Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (30 page)

From conversations with her mother and the films and fiction she de- voured, Jennifer got the impression that all sex felt wonderful, even if the first time hurt a little or brought some blood. But she’d also heard, espe- cially from more-experienced peers, that virginity loss could be boring, bumbling, or truly painful. As she put it:

You always see in the movies, this beautiful scene. . . . I mean, I knew that it could be painful, I knew it could really [trails off]. So I didn’t have as many expectations. But you know, I saw all the movies and, you know, the first time you want to be one of total pleasure.

She prepared herself for the worst, even while hoping that her own expe- rience would be an exception.

Knowing that the first time could be disappointing as well as joyful kept Jennifer and her friends from feeling any particular urgency to lose their virginity, even as they looked forward to doing so. Nor did they feel much pressure from classmates who, as a rule, neither celebrated nor dis- paraged virginity. She recalled:

My peers didn’t really care one way or another. . . . If I had gone to col- lege as a virgin, I think I would have felt pressure. I know my friends who were virgins felt pressure constantly. . . . If I were friends with a group of people who, everybody had sex but me, maybe then I would’ve felt pressure in high school. But that wasn’t the case.

All in all, Jennifer approached virginity loss as inevitable but firmly in her command.

She didn’t deliberately set out to abide by her mother’s wishes; but as it turned out, Jennifer had scant opportunities to become sexually active during high school. She wasn’t looking for the “perfect” partner, but none of the boys she dated piqued her interest in pursuing a relationship or in doing anything “more interesting” than kissing. Casual trysts were out of the question, because she wanted to work her way up to sex with a single partner. So Jennifer was still a virgin when she turned 18. She ex- plained:

I took outside classes and dancing and I had a job and I babysat Satur- day nights, so I was really busy. I think I kept myself busy because the boys weren’t exactly knocking on my door. Which, you know, fine, whatever, I’ll find other things to do. And I didn’t actually have a boyfriend until I was a senior anyway.

Many of the people I interviewed saw the transitions from virginity to nonvirginity and from high school to college (or work) as closely linked.
38
For the stigmatized, these links were a source of anxiety and urgency, whereas processers like Jennifer tended to view them as a matter of fact. As Matt Bergquist, a 24-year-old White heterosexual engineer, put it, vir- ginity loss was “just like one of the many changes when I was a senior and graduating high school. I don’t think that it seemed that much more of a change than moving or going off to college.”

Jennifer’s romantic prospects took a turn for the better in December of her senior year, when she started spending time with Andy. Also 18, Andy

was funny, smart, and kind—and Jennifer felt sexually attracted to him in a way she never had before. Within a month, they started to fall in love. They also began acting on their mutual attraction, starting with petting above the waist, then below, then experimenting with oral sex. Cunnilin- gus was simple enough—Andy had given it to his previous girlfriend, and Jennifer enjoyed receiving it—but Jennifer’s first attempt to reciprocate was nothing short of comic. When she was younger, Jennifer had learned that fellatio was sometimes called a blow job, “but not that it didn’t in- volve blowing.” So during one intimate encounter, Jennifer took Andy’s penis in her mouth and blew. He was confused at first, then laughed, then explained how fellatio usually worked in a way that, miraculously, kept her from feeling utterly embarrassed. Whereas people who saw virginity as a stigma felt deeply ashamed by beginners’ mistakes, Jennifer quickly regained her composure and lost none of her interest in sex.

Andy knew that Jennifer was a virgin—she’d told him that well before the fellatio incident—and he’d only had sex with one girl before. With- out belaboring the details, he let Jennifer know that he and his previous girlfriend, who had also been a virgin, had figured out what they liked to do through a process of trial and error (getting pleasure from vaginal sex had been particularly tricky for his girlfriend), and he imagined that he and Jennifer would do the same. Jennifer firmly believed that Andy’s pre- vious experience had prepared him to take the incremental approach to sex that she preferred. “We worked up to it,” she quipped. “We’d get into it and we’d even get naked, but we wouldn’t [have sex].” Rather than worry that Andy’s greater experience would give him power over her, Jen- nifer was glad that he could help guide her. She said, “He was so patient, so understanding. It wasn’t . . . that big of a deal that we couldn’t wait another month.” Likewise, most processers who were dating nonvirgin partners expressed gratitude for their partners’ greater knowledge.

As the weeks passed and their emotional and physical intimacy inten- sified, Jennifer grew increasingly certain that she would lose her virginity with Andy. With her mother’s grudging approval, she made an appoint- ment with a gynecologist to get a prescription for the Pill.
39
“I was on the Pill for two or three months before,” she explained with a laugh. “But I could just . . . see it coming, so I wanted to be prepared. And I figured, well, you know, it regulates my period anyway.” Altogether, two-thirds of people who viewed virginity loss as a rite of passage practiced some form of safer sex or birth control at virginity loss, a rate similar to that among women and men who saw virginity as a gift.

Andy and Jennifer had been dating about 5 months when they took the step from oral to vaginal sex.

I don’t think we actually made a conscious decision. Up to the point where we did it, we’d been messing around in his dad’s house one day. You know, doing the regular thing and you say, “Okay,” you know?

Jennifer liked the way sex with Andy made her feel emotionally; but unfortunately, that was the
only
part she liked. “Emotional pleasure, sure,” she said. “But, physical pleasure, the first time, no. Physical plea- sure the second time, no. The third, fourth—it took a while for me.” Andy climaxed very quickly their first time together, and vaginal sex was much more painful than Jennifer had ever imagined it could be—so much so, in fact, that she had no desire to try it again. But the emotional plea- sure she did feel, combined with Andy’s empathy and reassurance, con- vinced her that it would be worth seeing if the physical side of sex might improve over time. She recalled, “I really didn’t want to have sex at all again. It made me think, ‘Boy, that’s really not fun and not cool, let’s not do it again.’” When I asked her if she’d told him that, she exclaimed: “Yeah! I told him, ‘That’s it?’ He’s like, ‘Isn’t that enough?’ And I said, ‘No!’ He’s like, ‘We-e-ll-lll,’ you know.” In effect, Jennifer decided to in- terpret the physical pain of that first encounter as part of the process of learning about sex, rather than as a final verdict on vaginal intercourse. Later, she made a point of warning her still-virgin friends that sex got a lot better with patient practice, hoping that they could benefit from her experience. Indeed, people often feel obliged to help someone making a desirable passage overcome the obstacles in their way.
40

The physical pain Jennifer experienced is not unrelated to the fact that she lost her virginity through receptive vaginal intercourse. Women often feel some pain or discomfort the first time they have vaginal sex—though seldom as intense as Jennifer’s.
41
More common are physically mediocre “first times” like Meghan’s. Because gender and sexual identity determine which sexual practices individuals engage in, they effectively, if indirectly, help determine how physically enjoyable virginity loss is, on average, for members of different social groups. Heterosexual women like Jennifer and Meghan, and gay men who equate virginity loss with receptive anal intercourse like Tom, get the short end of the pleasure stick.

At the end of summer, faced with the prospect of attending colleges hundreds of miles apart, Jennifer and Andy decided to break up. Ironi-

cally, Jennifer said, “[Sex] got better right around the time I left.” Around that time she experienced her first orgasm, which seemed to mark the next big step in her ongoing education about sex.

All things considered, Jennifer was happy with the way she lost her vir- ginity. Its physical shortcomings notwithstanding, the experience brought her emotional pleasure and, more important, paved the way for her greater understanding and enjoyment of sex later on.
42
In anthropologist Victor Turner’s terms, virginity loss proved to be the passage of
status el- evation
that she expected it to be.
43
She had no regrets. Indeed, none of the processers I interviewed regretted losing their virginity when, how, or with whom they did.

In approaching virginity loss as a rite of passage, Jennifer, like Meghan, adopted a stance that, while generally thought to be appropri- ate for women, is also somewhat unorthodox. Her heterosexuality shaped her expectations and experiences (and vice versa) in similar ways as well. But if Jennifer’s interpretation of virginity was nontraditional for a woman, it was all the more so considering her Puerto Rican heritage. Latin American cultures, diverse as they are, typically revere unmarried women’s virginity while allowing young men considerable latitude; U.S. Latinos and Latinas therefore tend to place a higher value on female vir- ginity than do non-Hispanic Whites and African Americans.
44
Jennifer’s beliefs about virginity clearly diverged from this traditional model. Yet, her personal conduct—losing her virginity relatively late and in a com- mitted love relationship—
was
fairly typical of Latinas residing in the con- tinental United States.
45

Jennifer’s family history provides a clue to her “mixed” stance. Her parents had abandoned the Catholic Church, along with its teachings about premarital sex, and become highly acculturated to Anglo America when Jennifer was just a child. Yet, Jennifer observed, they never wholly shook off the moral teachings of their conventional Puerto Rican fami- lies. Indeed, her grandparents did their best to indoctrinate her in tradi- tional beliefs about women’s sexuality during her many summers on the island. By refusing to see her virginity as a precious gift to be given in mar- riage, but waiting to lose it until she was 18 and in love, Jennifer man- aged to conform to her family’s (admittedly ambivalent) teachings and to fashion herself as a sexually liberated heterosexual woman who was also authentically Puerto Rican.

Jennifer’s virginity-loss experience differed from those of Meghan, Tom, and Abby in two key respects. It was physically unpleasant—rather

than unremarkable or enjoyable—and her partner was a nonvirgin of the other gender. Since knowledge represents a source of power in status pas- sages, we might predict that a sexually experienced partner would try to take advantage of a virgin, especially if that partner enjoyed additional clout on the basis of his gender. But Jennifer felt that she’d been in charge of how and when she lost her virginity. In fact, none of the women who saw their loss of virginity as a step in a process had felt sexually disem- powered, regardless of their partner’s gender or level of experience; nor did they feel that their gender had worked to their special benefit. The contrast with women who interpreted virginity as a gift or as a stigma is dramatic. Jennifer’s story therefore raises additional questions about people who favored the rite of passage metaphor: What kinds of power dynamics did
men
in this group face if they lost their virginity with women? And how did virgins whose experiences were unpleasant physi- cally
and
emotionally react to the “lesson” that sex could be so disap- pointing?

“It Seemed Like It Should Be Really Easy to Do and It Wasn’t Working”

Although Jennifer experienced an unusual degree of physical discomfort at virginity loss, she was not alone in trying to reconcile the unpleasant aspects of her experience with the conviction that virginity loss represents a desirable transition. Jason Cantor faced an even more formidable task, for he was one of six people in this group whose virginity-loss encounters fell short emotionally as well as physically.

Tall and rangy, Jason had lively brown eyes, dark wiry hair, and a sub- tle wit. Though only 24, he ran his own Web site design company. Jason came from a prosperous suburb of Wilmington, Delaware, where his fa- ther worked in investment banking and his mother taught art in after- school and summer programs. He had been active in the youth group at his parents’ reform temple while growing up, and being Jewish had re- mained a central part of his identity. While he felt in no hurry to marry or have children, he looked forward to raising a family in the tradition he’d found so meaningful.

When Jason was a teenager, he had been eager to lose his virginity not because it embarrassed him, but because he had wanted to learn about sex. “I thought it [sex] would be pleasant,” he said wryly, “and I guess I

thought there would be a very intense feeling of closeness and things like that.” Virginity loss in particular had seemed to represent “sort of the year zero in between the part of life before sexual activity and then, the one after . . . the moment between having never had sex and having had it.” Jason had imagined that moment as an instant of supreme enlighten- ment, which he described now in retrospect:

It’s sort of like trying to unlearn something. It’s like . . . the drawing of the woman where if you look at it one way it’s a young woman in a hat and if you look at it the other way it’s an old, older woman with a shawl over her head. . . . Once, once you see them both you can’t unsee one of them. And once you’ve sort of, once you’ve ventured down that road, you’ve ventured down it and you can’t turn around and pretend you haven’t.

He expected the knowledge he’d gain through virginity loss to transform him profoundly.