Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (13 page)

treat virginity loss as a uniquely important, irreproducible event. Or, as Danice Marshall put it, “[T]his is something you can’t take back.”

After their attempt at sex, Kelly and Dave resumed their routine of going to movies and parties and petting on the way home. They were still in love and being together mattered far more to them than sex. Every month or two, they would fight and break up, then get back together after a few days had passed. But on one occasion, almost a year after their close call, instead of reuniting with Kelly, Dave started dating someone else. Devastated, Kelly tried to rekindle their relationship; but Dave proved immune to her pleas. After 2 months, convinced that Dave had given his virginity to his new girlfriend, Kelly, now 15, resolved to get him back however she could. She felt certain that having sex would inoculate their relationship against interlopers, so one afternoon she cornered Dave and declared, “I want to get back together so we can have sex.” Though flus- tered by Kelly’s bluntness, Dave also wanted to give their relationship an- other chance. They went on a few dates and at last had sex.

When she shared this experience with me, Kelly could recall every de- tail, right down to the turquoise panties she wore. “The things you re- member!” she laughed. In her eyes the encounter had been nearly perfect, despite ending abruptly and falling short of the physical marvels she’d expected. “It didn’t hurt,” she said, “but it wasn’t like everything that, you know, everybody told me it was going to be.” Emotionally, however, giving her virginity to Dave surpassed Kelly’s dearest dreams. Having sex felt loving and very intimate, and it even seemed to add some much- needed glue to their relationship—their periodic breakups came to an end. Ten years later, Dave confessed to Kelly that her suspicions had been misplaced, he hadn’t given his virginity to his temporary girlfriend. Kelly was still thrilled to know that Dave had reciprocated her gift of virginity not only emotionally, but also with his own. In fact, gifters were more likely to lose their virginity with fellow virgins than members of any other interpretive group—hardly surprising, given how many held mutual vir- ginity loss as an ideal.
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Kelly and Dave used condoms when they tried to lose their virginity, when they actually did, and whenever they had sex thereafter. For the most part, Kelly told me, they had been concerned with preventing preg- nancy, rather than HIV, which they hadn’t then seen as a threat to het- erosexuals like themselves. Gifters were more likely to practice some form of birth control or safer sex at virginity loss than any other group in my

study—four-fifths of them did. Largely this seemed to be a by-product of the intimacy enjoyed by people in committed romantic relationships, which helps them discuss and prepare preventive measures in advance. Such comfort may be particularly crucial for young women. According to scholars, many young women fail to use contraception or practice safer sex out of fear that preparing for sex will mark them as promiscuous or easy.
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Young women in committed love relationships may, by contrast, feel “permitted” to acknowledge the possibility that they might have sex, which in turn is a prerequisite for preparing for safer sex.

Kelly and Dave had a sexual relationship for nearly two more years. Such enduring relationships were especially common among gifters. Those who remained with their partners did so, on average, for 2 years after virginity loss, compared with 6 and 8 months for their counter- parts in the stigma and process groups, respectively.
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Throughout those

2 years, Kelly relished playing expert adviser to her girlfriends who were still virgins—a role enjoyed by many women who felt they’d lost their virginity in ways befitting their vision of virginity as a gift. Grad- ually, Kelly began to get more physical pleasure from vaginal sex; but the emotional rewards remained more important to her. As a case in point, she recounted a conversation with her father when she was 16 or 17:

He asked me . . . you know, “Are you having sex.” “Yes.” And he asked me, “Why are you having sex?” And I think, you know, I gave an an- swer like, “It feels good.” It did feel good, but . . . I think that was what I thought I was supposed to say.

Breaking up with Dave did not diminish Kelly’s conviction that sex was meant to be shared with a special person. When she decided to have sex with her next serious boyfriend, a romance that began in college, she found she had to relinquish “the idea of being with only one person” that had been so important to her. She explained:

When I had another partner, it was something like I, I actually said good-bye. . . . I guess I thought of the first person that I was with as being pure and whole and good and wonderful. Maybe a lot of what people think about being a virgin. And then when I . . . was with an- other person, I gave that part of it up.

Her first time with her second lover was, Kelly said, one of the three most significant sexual experiences of her life, along with losing her virginity, at 15, and her first orgasm, at 23.

Kelly’s ideals and experiences were undoubtedly shaped by her gender and sexual identity, albeit in ways that might easily remain invisible, since her approach is widely perceived as natural for heterosexual women (es- pecially if they are White). The overwhelming majority of people who viewed virginity as a gift self-identified as heterosexual, like Kelly, or as bisexual.
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Lesbians and gay men, by contrast, rarely compared virginity to a gift. I believe this may be because a model of virginity loss that re- volves around traditional understandings of femininity and masculinity has relatively little appeal for people who desire same-sex partners.
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“[A] Mutual Amount of Giving, on Both Behalves”

Some young men did interpret virginity as a gift. What first struck me about Bryan Meyers was his self-deprecating boyish charm. An 18-year- old White college freshman, Bryan had clean-cut good looks, with short sandy hair and bright blue eyes. He approached our conversation with an earnest politeness, but it was easy to imagine him playing the class clown. When I thanked him for agreeing to be interviewed, he laughed and said, “What college guy doesn’t want to talk about sex?” Lest I get the wrong impression about what kind of sex he meant, he described himself as “to- tally hetero.” He was born and raised in upstate New York, where his mother and father both worked as public-school teachers.

Given the masculine bravado lurking just below Bryan’s good-kid sur- face, I was somewhat surprised to hear him describe virginity loss in terms almost identical to those used by Kelly—terms overwhelmingly as- sociated with femininity in American culture. When I asked how he would define virginity loss to someone who’d never heard of it before, he replied that, after “describ[ing] it clinically, you know . . . whether pene- tration has taken place,”
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he would explain that virginity is

something that you have for yourself, you know, it’s like, “This is yours,” . . . and you finally decide who you’re going to give this to. And that’s, you know, you hope that that person really appreciates it. . . . [W]ith all the diseases and whatever going around there’s such a height- ened awareness these days of . . . just saving yourself. . . . It’s even funny

that they use those terms. I mean it’s like, saving yourself as if, as if you’re giving you. And I guess that’s kind of true. So . . . I think that people consider it giving of themselves to do this, and I think that that’s definitely important to them.

Although he believed that a person should be in love with his or her vir- ginity-loss partner, Bryan saw no point in waiting until marriage. People who do are “making a mistake if they think that they’re ready for some- body, and just because they said they’re not going to do it ’til they get married, and then they wait.”

Bryan is a classic gifter. In fact, his feelings about reciprocity were more emphatic and considered than those of most people in this group. As he put it:

I think that [there] definitely has to be just trust and, most importantly, reciprocity. I think that there has to be . . . [a] mutual amount of giving, on both behalves, because then, for something special like that to hap- pen and . . . you feel that you are not . . . loved as much as . . . you love this other person, and you actually decide to have sex with this person, I think you kind of feel slighted.

Bryan suspected that his approach set him apart from many young men. “I’m different from a lot of my guy friends,” he said, “. . . they still don’t have a clue.” Bryan’s story can help us see how men who defied gender conventions by likening virginity to a gift both resemble and diverge from women who share their beliefs and from men who do not.

One way Bryan differed from Kelly was the means through which he arrived at his position. He didn’t think that popular media had influenced his opinions, nor that his religious background had had much of an im- pact. Raised as a Methodist by parents who rarely went to church, reli- gion has never played an important role in his life. Yet, like Kelly, he felt that his parents and peers had profoundly influenced his beliefs. His mother and father had always encouraged him to think of sexual expres- sion as an aspect of love, but said little about virginity per se until he was in high school. When he was a freshman or sophomore, his mother ad- vised him to “wait until you’re ready” and really in love (she didn’t men- tion marriage). From her perspective, Bryan said, that advice “backfired”

—for by the time she gave it, Bryan felt ready for sex and chose to inter- pret her words as a stamp of approval.

Bryan’s high school peers expressed a range of beliefs about virginity, with different cliques disposed toward different stances.
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Whereas his own friends, the academic-track kids, were usually supportive of peers who remained virgins, the “dickheads”—that is, the rougher crowd— tended to disparage virginity and virgins, especially if they were boys. In that heterogeneous context, having an accepting peer group was proba- bly critical to Bryan’s ability to interpret virginity as a gift at an age when many boys begin to see it as a stigma. Bryan’s high school circle was prob- ably more supportive of the gift metaphor than most, for he belonged to a student group that sought to promote AIDS awareness through pro- grams that often included pro-chastity rhetoric.

[W]e did some skits and things like that, you know. We were proponents of virginity and, you know, staying, keeping, you know, “The best thing is abstinence,” and that catch-line. And so I think that’s when . . . we started talked about [sex and virginity loss] seriously, was once it actu- ally started happening.

Although Bryan couldn’t recall whether the group had supplemented their own skits and posters with a ready-made curriculum, his description of their positions and certain phrases he used—like “staying pure”—sug- gest the influence of abstinence-focused sex education programs like Sex Respect, which celebrate chastity and tend to frame virginity as a gift.

Ironically, Bryan’s involvement in the AIDS-awareness group did more than sustain his beliefs—it introduced him to his first girlfriend and even- tual virginity-loss partner. An 18-year-old senior, Heather shared 16-year- old sophomore Bryan’s zest for balancing studiousness and fun. He was thrilled when she agreed to date him exclusively: “[F]or some reason . . . I had always wanted a girlfriend. . . . I’d rather be loved and have that lit- tle cuddly-ness with just one person than go on lots of dates and stuff.”

Before dating Heather, the sum total of Bryan’s sexual experience amounted to “kissing and a few, like, up-the-shirt fooling around.” He and Heather kissed on their early dates, then, “Four or five weeks into it, we started having a little bit of fun”—that is, touching one another’s bod- ies beneath their clothing. By the time they had been dating 4 months, “That’s when things started getting really hot and heavy,” they were very much in love. “And it was the good kind, too,” Bryan explained. “There’s just something about high school love that you just can’t find anywhere else.” The physical side of their relationship proceeded in increments, just

like Kelly and Dave’s. Bryan summarized: “We went through the whole mutual masturbation thing, and then oral sex . . . and a week later, we had sex.” He was perfectly content to take things slowly, not least be- cause virginity was unique and its loss so consequential. “Considered that it’s a one-time thing, and bang, once you do it, it’s like, never again . . . you want to make sure it’s something done right. Something special,” he said.

Heather was also a virgin, and it delighted Bryan to think that they could lose their virginity together. “I thought it was great,” he said. “There was no other way I would have wanted to do it, honestly.” The pair assessed one another’s feelings about having sex through humorous yet pointed banter:

[T]he first month or two months, we kind of made the obligatory, like, “Oh, well, we don’t have to have sex,” statements. . . . And I think that most people say that just to reassure the person, so that they don’t think that they’re going to be forced to do anything against their will. But eventually [laughs], we tossed those statements out the window.

Some of the humor stemmed from the fact that Heather was 2 years older, and thus had waited longer to have sex. Said Bryan:

When we would talk about it, I was like, “I really need it [sex].” And she’s like, “Well think of that with two more years added to it.” And I’d be like, “Oh, man, I couldn’t handle that.” And, you know, jokingly, but still there’s a little bit of truth to the jest.

As it turned out, Bryan was, at age 16, the first of his close male friends to lose his virginity.

Despite anticipating that they’d probably have sex before long, Heather and Bryan resisted planning a specific encounter. “I didn’t want anything to seem contrived,” Bryan explained. “I just didn’t want to . . . book an hourly rate hotel with mirrors on the ceiling or . . . drive off to [a] public road . . . and do it in the back of the car.” Even so, he reflected, “We had to have maybe said a little bit, because we had condoms.” Their care in preparing for safer sex, facilitated by their close relationship, was further fostered by their coming of age during a period of heightened awareness about HIV/AIDS, and, more specifically, by their mutual in- volvement in AIDS education. Even so, like many people I spoke with,