Read Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences Online
Authors: Laura Carpenter
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a good position to slow down the young man.”
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Yet, at the same time, Sex Respect insists on a single, chaste standard for both genders: “It is equally important for both young men and women to abstain from sex outside of marriage. The time of the double standard is over.”
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The Debate over Sex Education in America
The proportion of U.S. public school districts providing formal sex edu- cation increased substantially over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, such that more American youth are schooled in sex-related matters today than ever before.
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But the ideals and advice imparted in sex education programs varies dramatically from one school district to another de- pending on the curricula they adopt. Sex education programs fall into three broad types:
comprehensive,
which present abstinence and contra- ception as similarly effective and morally equivalent options for prevent- ing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs);
abstinence-plus,
which portray abstinence as the best option for adolescents, but also dis- cuss birth control/safer sex as an effective alternative; and
abstinence- only,
which depict sexual chastity as the only moral and effective option outside of marriage, either omitting information about contraception or emphasizing its limitations.
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Over the course of the 1990s, the proportion of U.S. public schools of- fering comprehensive sex education programs shrank significantly, while the proportion teaching abstinence-only and abstinence-plus curricula in- creased.
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In 1998, of public school districts requiring sex education, 14 percent mandated comprehensive programs, 51 percent offered absti- nence-plus curricula, and 35 percent provided abstinence-only educa- tion.
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Sex Respect alone grew from a several-school pilot program in 1985 to a slick multimedia curriculum used by 1,600 school districts in 1991 and over 3,000 in 2001.
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The expansion of abstinence-focused sex education has dramatically altered what information students learn about methods for preventing pregnancy and STIs. In 1988, only 2 percent of secondary school sex ed- ucation teachers presented abstinence until marriage as the
only
means of protecting against pregnancy and STIs; by 1999, this figure had increased tenfold, to 23 percent.
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Conversely, the proportion of teachers depicting condoms as effective against HIV fell from 87 percent in 1988 to 59 per- cent in 1999.
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But official changes in policy don’t tell the whole story. In
many school districts, self-censorship has left comprehensive sex educa- tion programs closely resembling their abstinence-only counterparts.
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Tellingly, over one-third of students in nominally comprehensive pro- grams report receiving little if any information about how and where to use and obtain contraception.
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One might assume that abstinence-only sex education came to the fore so rapidly because of scientific evidence demonstrating its superior effec- tiveness in preventing unintended pregnancies and STIs—but virtually no reliable evidence suggests that this is the case. Nor is abstinence-only ed- ucation’s success due to widespread opposition to comprehensive pro- grams on the part of the American public. Indeed, the vast majority of
parents are in favor of teaching children about contraception and safer sex in addition to abstinence.
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Rather, the nationwide shift from comprehensive to abstinence-fo- cused sex education appears to have been motivated chiefly by federal- level funding structures put into place by moral conservatives starting in the early 1980s.
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The U.S. government supports sex education programs through three major channels—the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) of 1981, Title V of the Social Security Act of 1996, and the Special Pro- ject of Regional and National Significance–Community Based Abstinence Education (SPRANS-CBAE) of 2001—all of which require state recipi- ents to promote sexual abstinence until marriage as “the expected stan- dard of sexual activity.”
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Few states can afford to decline the monies pro- vided through these programs; at most, three states have done so in any given year.
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To qualify for federal support, sex education programs must conform to an eight-point definition of “abstinence education,” spelled out in Title V as an educational or motivational program that (emphasis added)
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has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;
teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the ex- pected standard for all school-age children;
teaches that
abstinence
from sexual activity
is the only certain way to avoid
out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;
teaches that a
mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage
is the
expected standard of sexual activity
;
teaches that
sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects
;
teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society;
teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alco- hol and drug use increase vulnerability to sexual advances, and
teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engag- ing in sexual activity.
Implicit in this definition is the version of sexual morality favored by con- servative Christians.
None of the metaphors for virginity employed by the women and men in my study are inherently incompatible with the criteria stipulated in Title V. A person could, for instance, interpret virginity as a stigma to be endured until marriage. But, in practice, the sex education curricula that have been developed according to the federal guidelines tend to present virginity as a gift intended for a person’s (heterosexual) spouse. Sex Re- spect, one of the first abstinence-only curricula developed with AFLA funding, exemplifies this pattern. Comprehensive sex education pro- grams, in contrast, tend to describe early sexual encounters as steps in the process of growing up: “Young people develop their values about sexual- ity as part of becoming adults. Young people explore their sexuality as a natural process of achieving sexual maturity.”
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(Abstinence-plus pro- grams vary, with some drawing on the process metaphor and others fa- voring the gift metaphor.) Comprehensive curricula also tend to be gen- der neutral and lesbigay inclusive.
Interestingly, the gift metaphor as presented in Sex Respect and its kin diverges from popular expressions in a key respect. Scarcely any of the gifters I interviewed believed that sexual activity was appropriate only in marriage. This discrepancy between the curricular and popular versions of the gift metaphor supports critics’ claim that the current federal policy represents a response to the demands of a vocal moral/religious conserv- ative minority rather than to the wishes of the relatively secular moderate majority.
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At the same time that public schools, spurred by federal monies, began adopting (ostensibly) secular abstinence-until-marriage curricula, conser- vative Christian organizations were busy developing explicitly religious sex education programs for their own youth.
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Many of these programs,
including the widely publicized True Love Waits (TLW), which was founded in 1993 with the support of the Southern Baptist Convention, conform closely to Title V requirements. As the TLW Web site succinctly puts it, “No one doubts that sexual activity in the new millennium is physically, emotionally, and socially dangerous.”
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Although the overt re- ligiosity of these curricula prohibits their use in public schools, thousands of youth have been exposed to TLW and its cousins through church youth groups, Sunday schools, and the like. By 2000, the TLW campaign claimed to have inspired 2 million youth to sign pledges of premarital sex- ual purity, reading, “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a bib- lical marriage relationship.”
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Like their secular counterparts, Christian sex education programs tend to describe virginity as a gift. In a tips-for- parents column for the TLW Web site, LifeWay Christian Resources/Stu- dent Ministry Publishing editor David Crim described a family conversa- tion on his daughter’s thirteenth birthday:
I explained . . . that, just as her mom and I had waited until just the right moment to give her the birthstone ring, we wanted her to wait until just the right moment [marriage] to give the gift of sexual intimacy to a man.
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Christian sex education programs also present a fourth metaphor— distinct from the gift, stigma, and rite of passage perspectives—positing premarital virginity as an act of worship. In pride of place on TLW’s list of the “Top 10 Risks of Having Sex before Marriage” are the following (emphasis in original):
The risk of permanently damaging your testimony as a Christian.
You’ll never be able to honestly say, “I was a virgin before I was mar- ried.” You’ll never be able to live as an example of committed purity.
The risk of shame.
Premarital sex imputes a spiritual state of shame that becomes a major weapon of Satan. God forgives you, but . . . you’ll still be vulnerable to Satan’s whispering accusations on your worth as a person and your value as an active Christian.
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Although the act-of-worship perspective shares the gift metaphor’s roots in Christian thought, specifically the belief that virginity is a gift from
“It’s a Really Great Way to Honor God”
In the course of my research, I interviewed two young women, both de- vout born-again Christians, who described maintaining their virginity until marriage as a way of worshiping God. The younger of the two women was Carrie Matthews, a 20-year-old White nursing student. A self-described heterosexual virgin, Carrie dressed in loose-fitting gar- ments that emphasized her plumpness. A bright smile illuminated her makeup-free face. Growing up in a deeply religious Protestant family had profoundly shaped Carrie’s perspective on virginity. Although her father earned most of his income as a counselor for recovering drug addicts, he had found his true calling as the pastor of a small independent evangeli- cal church. Her mother, a housewife, volunteered many hours for the church and numerous local charities. Carrie had chosen to attend a col- lege near home, partly so that she could remain active in her family’s church.
No less immersed in popular culture than others her age, Carrie was well aware that American beliefs about virginity are diverse. But for her, she said, there was no question that
[virginity is] the way that I want to live until I’m married. I
think that it’s a really great way to honor God, in a sense of know- ing that, like, whatever He has for me is going to be better than the things that I can pursue on my own. And . . . relationships . . . if they’re not drawn out of a commitment, it
is
kind of pursuing it on my own and not trusting that He has something that’s really good for me.
As further incentives, she cited virginity’s health benefits—“I mean, I’m the lowest [risk] group of anyone for sexually transmitted diseases”—and its effects on her interpersonal relationships:
To ensure that she didn’t confuse love and physical desire, Carrie rarely dated and planned to avoid almost all sexual intimacy before marriage. At 20, she had romantically kissed only two men. She did, however, look forward to sex within marriage as “an opportunity . . . to get emotionally and physically and spiritually, all sorts of connected, in a very unique way.” Despite being adamant about “stick[ing] to” her own “set of . . . morals,” Carrie made a point of telling me that she didn’t view people who have sex before marriage “as strange, evil, awful people.”
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She did, however, think that some—like a friend who’d discovered that sex “was- n’t the thing that completed her”—could benefit from becoming born- again virgins. Carrie didn’t believe that a person could resume her or his virginity “in the physiological sense,” but she described nonvirgins who make “the decision to be chaste” as “awesome, I respect that a lot.”
Kate O’Connor, in contrast, had not always seen premarital virginity as an act of faith. Raised in a not-very-devout Roman Catholic family, Kate grew disenchanted with Catholicism during college and joined an evangelical church when she was 20. She wanted to embrace her new church’s teaching that sex should be reserved for marriage, but she had lost her virginity at age 16 and been sexually active with most of her sub- sequent boyfriends. She resolved this thorny dilemma when she was 22 by becoming a secondary virgin.
When I met Kate, she was 24 years old and worked as a producer for a Philadelphia-area radio station. Descended from Irish and Dutch an- cestors, she had light blue eyes and a heart-shaped face framed by auburn hair. Kate’s father had recently retired from his career as a corporate ex- ecutive; her mother had stayed at home when their children were young, then gone to work part time in retail sales when Kate’s younger sister started high school. Kate was heterosexual and had never been married nor lived with a man.