . wigged.” Further complicating matters were the changes that having sex wrought in Emma’s feelings for Jonathan. Despite having initially seen him only as a friend, she became “convinced that he would wake up one day, you know, figure out that he was in love with me and all that.” She laughed, “But that didn’t happen.” With hindsight, she traced her desire for a romance with Jonathan to the purported significance of virginity loss:
In times since . . . there are guys I’ve slept with, and it’s just like, okay, you know, that was fun or whatever, but there’s nothing . . . that kind of bond isn’t the same as the first time. . . . [P]eople put more emotional weight on it . . . just because it is the first time.
Fortunately, Emma’s friendship with Jonathan survived the strain of their divergent inclinations—it helped that they “went away to different col- leges and got some time and space”—and they remained friends 7 years later.
Like Kendall and Marty, Emma felt overjoyed to have lost her virgin- ity but also somewhat disappointed to discover that sex wasn’t everything she’d expected. “There was just kind of like, ‘Oh . . . it hurt,’ and ‘That was sex,’” she said. “But I wasn’t a virgin anymore!” Over time, Emma too came to see virginity loss as the beginning of a learning process.
Looking back, she wondered if she might have learned more from, and gotten more pleasure out of, losing her virginity if she had waited for a partner who was more available emotionally:
Not necessarily that it should be the love of your life or anything like that. But . . . it would be better in a lot ways if it was someone who you had an emotional bond with and you had a good communication with as well. . . . My first experience was very, just physical. . . . But if you have one that just gives more of an indication of what the possibilities are. . . . It kind of sets the stage for better experiences in the future.
Significantly, Emma valued emotional closeness for different reasons than those cited by gifters, as did the nine other stigmatized who suspected that virginity loss with a closer partner would have been more enjoyable. And, in the final analysis, she said, “I honestly don’t think I would” change the way she lost her virginity, even if she could.
Emma’s beliefs and experiences—and those of the three other women who interpreted virginity as a stigma—bear a striking resemblance to the beliefs and experiences of the men who favored this approach. Yet, none of the women experienced virginity loss as disempowering. In fact, Emma’s tale shows how women who saw virginity as a stigma
benefited
from the sexual double standard. First, men’s relatively greater willing- ness to have sex outside of dating relationships enabled these women to lose their virginity fairly rapidly once they wished to do so, by proposi- tioning male friends or strangers. The women also profited from wide- spread social approval of feminine virginity. Their personal sentiments notwithstanding, women like Emma surmised that few people would find their virginity appalling. Lacking a strong incentive to conceal their vir- ginity from sexual partners, Emma and two other women simply an- nounced it, thereby freeing themselves from the possibility of discovery and ridicule. Less than half of the men did likewise. The two women in the study who did hide their virginity from male partners found that pop-
ular stereotypes of women as sexually passive worked to their advan- tage.
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Whereas Bill’s compulsion to play the active partner led to bum- bling and accusations of sexual inexperience, these women went unchal- lenged—aided by the fact that they bled little during coitus.
Although Emma and the other stigmatized women didn’t see them- selves as setting out to challenge gendered sexual standards, by interpret- ing and losing their virginity the way they did, they positioned themselves as sexually unorthodox women. Not surprisingly, given the social changes that have taken place since the early 1970s, the younger women I interviewed—those who reached adolescence after the emergence of HIV/AIDS—were considerably more likely than their older sisters to have felt stigmatized.
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The feminist movement, the fortification of liberal sex- ual values (in reaction to the influence of the Christian right), and the new media images of feminine sexuality all helped make the stigma metaphor seem more available and appropriate to women Emma’s age than it did to women just a few years older.