Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (49 page)

89. Marks 1924, 66, 58, 13.

90. Marks 1924, 11, 22, 53.

91. Marks 1924, 53.

92. Marks 1924, 165, 53.

93. Marks 1924, 155–56. See also White 1993. Hugh is “ashamed” to reveal his own standards (53). Still, his friends, far from teasing him, go to great lengths to protect his virtue.

94. Marks 1924, 249.

95. Marks 1924, 255.

1. Bailey 1989; Modell 1983.
   

2. The first quote comes from the University of Chicago’s Paul Cressey (cited in White 1993, 87); the second is from White’s (1993, 88) analysis of such researchers’ work. Urban sociologies of the 1910s strongly suggest that White working-class boys and men saw sexual inexperience at marriage as highly unde- sirable and sexual activity as proof of masculinity.
   

3. This redefinition was part of a broader shift, beginning in the late nine- teenth century, toward treating all manner of social “problems,” including sexu- ality, as medical, rather than moral, matters (Nathanson 1991; Tiefer 1995; Conrad 1992).
   

4. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Gordon 1974; Nathanson 1991. The shift
   

   from an agricultural to industrial economy meant that families “needed” fewer children to survive.
   

5. Seidman 1991. If African Americans perceived a crisis in the Black fam- ily, they saw it as stemming from poverty, racism, and the actions of White eu- genicists (see below).
   

6. Hannah Stone and Abraham Stone,
   A Marriage Manual,
   1939, quoted in Seidman (1991, 76). However, experts cautioned against seeing sex as an end in itself. The first converts to these theories were intellectuals and the medical community, starting around 1890.
   

7. Nathanson 1991.
   

8. Bromley and Britten 1938, 124; Butterfield 1939, 49, 89.
   

9. Mead 1939. See chapter 5.
   

10. Bromley and Britten 1938, 92.
    

11. Bromley and Britten 1938, 92.
    

12. Bromley and Britten 1938, 175.
    

13. Bromley and Britten 1938, 85. See also Newcomb 1937. 109. Haag 1993, 164.
    

110. Havelock Ellis, quoted in Haag 1993, 180–81. See also Brandt 1987. 111. Freud 1908, 197.

1. White 1993, 49; Bromley and Britten 1938, 144.
   

2. Bromley and Britten 1938, 60.
   

3. Bromley and Britten 1938.
   

4. Ellis 1951, 31. Ellis’s compendium of American sexual folklore draws heavily on examples from the 1920s and 1930s.
   

5. According to Bailey (1989), dating first spread beyond its working-class origins to elite urban youth drawn to the privacy from families it offered and to the air of decadence surrounding the practice. By about 1930, dating was the norm among youth from all social strata (Modell 1983).
   

6. The recognition of adolescence had already been well under way when psychologist G. Stanley Hall published his landmark study,
   Adolescence,
   in 1904. Three-fourths of American youth were enrolled in high school in the 1920s. Deferment of marriage was recommended by adults keen on protecting “endangered” adolescents. Middle-class youth tended to perceive generation, not gender, as the central division in social life (Bailey 1989).
   

7. Bailey (1989) argues that the automobile, while indubitably allowing couples more privacy, accelerated rather than catalyzed ongoing changes in sex- ual behavior.
   

8. DuBois 1899.
   

9. Jones 1985.
   

10. As novelist Jessie Fauset (1928) put it, middle-class African Americans were enjoined to keep their “pearl of great price untarnished” (66). The sex-af- firming lyrics of Black women blues singers notwithstanding, the bulk of empiri-
    

    cal evidence suggests that few young Black women achieved genuine sexual lib- eration in the early twentieth century (DuCille 1993; Omolade 1983; though see Carby 1990). Black community leaders’ concern was exacerbated by the proxim- ity of Black neighborhoods to vice districts. Asian Americans in West Coast cities reported similar difficulties in sheltering young community members from “vice” and racism.
    

11. Joyner and Laumann 2001.
    

12. On Blacks in the urban north, see Drake and Cayton 1945, Frazier 1932; on the rural South, see Johnson 1941.
    

13. Bailey 1989.
    

14. Lynd and Lynd 1929. Couples at such parties would pair up and neck (or more) in semiprivacy (e.g., at the host’s home with lights dimmed).
    

15. Parent and Wallace 1993, 27.
    

16. Technical virginity,
    sometimes called
    demi-virginity
    or
    half virginity,
    does not appear in any dictionary I have consulted. The first uses I have found occur in the 1920s, in novels and academic papers (e.g., de Lys 1960). The latter expressions appear to have died out in the 1970s.
    

17. Hecht 1921, 189–90. See also Bromley and Britten 1938. Technical vir- gins who were motivated by passion or love were typically viewed in a positive light—Hugh Carver and Cynthia Day are prime examples—but those who acted out of mercenary intent could be judged harshly.
    

18. Rates of premarital virginity loss were higher among African American men than White men (Joyner and Laumann 2001). About one-fourth of Ameri- cans had premarital sex in 1919; between one-third and one-half did by the mid- 1960s (Gebhard 1980).
    

19. Kinsey et al. 1953. Worried parents, physicians, and educators re- sponded by imposing curfews and parietal rules and by developing marriage manuals and college family life courses that depicted sexual fulfillment in mar- riage as dependent on premarital chastity (Bailey 1989; Moran 2000).
    

20. Omolade 1983, 372. See also Hine 1988.
    

21. On discretion, see Brumberg 1997, Rubin 1990. On contraception, see Gordon 1974. Under Margaret Sanger’s leadership, birth control became widely available to
    married
    women by the 1930s, thus enabling them to explore the erotic side of sex.
    

22. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948; Lindsey and Evans 1925.
    

23. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 226. The shift from moral to medical un- derstandings of homosexuality was part of the broader late-1800s trend toward medicalization. The new belief that all people were inherently sexual meant that relationships between same-sex partners could no longer be presumed asexual, which rendered them increasingly unacceptable in mainstream opinion.
    

24. Greenberg 1988; Seidman 1991.
    

25. Duberman 1991; Katz 1992. These subcultures/communities had begun
    

    to coalesce in cities like San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and New York between 1880 and the First World War.
    

26. E.g., Bromley and Britten 1938, 124.
    

27. Bailey 1989, 153n73; Trowbridge 1952.
    

28. Bailey 1989; Rothman 1984.
    

29. Bailey 1989.
    

30. Such sites would eventually be immortalized in nostalgic media produc- tions like the movie
    American Graffiti
    (1973) and television series
    Happy Days
    (aired 1974–84).
    

31. “Shaping the ’60s . . . Foreshadowing the ’70s,”
    Ladies Home Journal,
    January 1962, quoted in Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs (1986, 25). See also Moran’s (2000) discussion of sex educator Mary Calderone and contemporaries.
    

32. Sowing wild oats might acceptably include virginity loss, provided the young man remained discreet and didn’t sully a good girl’s reputation in the process.
    

33. Such rules were seen as increasingly necessary from the late 1940s on- ward, as youth were deemed more likely to transgress sexual boundaries (Bailey 1989). Early marriage was especially appealing for working-class youth, whose families lived in smaller, more crowded homes and who rarely enjoyed the respite offered by residential college life (Rubin 1976).
    

145. Mace 1949, 101.

1. Similar patterns prevail in better-known films of the era, such as
   A Sum- mer Place
   (1959),
   Splendor in the Grass
   (1959), and
   Where the Boys Are
   (1961).
   

2. According to the National Health and Social Life Survey (Laumann et al. 1994), 22 percent of men and 48 percent of women born between 1930 and 1944 had vaginal sex for the first time with their spouse.
   

3. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948; Kinsey et al. 1953; Nathanson and Schoen 1993; Weinberg and Williams 1980; Rubin 1976.
   

4. Joyner and Laumann 2001.
   

5. Scholars disagree as to whether the changes of this period represent a true revolution or the culmination of decades of gradual change. Compare, e.g., D’Emilio and Freedman 1988 to Seidman 1991 and Weeks 1985.
   

6. Ericksen 1999; Moran 2000.
   

7. Just under half of the women who married by age 25 had sex before marriage; rates were higher among women who married later (Kinsey et al. 1953, 287). Over 60 percent of men with at least a high school education, and
   

   90 percent of men with less education, had sex before marriage (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948).
   

8. On problems with Kinsey’s statistics, ostensibly the source of the widely cited statistic that one in ten Americans is gay, and for an alternative estimate of the proportion of lesbigay Americans, see Laumann et al. 1994.
   

9. D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Katz 1992. Expanded opportunities for
   

   lesbigay people and Cold War rhetoric linking homosexuality and communism prompted intensified oppression, including Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order barring gay men and lesbians from federal employment. Gay bars began appear- ing in cities in the 1940s, and various “interest societies” (e.g., the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis), precursors of later activist organizations, were founded in the 1950s.
   

10. Raymond 1994; Herdt and Boxer 1993. Historical patterns are difficult to establish with certainty, as data on the sequencing of sexual initiation with same- and other-sex partners are rare.
    

11. Seidman 1991; Weeks 1985. The consumer economy, mass media, and advertising industry grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas mainstream news sources generally discouraged extensive treatments of sexual topics, de- tailed coverage of the Kinsey Reports could be justified by their scientific status (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988).
    

12. Quoted in Leff and Simmons 1990, 194. Official Hollywood reaction to
    

    Moon
    strongly echoes critical reaction to
    Sister Carrie.
    

13. These media’s early 1960s successors, like the best-selling novels
    The Last Picture Show
    (Larry McMurtry 1966) and
    Summer of ’42
    (Herman Raucher 1965), likewise reflected and helped perpetuate the belief that premari- tal virginity was shameful in men.
    

159. Brown 1962, 225.

160. Brown 1962, 67.

1. The economic prosperity, earlier marriages, and pro-natalist sentiment that followed the Second World War helped bring about the baby boom (Bailey 1989; Seidman 1991).
   

2. Craig 2002.
   

3. Gagnon and Simon 1987; Joyner and Laumann 2001.
   

4. Muuss 1970; Modell, Furstenberg, and Herschberg 1976; Jessor and Jessor 1975.
   

5. Hofferth, Kahn, and Baldwin 1987; Sherwin and Corbett 1985. The Pill and the IUD became widely available to young, unmarried women in the late 1960s; the legalization of abortion in 1973 also facilitated women’s sexual free- dom (Gordon 1974).
   

6. Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1986; Connell 1995.
   

7. Moffatt 1987; Reiss 1967.
   

8. Rubin 1990, 46. See also
   Time
   1973.
   

9. Brumberg 1997; Thompson 1990; Tolman 1994.
   

10. Hofferth, Kahn, and Baldwin 1987; Joyner and Laumann 2001. A lack of data on Asian Americans prevents assessing trends over time. Analyses of trends in adolescent sexuality typically focus on attitudes about premarital sex and the ages at which youth first engage in vaginal sex (the most common defin- ition of virginity loss but, as I have shown, not necessarily equivalent).
    

11. Joyner and Laumann 2001. Mahay, Laumann, and Michaels (2001) find that although the majority of men and women at every educational level favor relational sex, college-educated men and women are more likely to take a recreational stance than their less-well-educated counterparts.
    

12. Upchurch et al. 1998.
    

13. Mahay, Laumann, and Michaels 2001. A comparable analysis is not available for Asian Americans.
    

14. Working-class and poor teens are therefore more likely to experience unintended pregnancy (Brewster 1994; Nathanson and Schoen 1993). There is, however, some evidence that the effects of race and ethnicity outweigh those of class among Black and Latino boys, who often feel they must prove their mas- culinity through sexual prowess (Anderson 1995; Lauritsen 1994; Upchurch et al. 1998).
    

15. Herold and Goodwin 1981; Schecterman and Hutchinson 1991. Brom- ley and Britten (1938) observed, but did not name, a similar phenomenon among college women in the 1930s.
    

16. Gagnon and Simon 1987. Unmarried men receiving fellatio, presumably from prostitutes, were an exception to this rule. Kinsey and colleagues’ data (1948, 1953) suggest that oral sex was fairly common among White, well-edu- cated married couples starting in the 1930s.
    

17. Newcomer and Udry 1985; Thompson 1990.
    

18. Dear Abby
    column, January 10, 1983, quoted in Jones et al. 1984, 10.
    

19. Prior to the Stonewall era, “coming out” had referred to acknowledging one’s homosexuality only to oneself and to other members of the lesbigay com- munity (Cain 1993).
    

20. Faludi 1991; Seidman 1992; Luker 1996.
    

21. Dworkin 1981; MacKinnon 1989.
    

22. Vance 1984; Willis 1992.
    

23. Shalit 1999; Roiphe 1993.
    

24. Johnson 2002. Kamen (2000) found that many nonfeminists of the same generation shared this “both/and” position.
    

25. The amendment, which died in the House of Representatives, would “define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, invalidate all state and local domestic partnership laws and nullify civil rights protections based on mar- ital status” (American Civil Liberties Union). It was reintroduced, but did not come to a vote, in summer 2004.
    

26. Herdt and Boxer 1993.
    

27. Ku et al. 1998; Singh and Darroch 1999.
    

28. Holland, Ramazanoglu, and Thomson 1996; Sprecher, Barbee, and Schwartz 1995; Thompson 1995; Wight et al. 2000.