Then I met the most remarkable young woman. I had gone to hear a talk being given on a local campus, and, in the way of lobby-waiting small talk-makers everywhere, we’d gotten to talking about our work. She told me what she did, and then I explained that I was a writer and had recently begun working on a book about virginity (
Virgin: The Untouched History
was published in 2007). The instant I mentioned this, as a remarkably large number of people do when they find out I’ve written a book on this topic, she grew animated and started relating to me her own personal virginity narrative.
Thus it happened that I stood awkwardly next to a potted plant, listening to this stranger tell me about her introduction to the squishy, fraught, complicated world of partnered sex. It was all fairly suburban and typical sounding until she explained that she’d decided that not only her first-ever experience of sex, but quite a number of others, simply didn’t count.
“I just didn’t feel like I’d really done it, you know, not for real,” she explained. “Not until about a year later. I kept feeling like I was a virgin. Until finally I had an orgasm while I was having sex with a partner. That was when I lost my virginity.”
I did a double take. People thought that way? Really? Had I fallen down some sort of postfeminist rabbit hole, or did people really have sex—penis-in-vagina sex, as well as other sorts—with multiple partners and still consider themselves virgins? This woman I was talking to certainly seemed to.
Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit,
I thought.
You learn something new every day.
I was fascinated, but at the same time, the more I thought about it, the more I felt my mental upper lip curling in scorn. I wanted to ask her if she was serious. I mean, this woman professed to have had more than a year of sexual activity, with more than one partner, before she’d been willing to cop to having popped her cherry. Who did she think she was, Britney Spears? It was—it could be nothing but—the most reactionary, blatant, self-serving revisionism. Maybe it was her way to make herself feel better about having had sex she didn’t enjoy or maybe didn’t even really want. Maybe she felt like she needed to hide it. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. It wasn’t that I felt, then or now, that every woman must necessarily be held to an identical sexual philosophy, or even the same degree of transparency. I just thought it was ludicrous.
Now, several years, a book, and several hundred lost-virginity narratives later (if I include the multitudes I only read about alongside those told to me), I find that my take on such deliberately redefined virginity, and subjectively determined virginity loss, is considerably more complicated. Strangely enough, what began to change my thinking was none other than the virginal philosophy of that notoriously and complicatedly sexual father of the early Christian church, Augustine of Hippo. In his
De Civitate Dei
(
The City of God),
written in the bleak years following the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 CE, he offers a doctrinally strange and uncommonly sympathetic consolation to the Christian women raped by members of the invading armies as an act of war.
“The integrity of the body does not reside solely in its parts,” Augustine wrote, explaining that if virginity were genuinely a spiritual attribute as well as a bodily one, surely it could not be utterly destroyed by purely physical means. A Christian woman who had resisted her rapist body and soul could, so long as she had not capitulated to the carnal desires of her own body in submitting, continue to regard herself as a virgin. More important, Augustine implied, she would continue to be one in the eyes of God. Two thousand years before the trend toward conscious, feminist theory-based reclamation of sexuality by survivors of sexual violence promoted a similar understanding, Augustine articulated a profound truth about the sexual body as distinct from the self. What
happened
to you sexually was not necessarily what you
were
as a person.
To be abundantly sure, this was hardly the first time that this idea had been imagined. It was merely the first time we know of that it was extended to include women. It was also not the first time there had been more than one simultaneous definition of virginity. But it was among the earliest instances we know of where multiple definitions were expressed simultaneously by a single person, and in which all the available definitions (in this case, both physical and spiritual) were systematically applied to the same women. This didn’t just broaden the spectrum of what might be understood to constitute virginity, or establish virginity as a (at least potentially) contextual quality. It also placed, at least in some cases, the determination of whether someone was or wasn’t a virgin in a place where it almost never rested otherwise: namely, in the virgin’s own hands.
As my research progressed, it dawned on me just how rare a thing it was, historically speaking, for the determination of virginity to be something that the virgin herself got to decide. It also occurred to me, after a while, that something major had changed in recent years on that score. My research showed increasingly that one of the big differences between virginity in the past and virginity in the present was that, since sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, it has been women themselves who have more often than not been the decision makers and announcers of their own virginal (or nonvirginal) status.
Bit by bit, stories like the one I heard from the woman in that campus auditorium lobby began to make more sense to me. This was fortunate because, as it turned out, she was scarcely alone. The more stories I heard from women who described their loss of virginity as a process, rather than an instant in time, the more I realized that this way of thinking was perhaps neither so rare nor so strange as I at first assumed. Nor was it necessarily so revisionist, or so self-serving. In fact, I began to rethink virtually every aspect of my initial reaction to the phenomenon. I even began to see it as a potentially feminist act.
The potential for feminism in what I began to call “process-oriented virginity” is not just a matter of women’s agency in dictating the terms and parameters of their virginity. It also lies in the implicit acknowledgment of a very telling double standard, encoded in the ways in which process-oriented virgins tell their sexual stories. When these women explained themselves to me, they always began by telling about their initial sexual experiences, the ones they felt other people would judge as sufficient to have made them nonvirgins but that to them didn’t count or weren’t really “real.” Then they would say a few words about the process, and usually the relationships and the sexual experiences, of how they went from that initial, discounted sexual experience to one that they were willing to lay full claim to, represented by declaring the transition to “nonvirgin.” They recognized, in other words, that at least two sets of standards are in operation, and that there are at least two potential ways to view their sexual histories.
What is even more intriguing is the insistent sense in these women’s narratives that all standards of virginity are equally subjective. One woman put it roughly this way: Some people would say that she had lost her virginity as a young adolescent when she was molested, and other people would say she had lost it when she was fifteen and had intercourse with a boy for the first time, but she had still felt like a virgin until she was nineteen and had sex with a woman for the first time. These were three different sex acts, and very different physical and emotional experiences. The woman who had had them, and who was now narrating them, understood clearly that any of the three of them might be interpreted as being the experience that had turned her from a virgin to a nonvirgin. Which experience actually had effected that change, however, was a matter of perspective. Critically, in this woman’s mind—and the minds of all her fellow process-oriented virgins—outsider perspectives do not necessarily carry more weight than their own.
Like Augustine, I was able to perceive this approach as being immediately valid for women whose experiences of sexual interaction with others had begun with sexual abuse. It seemed only right and proper in my mind that abuse survivors would be entitled to a clean slate. I could also, if I squinted a bit, see its being valid for lesbians whose initial sexual experiences were, as is the case for many lesbian women, with men. (This is also true for gay men. Heterosexuality is pervasive and normalized, and thus heterosexual sex is generally a lot more easily accessible to young people, regardless of what they might ideally prefer.) In both cases I could see why self-defined virginity loss that arrived as a culmination of a subjective process of healing or coming out made healthy, sane sense.
I had a harder time understanding, and feeling sympathy for, the process-oriented virgins who, like the first one I met, seemed not to have any compelling argument for choosing to interpret their virginities the way they did, except that they wanted to. It seemed disingenuous at the least, and perhaps even manipulative.
I tried hard to make sense of it. The work I’d been doing on contemporary youth conceptions of sexuality had hinted rather strongly that educational efforts to discourage teen pregnancy and teen sex generally had generated some disparities in what was and wasn’t being perceived as “having sex.” A major survey of adolescents conducted in 2002 by the Kaiser Family Foundation and
Seventeen
magazine (the report, “Virginity and the First Time,” was released in 2003), for instance, revealed that about half of the young people they surveyed did not necessarily consider oral sex, anal sex, or mutual masturbation to be “having sex.”
Maybe, I thought, this construction of “sex” as meaning “only the potentially procreative kind” had something to do with the subjective redefinitions of virginity I was hearing from so many process-oriented virgins. Perhaps women were just putting a slightly different spin on an age-old practice of working their way up through the ranks of nonprocreative sexual activities, not calling it “sex” or claiming lost virginity until they’d crossed the border into the land of penis-in-vagina intercourse. When I reviewed the narratives I’d been told, though, this seemed to be the case only occasionally. Process-oriented virgins weren’t depending on their grandmothers’ technicalities to determine when they were and weren’t virgins.
What they were depending on, on the other hand, was revealingly modern and female-centric. Although my research on the subject is, admittedly, entirely anecdotal, and although I would therefore never try to assert that this is somehow a statistically representative impression of “how young women think” about sex and virginity at this point in time, it nonetheless seems noteworthy that a lot of the process-oriented virgins I talked to are working with criteria that closely mirror the goals of twentieth-century feminist sex reform. The sex that counts, for these young women, is sex in which they are involved and invested. For some, that means the first time they instigated sex because they really desired it. For some it means the first time they had an orgasm during sex with a partner. For some it means the first time they felt fully emotionally invested and present during sex. Indeed, it might even mean simply that it was the first time that they felt like they genuinely knew what they were doing. Sex “counted” the first time it felt like sex that was good for women, not just for men.
Color me flabbergasted—again. The thought that these revisionist historians of their own sex lives are radically redefining virginity on the basis of a bottom line that is fundamentally derived from feminist sex-reform philosophy was a stunner. Still more astonishing, they are doing it intuitively. This process-oriented virginity is no carefully formulated political action, but a feral descendant of feminist priorities in, if you will, their natural habitat. Sexual pleasure, emotional and physical investment, self-awareness, and plain old know-how on the part of women have been internalized by these women to such an extent, and become so normalized in their thinking, that they are not merely aspirational—they are what is required in order to consider oneself to be having “real” sex.
Way to raise the bar, ladies.
Here’s the thing: It works. As an assertion of unconscious, psychological truth, the statement that a given woman’s virginity ends when the individual says it does, for the reasons that she says it does, is unassailable. It destroys the historical relationship between authority figures and virginity by cutting outsiders—anyone from priests to parents to virginity testers—out of the picture entirely, divesting them of any voice in regard to what virginity is and what it might or might not be worth. Process-oriented virginity is a historically extraordinary, remarkably effective, and absolutely justifiable arrogance.
After all, it even worked on me, and I of all people should’ve known better. It had become clear to me that virginity had, throughout the history of the concept, had multiple definitions and multiple meanings. Ultimately, I spent the entire first chapter of my book discussing this phenomenon, not attempting to tease out some primal and unassailable definition of virginity, but rather showcasing its multiple faces to point out that virginity, in and of itself, does not exist. It can’t be photographed, measured on a scale, wrapped in cling film and saved for later, or sniffed out by a trained beagle. I knew it full well.