Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (4 page)

sis of the differential effects of the gift, stigma, passage/process, and act- of-worship metaphors — among people who, like the vast majority of young Americans, have not remained abstinent until marriage—speaks to this debate.

Many of the factors that historically made virginity loss significant have lost much of their salience and force, due to extensive changes in so- cial and sexual life, the secularization of American society, feminism, and development of highly effective contraceptive methods, to name but three. Yet, everyone I interviewed believed that most Americans see vir- ginity loss as a momentous life event and almost all of them had person- ally seen their own experiences as very meaningful. I contend that Amer- icans currently accord tremendous significance to virginity loss because of the role it plays in the construction of identity and in the establishment of adulthood.
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My interviews suggest that there are costs as well as benefits to investing virginity loss with such importance, however. By considering the reasons for virginity loss’s significance today, this book helps reveal how broad social changes and individual biographies intersect, especially in light of evolving understandings and experiences of gender, sexual identity, and adulthood itself.

Plan of the Book

Before we can discuss how virginity loss is understood and experienced in America today, it’s important to examine how it has been interpreted, de- fined, and experienced in the past. Virginity is an ancient concept, and over the centuries Western peoples’ understandings of virginity loss have evolved to fit their ever-changing societies. The same social forces have also helped to transform people’s conduct—including when, where, and with what types of partner they lose their virginity. I chart these changing interpretations and experiences in chapter 1. Understanding how young women and men define virginity loss is fundamental to understanding how they experience it. Chapter 2, therefore, focuses on the diverse defi- nitions used by the people who took part in my study. As I will show, gen- eration, sexual identity, and gender shaped their definitions in important ways.

With this foundation in place, I turn to the beliefs and experiences of young Americans today. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, I tell the stories of young women and men who interpreted virginity as a gift, a stigma, or a

process/passage. For convenience, I will refer to them, respectively, as “gifters,” the “stigmatized,” and “processers.” Almost everyone I spoke with approached virginity loss through one (or more) of these three metaphors. However, my interviews and reading of popular culture also revealed the emergence of a distinctive fourth metaphor, one that frames premarital virginity as an act of worship. This metaphor, and the in- creasing prominence of abstinence-only sex-education programs, are the subjects of chapter 6.

I conclude the book by returning to the questions raised in this intro- duction, showing how my research has helped to answer them. At the heart of chapter 7 is a comparative analysis of the effects the gift, stigma, process/passage, and act-of-worship metaphors have on young people’s physical health and emotional well-being. Through this analysis and an examination of the relationship between these metaphors and the major approaches to sex education, I connect my scholarship to the ongoing de- bate about sex education in America. I close with a discussion of the en- during social significance of virginity loss, and its implications for indi- viduals and society overall.

It’s now been over a decade since that 1994 “Virgin Cool” headline made me do a double take. Thinking, reading, and writing as well as talk- ing to so many people about their own experiences with virginity loss has been an incredibly fascinating and, at times, deeply moving experience. I have heard stories about sexual experiences that virtually no other scholar has ever recorded and I have been repeatedly surprised by my own assumptions and challenged to see virginity loss in a different light. Writing this book has been an absorbing, instructive, and revealing expe- rience for me. My hope is that reading this book will prove to be the same.

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A Brief History of Virginity Loss

In the summer of 1999, not long after I’d conducted the last interview for this book, Universal Pictures released a movie about four high school boys determined to lose their virginity by the night of their senior prom.
American Pie
took box offices by storm, launching the careers of half a dozen young actors, and ultimately spawning two commercially success- ful (if increasingly vapid) sequels.
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If anyone had doubted that young Americans saw virginity loss as a significant experience, here was confir- mation that they did.

On the surface,
American Pie
resembles countless other teen sex come- dies. Its plot centers on a group of male friends who feel stigmatized by their virginity and long to eradicate it with maximum haste and minimum embarrassment. Jim (Jason Biggs) scarcely seems to care whether he loses his virginity with a sexy exchange student, geeky marching-band flutist, or homemade apple pie.
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Likewise mortified, Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) tries to disguise his virginity through a series of elaborate sub- terfuges before finally being initiated by his classmate Stifler’s stunning mother (Jennifer Coolidge), in an apparent homage to
The Graduate.
The young women in the movie, by contrast, hope to bestow their virginity on loving partners, in romantic surroundings. Vicky (Tara Reid) refuses to have sex with longtime boyfriend Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) until he can say that he loves her; and Heather (Mena Suvari) repeatedly rebuffs the attentions of star athlete Oz (Chris Klein) until he proves that he’s in- terested in her as a person.

Yet, the movie also features characters who defy gender norms. Jessica (Natasha Lyonne) respects her friend Vicky’s desire for a “special” vir- ginity-loss encounter but makes a point of warning her that vaginal sex is seldom perfect the first time, effectively presenting virginity loss as a step in a learning process. In a truly revolutionary move for a teen comedy,

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Jessica also suggests that Vicky might be more inclined to have sex if she were having orgasms during foreplay, thereby arguing that women should make virginity loss contingent on sexual pleasure. Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) likewise flouts traditional feminine ideals. Having an- nounced that she agreed to be Jim’s prom date because he was a “sure thing,” she brusquely deflowers him, then disappears.
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Nor do the film’s young men fully conform to traditional ideas about masculinity. Oz de- cides it is worth remaining a virgin if he can keep Heather’s trust and af- fection; and mutual virginity loss appears to enhance Kevin’s love for Vicky.
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Sherman (Chris Owen) frames virginity loss as a rite of passage; having spent the night with a girl, apparently having sex, he declares, “Say good-bye to Chuck Sherman the boy. I am now a man.”

The teenagers in
American Pie
take diverse approaches to virginity loss, even though they are all White, middle-class, and heterosexual. When I first saw the movie, having just interviewed 61 young Americans about virginity loss, I was struck by how much it reflected the patterns I saw in my research. The fictional youth interpreted virginity through the same metaphorical lenses as the women and men I interviewed, compar- ing virginity to a gift, a stigma, and a step in the process of growing up; and they exhibited a similar combination of conformity and resistance to traditional gender ideals. In depicting virginity loss as a site of competing and even contradictory beliefs,
American Pie
epitomized a phenomenon that captivated many lay and academic observers at the time. As sociolo- gist Steven Seidman and others have noted, in the last decades of the twentieth century American sexual culture entered a period of unprece- dented diversity.
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Yet, many of the meanings currently assigned to virginity have been in circulation in Western cultures for centuries.
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Indeed, as I researched the history of virginity loss, I saw how previous generations of Americans had also invoked the gift, stigma, and process/passage metaphors. In this chapter, I chart evolving understandings, definitions, and experiences of virginity loss from the time British colonists arrived in the “new world” until the present.
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Understanding the processes through which different approaches to virginity loss have emerged, come to prominence, and fallen out of favor will provide a useful backdrop against which we can unravel contemporary patterns and begin to consider what might tran- spire in the future. My account relies chiefly on secondary sources, al- though I also incorporate selected primary materials and draw represen- tative illustrations from popular culture.

Before proceeding, some words of clarification are in order. The scien- tific study of sexuality is a relatively young discipline, launched in the 1880s by medical scholars and psychologists such as Richard von Krafft- Ebing and Havelock Ellis.
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Although the first surveys of sexual beliefs and practices in the United States were fielded in the 1890s, sex research re- mained relatively moribund until the 1920s and 1930s; even then, schol- ars seldom collected data from unmarried men and women. Research fo- cusing on sexual life before marriage grew exponentially in the 1960s and 1970s, motivated initially by a narrow concern with the psychological ad- justment of (mostly White) college students and, starting in the early 1970s, by mounting social anxiety about adolescent pregnancy and, from the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS. Marriage, birth, and other legal records can provide some “hard” data on sexual attitudes and conduct before the sci- entific era; however, for the most part, what we know about bygone pe- riods comes from prescriptive literature (sermons and advice manuals), idealized texts (novels and songs), and personal documents (diaries and letters). These sources offer considerable insight into the sexual ideals of the past but only indirect evidence about actual human behavior. Con- temporary studies indicate that most people’s sexual behavior conforms broadly to their beliefs—for example, teenagers who disapprove of pre- marital sex are less likely to engage in it—yet discrepancies are not un- common.
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It is also important to note that the sexual patterns that prevail among marginalized social groups—racial/ethnic minorities, people who desire same-sex partners, the economically disadvantaged—often differ from patterns among dominant groups and are frequently absent from, or misrepresented in, the historical record and even scientific scholarship.
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The Roots of Colonial American Beliefs

In the United States, ideas about virginity loss are firmly rooted in the Christian tradition of venerating premarital virginity, which White colonists brought with them from Europe.
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This tradition evolved from ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman beliefs and customs. While by no means uniform, these cultures all valued virginity in unmarried women and believed virgins of both genders to possess special powers, such as in- vulnerability to injury or death.
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The English words
virgin
and
virginity
derive from the Latin “virago,” meaning “maiden,” and entered the Eng- lish language in the 1200s, followed by the expressions
to keep
and
to

lose
“virginity” around 1390. The oldest uses of the term
virginity
re- ferred to “abstinence from or avoidance of all sexual relations” and “bodily chastity . . . esp[ecially] as adopted from religious motives.”
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Most early Christian theologians claimed that Adam and Eve were born virgins and that their first sexual encounter helped unleash sin into the world.
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Believers who wished to live a sinless life were accordingly encouraged to embrace virginity, preferably as a permanent state. For those souls who could “not control themselves,” Paul of Tarsus, perhaps the best-known proponent of lifelong virginity, advocated sexual activity within marriage over failed celibacy outside it in the famous phrase, “It is better to marry than to be consumed with passion.”
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All early Christians were encouraged to embrace sexual abstinence. Both genders were thought to experience sexual desire, but abstinence was understood in gender-specific ways. The term “virgin” customarily referred to women, whereas “chastity” was the favored expression for men, implying that sexual purity and abstinence were innate in women, but had to be cultivated by men.
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From about the twelfth century on, women’s physiology was believed to allow for a more complete virginity than men’s, insofar as “the female body [was] hollow and therefore ca- pable both of containing the divine and being sealed to exclude all other influences.”
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More practically, since virginity precluded marriage, it ap- pealed to women seeking independence from men and freedom from the dangers of childbirth. The popular thirteenth-century poem, “Hali Mei- denhad,” describes virginity as “the one gift granted you from heaven; give it once away and you will never recover another in any way like it” and counsels women to reciprocate God’s largesse by “giv[ing] yourself to Him”—or, failing that, to a husband.
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In contrast, medical scholars warned men that, Christian teachings notwithstanding, sexual continence was injurious to their health.
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Ambivalence about men’s virginity—typ- ified by Saint Augustine’s prayer, “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now”—has characterized Western thinking ever since.
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