Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (27 page)

I think if one of us had been more experienced than the other, it would have been kind of like a, more of a pressure about, well, “You know what you’re doing and I don’t,” kind of thing. So, neither of us knew what we were doing and, you know, we figured it out just fine. I

think that it was better like that.

Her concerns about nonvirgin partners weren’t unique; several others also wondered whether nonvirgins might try to capitalize on their greater knowledge.

In the fall of their senior year, when both of them were 18, Meghan and Rich were poised to take what she called the “natural” next step in their sexual relationship. When Rich’s parents announced they were going away for a weekend, he and Meghan hastened to prepare. While Rich bought condoms, Meghan got her parents’ permission to spend the night at a girlfriend’s. But things didn’t go according to plan.

This was the weekend we were going to have sex, like, it was so dra- matic! . . . And all of a sudden both of us were just really scared or ner- vous or something. . . . And he had a big track meet the next day or something. And, you know, we’re up real late because neither of us wanted to just, like, initiate, you know what I mean? And . . . I was so

nervous that it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, because I mean, I just wasn’t enjoying myself. He probably wasn’t enjoying himself. I

think it was because we had planned it that it didn’t work. So we were like, “Forget it,” you know. “We’ll do this another time.”

Just a few weeks later, they found themselves together under less con- trived circumstances:

We didn’t know we were going to be staying in the same place, we didn’t know we were going to be in the same bed, and we ended up together. And it just kind of happened. You know, we were just kind of kissing, fooling around, and then one thing led to another and it was like, nei- ther of us knew it was going to hap— [trails off]. Well, we probably did in the back of our minds somewhere, but it wasn’t like this rigid or set plan, like it had been before. And it just happened naturally, so that was nice. Unprotected, though.

Not using a condom, even though they had planned to, was the one thing Meghan regretted about the encounter. “I didn’t even think about protection at that point,” she said, “because we didn’t realize it was going to happen. And then it did. . . . It was very short because of, because we didn’t have protection.” Seeing virginity loss as a step in a process, iron- ically, contributed to their lapse. Meghan was one of four people in this group who, despite discussing safer sex with their partners and planning to use condoms, wound up losing their virginity when “one thing led to another” in a place and time where a condom wasn’t available. (In con- trast, when the stigmatized declined to practice safer sex, it was because they feared exposing their virginity.) Since Meghan and Rich both ex- pected that they would continue having sex, she soon went on the Pill, al- leviating their worries about unprotected encounters in the future.

Meghan found virginity loss emotionally “very enjoyable” but physi- cally unremarkable, especially compared with the times she’d reached cli- max in other ways. Both the brevity of the act and their mutual inexperi- ence with vaginal sex were, she felt, to blame. “Neither of us orgasmed,” she explained. “I’d say it was just more that we were trying it out.” Phys- ically mediocre or even uncomfortable virginity-loss encounters were quite common among women who lost their virginity with men, due to the discomfort women often experience the first time inserting a penis into the vagina.

Like most who favored the passage metaphor, Meghan felt that her vi- sion of virginity loss as a natural, if critical, step in learning about sex was confirmed by what happened when she lost her virginity, as well as by the experimentation that had gone before:

Like, “That was it?” You know, like, “That’s done? That was what we were waiting for, for so long?” ’Cause it’s, I think it’s a pretty natural thing, and once you do it, it’s, I don’t know. You, like, from what you see, you know, these mad sex scenes in movies, that was kind of like, “Oh, well, it wasn’t quite like that.” But that was also because it was our first time and everything.

Subsequent encounters bolstered Meghan’s impression of taking part in an ongoing transformation. At first, “we didn’t have sex a lot. And then . . . by the end of senior year and starting college, it was like, you know, we had sex more often. . . . I think it was just kind of like a natural progression.” Happily, she found vaginal sex more physically pleasurable over time. This was a common trajectory: two-thirds of the processers continued to explore sex with their virginity-loss partners after virginity loss, for about 8 months on average. (Comparable figures for the stigma- tized and gifters are 6 months and 2 years, respectively.) Looking back, Meghan described losing her virginity as a learning experience par excel- lence. “[It] just made me more aware of my sexuality,” she said. “I mean, once . . . we had kind of decided that was where our relationship was going, we were more sexually experimenting.” In short, virginity loss brought the enlightening changes she’d hoped for.

Pleased to have made the transition from virgin to nonvirgin, Meghan told her closest friends the news, inviting them to help celebrate this new stage in her life. Her parents were another story, however. A few months after she lost her virginity, Meghan’s father chanced across “this whole letter [from a friend] . . . about me having sex.” She recalled:

He didn’t say anything for about two days, to anyone. . . . Then finally he says . . . , “I need to have [a] talk with you.” And he cried, he was so upset. He was so upset he just. I think . . . he was worried. I was in high school. I was, you know, I think he thought that this was just going to lead to trouble. That maybe I’d get pregnant or something bad would happen. . . . It was horrible, he was just so angry. And then I got upset and . . . He was like, “I really hope you stop this.” And he never asked

me again, but I think he honestly thought that we had stopped after that.
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Such intensely negative reactions were unusual among the parents of this group—a number of them had, in fact, helped their children obtain birth control or condoms—and was probably due in part to the O’Briens’ de- vout Catholicism. Clearly, Meghan misinterpreted her parents’ flexibility on this point of religious doctrine.

Meghan’s frankness with her friends and partners throughout her sex- ual career was also typical. Overall, processers were much less con- cerned with others’ impressions of their sexual status, before
and
after virginity loss, than gifters or the stigmatized. Seeing virginity and non- virginity as inevitable stages, rather than as causes for shame or pride, they felt neither compelled to conceal their virginity or boast of its ab- sence, nor tempted to brag about it or hide its loss. No one in this group tried to pass as nonvirgin; nor were they ashamed of having recently been virgins.

Meghan and Rich dated until they were juniors in college, when Meghan decided she wanted to see other people. Their relationship, which lasted a total of 8 years, was unusual in its duration before and after virginity loss. Deciding to have sex with a subsequent boyfriend, Rob, struck Meghan as another learning process. She explained:

I think the first time I had sex with somebody else was . . . a really big deal to me because I had that same sense of, like, nervousness. . . . It wasn’t about the act, it was more just being with this other person and, you know, it’s going to be different. . . . It was funny, it was the same type of thing, like, “Well, I don’t want to have sex until, you know, we’re clear-cut and know what’s going on.” . . . It was a different kind of waiting period, but it was the same thing.

Three-fourths of processers followed a similar pattern. Moreover, Meghan’s reaction to first sex with Rob highlights the significance of first times. Many rites of passage center on events that are first of their kind; as anthropologist Arnold van Gennep noted, the idea that “only the
first time
counts . . . is truly universal and . . . is everywhere expressed to some extent through special rites.”
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While virginity loss may represent the ul- timate sexual first time, each sexual relationship offers the possibility of its own first time.

Meghan’s beliefs and experiences were shaped by her gender and sex- ual identity. In American culture, it is acceptable for women and men to approach virginity loss as a rite of passage; overall, the women I inter- viewed were somewhat more likely to have done so. For women, the process metaphor offers an alternative to the traditional understanding of virginity as a gift, but one which carries less risk of being branded as promiscuous or unfeminine than treating virginity as a stigma. When women in this group lost their virginity, they constructed an identity as sexually “liberated,” but not truly unorthodox, adult women. For those who lost their virginity with men, as Meghan did, the act offered a way of establishing a heterosexual identity, although only the women who subsequently came out as lesbians explicitly described it as such. The het- erosexual women in my study were, in fact, less apt to see their own vir- ginity loss as a step in a process than were the lesbians and bisexual women, a difference stemming from the fact that lesbian and bisexual women experienced the process of coming out as intertwined with vir- ginity loss.

Meghan’s beliefs and experiences may also have been influenced in subtle ways by her racial/ethnic background. Comparatively few women of color took this gender-atypical stance; being White probably made it easier for Meghan to do so.
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(Stigmatized women were also dispropor- tionately White.) Previous studies have suggested that African American women and Latinas may feel pressured not to reject traditional ideals for feminine virginity, because doing so reinforces popular stereotypes of women of color as promiscuous.
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Young Asian American women, for their part, may feel caught between the sexual stereotypes of the submis- sive “lotus blossom” and the sexually predatory “dragon lady”; treating virginity loss as a rite of passage may offer a welcome alternative to both images (whereas the gift and stigma metaphors, respectively, would help confirm them).
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How gender and sexual identity shape, and are shaped by, virginity loss as seen through the rite-of-passage lens becomes even clearer when we explore the story of a gay man who shared Meghan’s perspective.

“I Think Awkward’s a Good Word to Describe It”

Tom Hansen hadn’t started thinking of virginity loss as a rite of passage until he was in his early twenties. He’d lost his virginity at 23, just a year

before our interview. Closely intertwined with both changes in Tom’s life was his gradual recognition that he was gay, which had prompted him in turn to question certain aspects of the evangelical Christian tradition in which he’d been raised. The box office manager of a repertory theater, Tom came from Scandinavian German heritage; he had fly-away blond hair, a round face, and a contagious smile. His father ran a bookstore and his mother taught preschool in suburban Pittsburgh, where Tom had grown up.

As a youth, Tom had agreed wholeheartedly with his parents’ under- standing of virginity, which was endorsed by their independent Christian church.

When I was younger, I guess I followed my parents. . . . They never told me it was wrong to lose my virginity—like if I were, I’d go to hell or anything. You know, that’s not the way they worked. . . . But then I sort of respected them and respected their wishes. . . . So I considered that it would probably be better to wait until I got married. . . . In high school, I guess even through college, I was pretty, I was proud of it, the fact that I hadn’t lost my virginity.

In effect, he had interpreted virginity as a gift. Such sentiments weren’t particularly popular among his high school classmates, boys or girls; but Tom knew he wasn’t entirely alone in feeling—or behaving—as he did. He recalled a conversation with one of his closest friends:

At our graduation party we sat down with the yearbook and looked through all the pictures of our graduating class. And we decided who was sleeping with whom. You know, “Remember this guy, when he was with this girl?” and, you know, whatever. And out of the 419, we found that amongst us knew twelve to be confirmed virgins. And two girls were in wheelchairs. So [chagrin filled his voice]. . . . I used to tell that as a joke, but it’s not as funny now. But I was one of the twelve, in high school. And so were, like, three or four of my friends. Not a lot of them, a lot of my friends were not virgins. But like three or four other kids that I knew and had grown up with . . . I knew that they were.

That knowledge had strengthened his convictions—he’d never wanted to hide his virginity from people who saw things differently—as did his par- ents’ own example:

It wasn’t that they ever said, “No, and don’t, because of this.” But it was, you know, almost an expectation. “Oh, you wouldn’t do that be- cause you’ll want to wait until you’re married, because it’s better that way.” And I always assumed that they had, too.

What worked for them, he reasoned, would work for him.

But a series of events, beginning in college, spurred Tom to rethink his views on virginity.
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Chief among them was his growing recognition that he was sexually and romantically attracted to men. He’d felt the first inklings in high school and had attempted—unsuccessfully—to “protect” himself by choosing to attend a conservative Christian college. Since “one doesn’t get married if one is gay,” he said, “I . . . quickly realiz[ed] that it was not going to be a possibility for me to wait until I was married.”
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Tom’s beliefs were further shaken by what he saw around him at school. Some of his evangelical peers flouted their nonvirginity, while others in- terpreted the biblical ban on premarital sex in extremely broad terms, see- ing oral sex with multiple partners as compatible with maintaining their virginity. One day, a friend from Tom’s dorm confided that, just before he left for school, his mother had instructed him: “Before you marry a girl, sleep with her. ’Cause if you don’t like it, don’t marry her. Then she’s not the one. . . . You have to make sure you’re compatible.” Tom wasn’t sure he agreed, but his friend’s remark gave him another possibility to ponder. If all that were not enough, when Tom was a senior in college, his fa- ther—on the brink of a divorce—vindictively announced that he and