Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (24 page)

It is worth noting, however, that these changes may affect women dif- ferently, depending on their racial/ethnic identity. Although the men in my study who interpreted virginity as a stigma came from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, all of the women who shared their perspective were White. Previous studies have suggested that young White women, while by no means free from concerns about sexual reputation, may feel relatively free to approach sexuality in gender-unorthodox ways because they have historically been stereotyped as asexual. In contrast, young women of color may feel compelled to repress or refuse to act on their sexual desires because they have been maligned as sexually promiscuous and out of control.
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“Part of Me Was Going, ‘Yes, You Are No Longer a Virgin!’ And Another Part of Me Was Saying, ‘I Didn’t Want That to Happen’”

Ed Winters was profoundly ambivalent about the way he lost his virgin- ity. For although Ed had felt stigmatized as a virgin, he had not wanted to lose his virginity when and with whom he did: a female acquaintance coerced him into having sex with her when he was 16. His story, though unique, helps specify how people’s sexual careers can be colored by their (in)ability to assert themselves at virginity loss. It also shows that there

are limits to the circumstances under which people are willing to lose the stigma of virginity. When Ed and I met, he was 28 years old and working as a computer systems analyst. He played bass guitar in a Gothic rock band, befitting his dyed black hair, makeup-whitened skin, and wiry body clad in leather and buckles. Although most of his sexual relationships had been with women, he described himself as bisexual. He’d lived with a girl- friend for several years after college and now shared a townhouse with four platonic friends.

Shortly after I arrived at Ed’s office, he told me that in the days since I’d contacted him, he’d been pondering what it was, exactly, that made virginity so significant to so many people. “Even though supposedly it’s not, it is,” he reflected. “Everyone’s either trying to keep it or lose it, give it away or get it back. And I think a lot of the significance behind the whole concept of virginity is just how vague its essential value is. I think that causes a lot of conflict.”

Ed had first glimpsed that conflict in the divergent views of his parents, who had divorced just after his birth and subsequently left the Roman Catholic Church. His mother, who was comfortable talking about sexual topics from masturbation to orgies, encouraged Ed to “go out, have fun

. . . see a lot of people before you make your mind up.” Her view of pre- marital chastity was particularly dim, as Ed recalled:

I remember my mom saying, “Virginity is stupid.” Both she and my dad were virgins when they got married. . . . And she said it was, like, the worst move she ever made in her life, you know. And if you’re going to spend the rest of your life with someone, you should damn well know how to have sex with them.

Ed’s father, by contrast, barely strayed from the Catholic doctrine he’d os- tensibly rejected. Although he was too “embarrassed talking about sex” to say so directly, Ed’s dad made it clear that he thought his teenage sons had no business being sexually active. Yet, when Ed was 21,

my dad asked me if I was still a virgin, ’cause you see my dad thought I might be gay [laughs]. He’s not too terribly far off, but. . . . That was re- ally funny. He asked me, like, “You’re not a virgin anymore are you, are you, Ed?” And I’m like, “No.”

His dad’s relief was palpable.

Yet another set of ideas prevailed in the high school Ed attended:

[N]ot being a virgin was a status symbol. The younger that you did it, up to a certain age, the better. Because losing virginity implied that you had a girlfriend, and that was a really big deal. . . . You know, the people that had the car and had the money and had the girl were, like, “Well, he may be an asshole, but he’s doing pretty well for himself.”

The stigma of virginity was moreover associated with other stigmas, such as being “socially backwards,” a designation that accurately de- scribed Ed and his Dungeons and Dragons–playing “freak” friends, or relatively poor, which he was, too. His mother, a high school graduate, made just enough money selling office equipment to afford a tiny apart- ment in a wealthy suburb where Ed and his brother could attend good public schools. Ed’s father, a sporadically employed musician, provided little in the way of financial help. By virtue of their outcast status, Ed and his friends escaped the intense peer pressure that beset members of the popular cliques; but even they felt it increasingly urgent to lose their vir- ginity “once we hit 16, 17.”

Well before that urgency peaked, Ed had been determined to appear sexually experienced. He disguised his virginity whenever he could, some- times going so far as to lie about it, as, he surmised, his friends did, too. Laughing, he explained:

The whole virginity thing was like the one thing that you could lie credi- bly about. So. You know, and it wouldn’t. I mean, it could be just the, like, “My many conquests in the Niagara Falls region.” . . . Or you could, just on the sly, you know. The person that you had seen for, like, two weeks last year was actually, you know, “Oh, yeah, I did her.” . . . I mean, the thing is, you also have to approach . . . something that every- one seems to value so highly, you know, losing virginity, with a certain amount of matter-of-fact nonchalance. Which kind of belies how, how important a lot of people make it.

In retrospect, Ed thought it ironic that a group of friends who were all probably virgins found it so imperative to disguise their status; but “at the time . . . it’s just like one of those . . . seemingly necessary lies. So you don’t actually look different than the people that are your friends.” Like Kendall, Ed benefited from belonging to a group in which reluctance to

call others’ bluffs was the norm. He compared his crowd to poker play- ers: “You’re pretty sure everyone’s lying, but you can’t really know for sure until you see the cards.”

In truth, Ed had scarcely done anything sexual before he lost his vir- ginity, not least because his lack of popularity gave him few opportunities to try. “I was . . . really, really scrawny. Really, really dorky. And really, really socially inept,” he explained. “Back in high school, that was not a combination that attracted women.” Prior to the day he lost his virginity, Ed said, “I think I kissed like maybe two, three people. . . . And a little, like, fooling around, you know, petting through fabric. . . . But nothing

. . . that I would consider . . . serious.”

Shortly after Ed turned 16, he, his older brother, and their father were invited to spend a week skiing with wealthy family friends. From the mo- ment they arrived at the resort, Angela, the friends’ 19-year-old daughter, began to pursue Ed sexually. He and she knew one another from similar vacations over the years and, while not close, got along “well enough” as a rule. Though flattered, Ed tried to deflect Angela’s advances at first. He said:

It was just one of those things where like from the very beginning she said, “You!” And I was really scared ... because, friend of the family, someone I know. . . . So for the first two days . . . I was doing that ... “I want to, but I can’t” sort of thing. You know, we’d kiss and we’d flirt... but I’d always just be like, “No, no, no.” ’Cause, you know, I was terrified that my dad would find out. Also terrified that her father would find out.

But Angela refused to take Ed’s “no’s” for an answer. They were sharing a chair lift up the mountain when she said, “Ed, you have a choice. You can either have sex with me or I’ll just tell everyone you already did. And, more to the point, I’ll say that you made me have sex with you.” At the time, Ed could see no way out of Angela’s trap. Who would believe that a girl had forced a guy to have sex with her, rather than the other way around? He thought about telling Angela that he was a virgin, but he was afraid that she might see that as a challenge rather than a defect. Looking back, he said:

I realize that she said a lot of things . . . just to get a reaction out of peo- ple, and no one would have believed her. But, you know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know squat. I was not, not very worldly at the age of 16.

When their lift reached the top of the slope, Angela pulled Ed into a small supply shed and repeated her demand. Feeling utterly unable to es- cape, Ed dropped his ski pants to his ankles and fumbled around until his penis was in Angela’s vagina. He ejaculated scant seconds later, adding to his embarrassment and confusion. He had been too stunned to say anything about birth control or safer sex. If Angela surmised his vir- ginity from his awkward performance—he thought she might well have

—she gave no outward sign; nor did she tease him about his lack of dex- terity.

Immediately afterward, Ed didn’t know what to feel or think. He was delighted not to be a virgin anymore, but profoundly upset about being coerced into sex.

All I know is that I was put in a situation where I, saying no would have been much worse than saying yes. . . . It was one of those things where after it happened it was like, “Huh? What just happened?” And part of me was going like, “Yes, Ed, you are no longer a virgin!” And another part of me was saying, like, “I didn’t want that to happen.”

As shameful as virginity seems to the stigmatized, it is not so shameful that they would willingly lose their virginity/stigma through nonconsen- sual sex.

Ed’s experience differs from Bill’s in instructive ways. Like Bill, Ed felt that he’d had no control over what happened when he lost his virginity. But where Bill blamed himself for that lack of control, Ed found fault ex- clusively with Angela. Ed also escaped the shame and sense of being newly stigmatized that haunted Bill, for Angela had neither poked fun at his inexperience nor intimated that he was a virgin. Although many rape victims report feeling stigmatized, Ed didn’t at first think of himself as having been raped.
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Later, when he discovered the concept of acquain- tance rape, that seemed like the right thing to call his experience. But sometimes Ed wasn’t sure, especially since he’d had an erection.

I wasn’t raped by a guy. It was by a woman. And a lot of people say that can’t happen. And to tell the truth, I don’t know if it can happen even myself. You know, it depends on what you call rape. All I know is that I was put in a situation where . . . saying no would have been much worse than saying yes. And so I don’t know . . . if what happened was actually rape, but in my mind, it kind of did and kind of didn’t.

From this new perspective, his belief that coerced sex isn’t the victim’s fault helped to minimize his feelings of stigma. Thus, although Ed was very unhappy with his virginity-loss experience, his unhappiness resulted from having been raped, not from decisions he made because he inter- preted virginity as a stigma (as was the case for Bill).

In their remaining days at the ski resort, Angela hinted that she’d like another tryst. But Ed, his anger and bitterness mounting, couldn’t stom- ach the idea of having sex again with someone who had manipulated him that way. Many months passed before he, a once inveterate masturbator, could muster any sexual desire. As he explained, “After I . . . started re- alizing what had happened . . . I pretty much didn’t have sex until . . . after I graduated from high school.”

Two days after commencement, one of Ed’s friendships took a roman- tic turn. He had by then recovered his interest in sex, and he and his now- girlfriend “had sex all the time. We were like, three or four times a day. And it was pretty darn all right!” From that relationship up to the pre- sent, Ed told me, he enjoyed sex immensely. And yet, he was rarely able to ejaculate—a dysfunction he traced to Angela’s offense. He was also deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of ever having sex with a virgin. “I don’t want . . . anyone else go through that,” he said.

Because of the manner in which he’d lost his virginity, and because he had been passing as a nonvirgin, Ed didn’t tell his friends about his change in status. He sketched his rationale:

While on the inside [you] may be wanting to jump up and down and scream, like, “I’m not a virgin, I got laid!” [laughs] . . . [I]f you did, they’d all know that up to that point you were a virgin. So everything else that you might have said before that time was a complete lie and you can’t get caught in the lie. So even if you did lose your virginity and it was your first time and it was, like, fantastic, all you could really do is say, like, “Oh, yeah, I did her. I, you know, it was okay.”

In fact, he confided only in his brother—“He was just sort of like, ‘Fine, whatever,’ ’cause he was still a virgin”—and his friend Kathleen. Lest he appear deceitful or newly initiated, “With everyone else I was still like, you know, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve been having sex for, you know, years now.’”

Intensely disappointed with sex and virginity loss, Ed, like almost everyone in this group, gradually began to reenvision virginity as a step in a process. Later turning points in his sexual career—most notably, dat-

ing a woman who introduced him to the pleasures of rough sex and rec- ognizing that he was sexually attracted to some men—reinforced his new perspective.
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By the time of our interview, Ed believed that “virginity is a state of mind more than anything else,” and its loss a “moving from one state, of childhood, to a more adult state.” Ed had also come to exclude coerced sex from his definition of virginity loss. But, interestingly, he did not apply this new definition retrospectively to himself, perhaps because doing so would have necessitated revising the way he had understood his sexual history for several years—a disorienting experience at best.
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The same was true of Miranda Rivera, who also lost her virginity through ac- quaintance rape.

Ed also felt that it would be a mistake to imbue virginity loss with more significance than any single event could realistically bear. When people lose their virginity, he explained:

They suddenly do something that is supposed to be this major event in their lives. . . . And they go through it, and it’s not that. Some of them freak out, I think, because everything’s the same afterwards. Nothing’s really changed. You’re still the exact same person you were before. I