Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (26 page)

In keeping with its anthropological subplot, the film frames virginity loss as a rite of passage. Sutwell’s dictated field notes describe the youths’ flirting, sexy dancing, and make-out sessions as puberty rites. Dolores herself likens virginity loss to a step in the process of growing up when she complains to her friend Rhonda (Valora Noland), “I want Frankie to think of me as more than just a girl.” Confused, Rhonda says, “But you’re not even a woman,” implying sexual status as well as chronologi- cal age. Dolores clearly has the former in mind, for she snaps, “But I’m close—and I’m not getting any closer until I’m a wife!” In effect, she be- lieves that virginity loss and marriage both transform girls into women— and that the two events should take place together. (In this respect, the movie presents women’s virginity as a gift for future husbands; little is said about male sexuality beyond the suggestion that decent men don’t let

their lusts interfere with women’s desire to postpone sex until marriage.) By the end of the film, Frankie and Dolores have joyfully reunited, with sex and marriage on hold. Meanwhile, Sutwell has undergone something of a rite of passage himself, transformed by his research and Dolores’s ex- pert tutelage from a tunnel-visioned scholar—so obtuse about sex that he is wholly unaware that his beautiful assistant, Marianne (Dorothy Mal- one), is heads over heels in love with him—to a clean-shaven, Bermuda shorts-wearing flirt eager to recruit Marianne to help “keep me from get- ting involved” on his next expedition, “with the natives, that is.”

Although the women and men I interviewed were born too late to cite
Beach Party
as influencing their own understandings of virginity, one- third of them shared its perspective on the subject. These young people described virginity loss as a central step in the transition from youth to adulthood—precisely the kind of event anthropologists refer to as a rite of passage. More specifically, they likened virginity loss to a step in two interrelated processes: becoming an adult, and acquiring knowledge about sexuality.
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Recalling discussions among her high school friends, Jessica Tanaka, a 27-year-old bisexual Japanese American from a work- ing-class background, invoked both themes:

I guess we sort of romanticized the whole, like, losing your virginity, like, becoming a woman, like, being grown-up kind of thing. . . . Like, we really couldn’t figure out what it would be like, we’d have to go and find out on our own. . . . It was just sort of one of those things that even- tually would happen, and then we would
know.
And . . . we would be really disappointed or really not disappointed [laughs].

Heather Folger, a 28-year-old heterosexual middle-class White woman, compared virginity loss to other life transitions. “[It’s a] pretty big mile- stone in people’s lives. . . . Maybe not on a par with marriage or birth or death, but it’s definitely one of the things that you’ll always remember.” People who liken virginity loss to a learning process or to a transition be- tween life stages are effectively saying the same thing: that virginity loss represents a rite of passage, a process of transition from sexual youth to adulthood.
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I use the expressions
rite of passage
and
process
inter- changeably, and call the metaphor’s devotees “processers” for short.

Anthropologist Victor Turner compared the person undergoing a rite of passage to a “blank slate, on which is inscribed the knowledge and wis- dom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status.”
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Be-

cause of their relative ignorance about sexual intercourse (or whatever act they see as resulting in virginity loss), virgins are potentially at the mercy of their chosen sexual partners, especially experienced ones.
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Yet, since virginity loss is an informal passage, unregulated by formal institutions, virgins do have some control over it.
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Virgins and their sexual partners, like all informal initiates and their “helpers,” both possess some power and must negotiate with one another as the passage proceeds.

Consistent with the gender-neutral application of the concept in an- thropology and popular culture, the women I interviewed were only slightly more likely than men to describe virginity loss as a step in the process of growing up.
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Yet, although the rite of passage metaphor ap- pears to offer an alternative to the traditionally feminine and masculine gift and stigma metaphors, it is not gender neutral. Because people tend to think in terms of becoming not just generic adults, but specifically adult
women
and
men,
when they draw on the process metaphor to guide their virginity-loss experiences they are constructing
gendered
adult iden- tities.
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(In a similar manner, the metaphor helps people fashion specific sexual identities.) Whether the process perspective tends to disempower male or female virgins disproportionately, as do its stigma and gift coun- terparts, is a central question in this chapter.

“I Was a Virgin at One Point and I . . . Never Really Thought about It”

Meghan O’Brien hadn’t attached much importance to virginity while she was growing up. To her, it was a simple designation for a certain stage in life:

I guess I never really thought of virginity as, like, a qualitative thing. It was just . . . you have not had sex, you are a virgin. It wasn’t like a feel- ing or anything like that to me. So if someone asked me how I felt about it, I think I would just say, you know, I was a virgin at one point and I

. . . never really thought about it. That was just the way it just was.

The third daughter in a large Irish-American family, Meghan had grown up on the outskirts of Boston. She had attended an exclusive pri- vate high school and now, at 22, was within months of receiving her

bachelor’s degree from a prestigious liberal arts college. Her father and mother had pursued fairly ordinary careers—as a private attorney and the volunteer director of a children’s recreation center, respectively—but their extended families included more than a few of New England’s social and political elite. Meghan’s reserved manner and appearance testified to her upbringing: she wore discreetly expensive sportswear and kept her straight brown hair brushed neatly back from her well-scrubbed face. By the time I interviewed Meghan, she no longer attended mass every Sun- day, as she had when living at home, but she considered Catholic worship an indispensable part of her life.

Sex was rarely discussed in Meghan’s family, but when she was about ten, her parents sat her down for “The Talk.” This amounted to a review of basic reproductive biology and the decree, “You’re Irish Catholic and you shouldn’t have sex before marriage.” Meghan took the latter with a grain of salt. Having once found a packet of condoms in her parents’ bed- side table, she figured that while they probably felt compelled to impart Catholic doctrine, they didn’t expect their daughters to follow it to the letter.

The sex education Meghan received at school was altogether different in breadth and tone. In formal health classes, sex was discussed with value-neutral candor—all consensual acts were “okay”—and when talk in the hallways and cafeteria turned to sex, as it often did, no one praised or condemned virginity or the lack thereof. Other students’ sexual status was a topic of perennial interest, but Meghan recalled little if any peer pressure around sex. Typical of people who favored the process metaphor, she remembered feeling secure in the knowledge that virginity loss was an inevitable part of growing up. She didn’t need to ask
whether
she would lose her virginity, though she did wonder about
when
and
with whom
— choices she saw as hers for the making. Virginity loss is, of course, not
literally
inevitable; but no one I interviewed saw lifelong celibacy as a desirable option—nor do any but a vanishingly small num- ber of Americans.
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Meghan’s matter-of-fact approach didn’t mean that she saw decisions about sex as inconsequential. But she looked forward to virginity loss for reasons quite different from those cited by gifters and the stigmatized. In- stead of valuing virginity for its power to bind a special romantic rela- tionship or longing desperately for its absence, Meghan desired the posi- tive changes that accompanied virginity loss—changes like being one step

closer to adulthood and gaining practical knowledge about sex’s role in a caring relationship. She spoke of virginity loss not as significant in itself, but as “just like a steppingstone.”

Perceiving sex as a natural part of a long-term romance, Meghan ex- pected that she’d lose her virginity with one of her first steady boyfriends. She adamantly declared that this wasn’t because she disapproved of ca- sual sex—she didn’t—but because she thought she’d be more comfort- able learning about sex in an ongoing relationship. For one thing, losing her virginity with a boyfriend would give her the opportunity to learn about sex in stages. She explained:

I just think that . . . when you’re young, you’re not . . . so comfortable with your own body, and you don’t exactly know what you want, what you need. And I think it’s more safe to just kind of step into things, you know, slowly, than to just . . . to have sex very quickly.

Tellingly, no one who preferred the process metaphor considered remain- ing a virgin until marriage (a significant change from
Beach Party
days). Sometimes Meghan imagined that virginity loss would be like “these mad sex scenes in movies,” but more often she anticipated it being as physically awkward as other new experiences, like the first time she went skiing. Expecting some clumsiness was typical of women and men who shared her interpretation—as was the hope that one’s own virginity-loss encounter might prove an exception to the rule. This stands in striking contrast with the perfect romantic scenes envisaged by most gifters and with stigmatized men’s fear of awkwardness as a telltale sign of their sex-

ual naiveté.

Meghan wasn’t very experienced sexually when she started dating Rich in her freshman year in high school. “I did a lot of kissing when I was young,” she recalled with a shy grin. “But, you know, innocent kiss- ing.” Rich, she said, “was the first person I did anything else with.” Meghan and Rich were the same age, took many classes together, and were equally devoted to sports (tennis and track). The longer they dated, the more deeply they fell in love, and the more sexually intimate their re- lationship became. Meghan described their early encounters as a series of practice sessions. She said:

I can remember lots of times like, being naked with each other. But we really wouldn’t do anything, we would just kind of, like, lay around

with each other. But that was enough . . . for us at that point. And I guess sometimes we would come close, I mean, the areas would touch or something. But I don’t know if we were really ever trying. We weren’t, we knew, both of us knew we did not want to be having sex at that point. . . . It was just, I think we were just kind of, like, getting to know each other’s bodies.

By the time they were juniors, Rich and Meghan had fondled each other to orgasm many times and she’d given him fellatio once or twice. In effect, they learned about sex through a step-by-step process that they saw as (potentially) leading up to the big step of virginity loss. Incremen- tal approaches to physical intimacy were universal among women and men in the rite-of-passage group. Unlike gifters, for whom incremental sexual activity represented a way of testing a partner’s capacity for reci- procity, Meghan and her kindred spirits spoke of their expanding sexual repertoires as a kind of education. However, unlike Meghan, the major- ity went through this learning process with at least one partner before the person with whom they lost their virginity.

Although Meghan didn’t think about it consciously, the fact that she was heterosexual provided the framework in which she made choices about sex and sexual partners. Nine of the ten heterosexual male and fe- male processers lost their virginity with steady romantic partners, after engaging in increasingly intimate sexual activities with them, as did both bisexual women and two lesbians who hadn’t come out at the time. In contrast, the two openly lesbian women and one openly gay man in the process group had virtually no experience with same-sex partners prior to losing their virginity; all three lost their virginity with friends. What poet and scholar Adrienne Rich has called
compulsory heterosexuality
contributes to these different trajectories.
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Whereas high school youth are virtually expected to engage in heterosexual romance, relatively few adolescents openly identify as gay. (This was especially true in the early to mid-1990s, when the participants in question lost their virginity.) Given their predominance, greater visibility, and relative freedom from social sanctions, heterosexual teens may simply have more opportunities to develop romantic relationships than their gay and lesbian counter- parts.
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Meghan’s choices were further shaped by her understanding of virgin- ity. Processers cared considerably more about who their partners were than did the stigmatized, and they were far more likely to lose their vir-

ginity with someone they were dating. But they did not speak of waiting for the “right” or “perfect” partner, as did gifters, nor did they insist on being in love, although about half of them, like Meghan, were. Rather, they described romantic relationships as the context best suited for satis- fying in stages their curiosity about sex.

Meghan and Rich had both been virgins when they started dating, a fact they discussed with increasing frequency the longer they remained a couple. “We had talked about it a lot, like a
lot,
” Meghan laughed. “I mean, I think, like, my junior year it was kind of like this obsession we had, you know?” In framing virginity and nonvirginity as normal stages in an inevitable process, rather than as causes for shame or pride, she ex- emplifies the process frame. All but two processers told their partners that they were virgins.
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Half of the partners were virgins themselves. But even after Meghan and Rich decided that they wanted to lose their virginity to- gether, when it came to actually having sex, “We were both very ner- vous.” Under the circumstances, Meghan felt their mutual virginity had been an advantage: