Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (29 page)

On the other hand, being raised to see sex and virginity loss as a part of marriage—and thus reserved for heterosexuals—had made it more diffi- cult for him to come out.

Not long after Tom and Kent lost their virginity together, Tom was lured away from Pittsburgh by a job offer from a theater in Philadelphia. He and Kent still visited one another 5 months later and, following Tom’s new “practice makes perfect” adage, were continuing to explore sex to- gether. This was unusual for someone who lost his virginity with a friend. Neither Tom nor Kent expected their relationship to blossom into any- thing more. “I’m not the type that will just have sex with anyone,” Tom said, adding that he looked forward to discovering what it would be like to have sex with a man he loved.

Before I left Tom’s house, I asked what he would do if he could go back in time. Although he admitted wishing that he’d lost his virginity under “more romantic” circumstances—the Florentine setting of
A Room with a View
came to mind—Tom’s retrospective desires centered on the years and events preceding that momentous step.

I wish that I could go back and just be as wise about the world, as aware of things, as [I am now]. Because I’ve learned so much from being very foolish and making stupid mistakes and, you know, not being bold enough to tell everybody. . . . If I were 16 now, I think it would be a lot easier to go out and be out in high school. Just because, first of all, you’d be cool. And you know, then you[’d] have Ellen [DeGeneres] to back you up.
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His comment deftly captures two levels of change: the increasing visibil- ity of and tolerance for lesbigay people in American society over the past few decades, and Tom’s personal journey from seeing virginity as a gift to viewing virginity loss as one aspect of learning about sexual and roman- tic relationships.

“I Felt Different Afterwards, but I Didn’t Feel Like I Had Crossed over Some Great Line”

Feminist theorists often remark that lesbians’ lives take distinctive shape from the ways their gender and sexual identities affect one another, or what theorists would term their intersection, such that their experiences cannot be simply equated with those of gay men or heterosexual women.
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Abby Rosen’s virginity-loss story is a case in point. When I in- terviewed her, Abby was 33 and had just embarked on a new career as a science librarian, much to the delight of her biologist father and librarian mother. She described her family as culturally Jewish but not particularly religious. A tall, athletic redhead, Abby had played soccer throughout high school and college and now coached a local girls’ club team in her spare time. For the past 10 years, she identified herself as a lesbian. When I arrived at their house, she introduced her live-in partner as her wife. Neither woman had yet had children, although they hoped to in the fu- ture.

By her own account, Abby had never felt proud or ashamed of her vir- ginity (or, later, her lack thereof). In the junior high and high schools she’d attended, virginity loss “was a big deal.” But whereas many of her friends had perceived virginity loss as possessing “a significance beyond a physi- cal act,” Abby herself “just never had that much significance attached to one particular event.” Instead, she had seen virginity loss “in terms of

growing up, getting more experiences in life in general.” Thinking that it would be unrealistic to expect “stars shooting in the skies and violins playing and everything else,” Abby had instead hoped that losing her vir- ginity would be a learning experience. In fact, she said, “I would hate to think of someone hanging, like, this is going to be it for the rest of my life, on this one event, because almost no one I know is still with the same per- son that they had sex with.”

Why had Abby come to interpret virginity loss so differently from her peers? She thought being Jewish among mostly Christian classmates had something to do with it; plus she had been a careful student of human be- havior. She recalled her youthful reasoning:

I knew that some kids in their religious classes were . . . told, “Don’t have sex.” So I knew that message was out there, I knew that certain people thought it was only . . . for marriage and not for beforehand. But

. . . I was smart enough to figure out that perhaps the message wasn’t an entirely accurate one. . . . I just knew it was out there and I knew it was- n’t true.

On a less conscious level, Abby may have gravitated toward the process metaphor because she was going through the transition of coming out— first as bisexual and later as a lesbian—at the same time as she was be- coming sexually active. As with gay men, the lesbians and bisexual women I interviewed were substantially more likely to have seen their own virginity loss as a step in a process than were their heterosexual counterparts.

Looking back, Abby believed that her nascent sexual identity had in- fluenced the sexual decisions she made as a teenager, even though she hadn’t been aware of it at the time. Before she recognized that she was sexually attracted to women, Abby hadn’t really been interested in hav- ing sex or losing her virginity—both of which she had been taught to equate with vaginal intercourse. During high school, she had engaged in heavy petting, cunnilingus, and fellatio with several young men, but never seriously contemplated doing anything more. She explained:

I don’t think it was ever a conscious thing. I just . . . never did anything that I was uncomfortable with . . . and I never did any more than I wanted to. So I guess if I had wanted to, I would have, but I hadn’t. And

I was in the . . . very long process of figuring out my own sexuality, so that might have been part of it.

Other scholars have likewise found that lesbian and bisexual girls tend to see sexual experimentation with boys as a matter of course, rather than as a way of “testing” their sexual identity.
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By the time she came out as bisexual, as a 20-year-old college sopho- more, Abby knew she wanted to have sex with a woman. Once she did, she reasoned (having revised her definition of sex since high school), she would no longer be a virgin. Abby looked forward to having romantic re- lationships, but her desire to satisfy her curiosity about sex was stronger than her inclination to lose her virginity with a girlfriend. She would be happy, she thought, if her first lesbian encounter was “trusting and car- ing and responsible.” Among the women Abby trusted and liked “a whole lot” was Tara, a soccer teammate with whom she had been friends for several months. They had shared their sexual histories as friends, so Tara knew that Abby was a virgin and Abby knew that Tara was not. “[Tara] was actually straight,” Abby explained with a laugh, “but had slept with both men and women before.” Despite finding Tara attractive, Abby hadn’t expected their relationship to take a sexual turn. They had never touched one another sexually before the spontaneous encounter in which they gave each other oral sex. “It was the kind of thing where one night it just happened,” she recalled. “No great planning ahead of time.” Pregnancy wasn’t a possibility and STIs didn’t cross their minds, so they didn’t practice safer sex. In this, they were typical of the women I inter- viewed who lost their virginity with other women, but an exception among processers.
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Abby found sex with Tara physically and emotionally pleasurable. She was one of the few women in this group who described her virginity-loss encounter as very enjoyable physically; this may well be because she lost her virginity through cunnilingus, rather than penetrative vaginal sex, which many women find uncomfortable or even painful at first.

Abby also felt that the experience had enlightened and transformed her in small but meaningful ways. Having already given and received oral sex, albeit with men, she hadn’t expected to learn anything new about sex per se from virginity loss. As she put it, “It wasn’t like, ‘Now I know what’s it’s like,’ because I had actually done all those things before.” Abby stood out in this interpretive group for expecting virginity loss
not
to be

physically awkward, probably because she was one of the few not mak- ing the leap from oral to vaginal or anal sex. Having sex with a woman did, however, reinforce Abby’s understanding that she wasn’t heterosex- ual; and she felt subtly changed by virginity loss, in a way that confirmed her sense that it was part of a process.

I felt different afterwards, but I didn’t feel like I had crossed over some great line, that I was, you know, forever changed or any of those things [laughs]. [It was] more coming to terms with my sexuality and finally doing something that I had wanted to do, than any physical change in myself or any, you know, “I am a woman now,” kind of thing [laughs].

. . . So I, I felt different because I had done something I had never done before. And I had, you know, been coming out to myself, coming out to friends, coming out wherever, but. This was sort of, I felt, another step in that process.

By laughing at the notion that virginity loss suddenly turns girls into women, Abby was poking fun at popular media depictions, like
Beach Party,
even as she agreed with their basic interpretation of virginity loss. Her curiosity sated and her sexual interest in women confirmed, Abby knew that most of her future romantic and sexual partners would be women. She had sensed from the outset that Tara was ambivalent about sex with women, and therefore correctly assumed that while they would continue to be friends, their sexual encounter would remain an isolated incident. “[She] wasn’t the person I was going to spend the rest of my life [with],” Abby explained. “I had no thought that [she] would be. So [vir- ginity loss] wasn’t any of that other stuff . . . that I guess some folks at- tach to it.” When Abby had sex again, it was with her first girlfriend, Kris, whom she met several months after her night with Tara. Making love with Kris felt like just as much of a sexual turning point as losing her vir- ginity had, Abby told me, because it had been her first sexual experience with someone she loved. Coming out had felt even more significant, for it involved “dealing with my own sexuality, and, you know, going through all that in my head was a lot more changing than . . . any specific act. Be- cause that really had to do more with who I was.” In short, Abby saw vir- ginity loss, coming out, and having sex with a beloved partner as interre-

lated steps in the process of growing up and learning about sexuality.

Abby was, on the whole, pleased with the way she lost her virginity and said that she wouldn’t change anything “at all.” Unlike Tom and

Meghan, who were glad to have lost their virginity with fellow virgins— people who knew as little about sex as they did—Abby hadn’t given her partner’s status much thought. Although knowledge is a source of power in a rite of passage, Tara hadn’t abused her greater familiarity with sex; Abby had felt that she was in control of their encounter and that Tara had treated her as an equal. Was the encounter equitable because Abby and Tara were both women? We have, after all, seen that gender differences in power exacerbate the disadvantages faced by virgins who favor the gift and stigma metaphors (if they lose their virginity with an other-sex part- ner). Considering the story of a woman who lost her virginity with a non- virgin man will help establish whether the process frame allows for more equitable virginity-loss experiences, regardless of the partners’ genders.

“Emotional Pleasure, Sure.

But Physical Pleasure, the First Time, No”

Jennifer Gonzales felt she’d learned a lot from the process of losing her virginity, even though her own experience had been physically very painful. When I arrived at Jennifer’s apartment, she had just gotten home from the inner-city high school where she taught English as a second lan- guage. After changing into sweatpants and a T-shirt, which accentuated her curvy figure, Jennifer made a pot of tea to share while we talked. Now 25, she had spent her youth shuttling between her mother’s house in northern Virginia, where she attended school, and her paternal grand- parents’ home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her parents, who shared little besides their Puerto Rican heritage and distaste for Roman Catholicism, had divorced when Jennifer was 8. Her father, a public accountant, re- married a few years later and moved to New York, while her mother, a dental technician, stayed in Virginia with Jennifer and her siblings. Jen- nifer had been married for 2 years when I met her, and she was looking forward to starting a family—as soon as she could convince her husband, who wasn’t Latino, that their future children should carry
her
last name as a public emblem of their ethnicity.

Twirling a strand of wavy dark hair around her finger, Jennifer ex- plained that she saw virginity loss as one of many experiences through which people learned about sex. “There’s not, like, one epiphanic mo- ment,” she declared. “It’s part of a process, even.” Yet, she had expected that the first time she had vaginal sex—the moment she lost her virginity

—would be a uniquely memorable episode in that long and gradual jour- ney.
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“I think you always remember the first time you have sex,” she said.

Virginity loss was a central theme in many of the movies Jennifer saw as a teenager, such as
The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles,
and
Hal- loween,
and in the novels she’d read, especially
Forever.
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But the source of information about sex that Jennifer valued most, especially as a young girl, was her mother. Jennifer’s mom brought home “all the books” about puberty and was open and comfortable talking about sex, which she said could and should be a source of great pleasure. Yet she also en- couraged Jennifer to wait to have sex until she was at least 18. Jennifer suspects her mother’s views were motivated not by any vestigial disap- proval of premarital sex, her mother having repudiated the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, but by concern for Jennifer’s emotional ma- turity and, later, reluctance to acknowledge that her “little girl” was growing up.

Jennifer found the sex education she received in public school far less helpful, not least because, as she remembered it, the teachers were for- bidden to mention birth control, much less illuminate specific aspects of sexual practice.
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She remembered in particular an incident from fifth or sixth grade, when she and her girlfriends had eagerly brought permission slips from home, only to discover that the “big sex ed talk” wasn’t about sex at all, but about tampons and personal hygiene. By the time her ninth- grade biology teacher covered sexual reproduction, Jennifer was already well informed about “the basics,” though she said she did learn some in- teresting, if trivial, facts.