Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (6 page)

Middle-class Whites tended to believe that they alone could achieve sexual morality, although the historical record provides evidence to the contrary. Most Whites denigrated Africans and their descendants as sex- ually depraved.
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Yet, the life histories of former slaves suggests that en- slaved Blacks’ own standards for sexual conduct before marriage, which evolved out of African traditions and adopted Christianity, were far from licentious.
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Black parents rarely permitted youth to court until late ado- lescence and they strongly favored long-term monogamous unions over casual sexual liaisons. Nonmarital births among African Americans were neither uncommon nor cause for shame, however, due to a combination of enduring African values, the absence of an incentive to ensure legiti- macy for inheritance purposes, and, most important, slaves’ lack of prac- tical control over their own sexuality. Owners interfered with courting and could prohibit or force marriages, often with the goal of augmenting their human property.
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When enslaved women were raped by White men, they had no redress. Under these circumstances, it was impossible for Blacks to valorize virginity in the same terms as Whites did. After Emancipation, African Americans gained greater control over their own sexual lives, albeit within a context in which White authorities tacitly condoned the rape of Black women and lynching of Black men on suspi- cion of sexual desire.
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Many slave marriages were formalized and the majority of southern Blacks continued to discourage promiscuity while

forgiving premarital virginity loss.
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African Americans who aspired to middle-class status, however, increasingly adopted the more restrictive sexual standards favored by middle-class Whites as one means of defus- ing racist stereotypes and gaining social mobility.
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White reactions to the sexual cultures of Mexican Americans in the

U.S. Southwest and East Asian immigrants in the West, from about 1850, resembled their reactions to Black and working-class White sexuality. Heavily influenced by Roman Catholicism, Hispanic sexual culture placed great value on unmarried daughters’ virginity. However, Mexican American youth commonly courted and danced in public, activities that White Victorians interpreted as licentious and immoral.
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Chinese, Japan- ese, and other Asians who immigrated to the U.S. West as laborers were not permitted to bring their families, so Asian American communities were overwhelmingly male, save for a small number of female sex work- ers.
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Although most East Asian cultures traditionally value virginity, White Americans interpreted the sexual regime that resulted from their immigration policies as evidence of Asian women’s promiscuity and Asian men’s asexuality or, alternately, depravity.
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The Development of Dating, 1865–1900

The Victorian approach to virginity loss was disrupted by the rapid social changes that took place at the end of the nineteenth century, although di- visions by gender, race, and social class remained. Theodore Dreiser cap- tured the spirit of the era in his 1900 novel,
Sister Carrie.
The story be- gins in 1889, a time when rapid industrialization was drawing thousands of young men and women from rural America to the nation’s cities, where they hoped to achieve financial and social independence. Yet, as the 18- year-old heroine, Carrie Meeber, discovers soon upon arriving in Chicago, turn-of-the-century America offered few gainful
and
honorable employment options for women who lacked or refused economic support from fathers or husbands. When illness forces Carrie from a hard-won factory job, she defies her sister’s command to return to the family home in small-town Wisconsin and agrees to set up housekeeping with her new friend, dapper salesman Charles Drouet, who promises to marry her once his finances improve. Their disparate reactions to the new arrangement, including Carrie’s loss of virginity, speak volumes about the gendered sex- ual mores of the time:

“Oh,” thought Drouet, “how delicious is my conquest.”

“Ah,” thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, “what is it I have lost?”
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Her moral frailty exposed, Carrie is subsequently seduced and nearly ru- ined by a married friend of Drouet. By the end of the novel, she has re- jected this shiftless man and achieved fame and fortune as a stage actress, albeit apparently at the expense of love and contact with her family.

Although Dreiser’s book shares
Charlotte Temple
’s status as a cau- tionary tale for virgin women and an indictment of sexually predatory men, the fact that Carrie ultimately prospers in spite of her sexual trans- gressions indicates how much American sexual culture was transformed in the space of a century.
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Industrialization and urbanization were the chief engines of change. Starting at the end of the Civil War and acceler- ating after 1880, tens of thousands of young White working-class men and women, most of them single, migrated to cities eager for work in the burgeoning industrial economy. A parallel, albeit smaller, migration oc- curred among young working-class African Americans in the South.
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Young urbanites enjoyed relative anonymity and freedom from the watchful eyes of kin and close-knit communities. Opportunities for young women and men to socialize unsupervised expanded tremendously, especially as growing numbers of single women began to work for pay.
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Urbanization and industrialization fostered a consumption-oriented economy in which virtually all aspects of life, including sexuality, could be turned into commodities. Risqué novels and picture magazines prolif- erated, as did commercial pastimes like dance halls, amusement parks, and nickel cinemas. Such amusements helped give rise to an urban work- ing-class youth leisure culture, first among Whites and a few decades later among Blacks, which in turn profoundly changed the nature of working- class courtship.
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In the late 1800s, upper- and middle-class youth pur- sued heterosexual romance through a system of social calling, whereby marriageable daughters invited eligible men to visit in the security of their parents’ homes. Unable to access the material requisites of social calling

— parlors, pianos, and privacy — working-class youth devised the “date.”
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Instead of being received in would-be Juliets’ homes, working- class Romeos invited young women out to theaters, dances, and other public venues. Dating introduced an explicit monetary component to courtship and, since men, as “hosts” and higher-wage earners, customar- ily paid, tipped the balance of power in men’s favor.

The advent of dating did not appreciably alter prevailing beliefs about premarital virginity, but it did affect sexual behavior. Previous genera- tions of youth had indulged in some amount of sexual contact before marriage, typically kissing and perhaps necking. But the privacy of dates and anonymity of urban settings made more intimate sexual activity in- creasingly possible and, by all evidence, more common. Kissing and neck- ing became increasingly acceptable for White couples of all classes; how- ever, petting remained not quite respectable and was probably largely confined to betrothed pairs.
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Although most unwed White couples ap- parently stopped short of intercourse, climbing rates of premarital preg- nancy indicate that an increasing number of young women were losing their virginity before marriage.
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Class differences in courtship customs suggest that this increase in premarital sex was concentrated among working-class youth, who had more opportunities to indulge and fewer disincentives not to.

Worried that dating and the permissive sexual practices of working- class youth and new immigrants would contaminate their own offspring, White and African American community leaders launched a series of cru- sades to shore up the sexual standards they held dear.
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White activists’ various efforts—to establish homes for “wayward” girls, raise the age of sexual consent, and curtail the circulation of “obscene” literature—coa- lesced into a national, broad-based social-purity movement, with mostly female leaders and a critique of men’s sexual privilege at its core.
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Suf- fragists and organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union roundly criticized men’s social and economic power over women, dis- missed the popular view of men as innately lustful, and demanded ad- herence to a single sexual standard reflecting contemporary expectations for women. Yet, their pet strategy for enhancing women’s sexual auton- omy backfired. The campaign for “voluntary motherhood”—the right of married women to refuse sex in order to avoid pregnancy—ultimately en- couraged ordinary men and women to think of sex as separate from re- production and to accept artificial birth control, two preconditions for women to lose their virginity before marriage with impunity.
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Black leaders likewise struggled to curb sexual “immorality” and to promote a single, conservative sexual standard, but their critique centered more on Whites’ power over Blacks than men’s power over women, with the aim of achieving “racial uplift,” counteracting racist stereotypes, and stem- ming racist violence.
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Public support for a single sexual standard did in fact increase among the White and Black middle classes in the 1890s; but, in practice, the double standard reigned as before. Women were still expected to marry as sexually inexperienced virgins, while young men enjoyed considerably more latitude.
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In fact, as the consumer-oriented economy and rise of bureaucratic corporations made self-control less crucial for men’s pro- fessional success, sexual prowess—demonstrable through virginity loss

— began to replace sexual continence as “essential to the worth” of White middle-class men.
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Black middle-class men, by contrast, were still expected to exercise sexual restraint; but they were probably also more likely to have sex before marriage than Black middle-class women.
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Same-sex relationships were also affected by shifting social circum- stances. As small numbers of middle-class White women began to gain economic independence through higher education, some of them rejected marriage to men in favor of committed live-in relationships with other women. At least some of these “Boston marriages” were explicitly erotic.
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Urbanization facilitated the development of close, potentially erotic relationships among men, who could and did live together in city boarding houses, away from community scrutiny.
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Extending the “New” Sexual Culture, 1900–1945

In the popular imagination, 1920s America is inhabited by the sexy flap- pers and reluctant-to-settle-down new men immortalized in the fiction of

F. Scott Fitzgerald and by the proudly sexual women and unorthodox men described by Black blues singers like Bessie Smith.
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Although less celebrated than Fitzgerald, Percy Marks created an ex- ceptionally detailed account of the changing sexual customs of White col- lege youth in his 1924 novel,
The Plastic Age.
When the book’s protago- nist, Hugh Carver, arrives at Sanford College, he gains immediate favor “for his shy, friendly smile, his natural modesty, and his boyish enthusi- asm.”
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But when it comes to sex, small-town Hugh is “pathetically ig- norant . . . consumed with curiosity.” Though attractive to women, he had kissed his hometown sweetheart, Helen, only once, “a silly peck on the check.”
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His roommate, Carl Peters, is a charming reprobate by con- trast. A “good-looking, sophisticated lad” from a nouveau-riche family,

Carl bedecks his side of their room with “photographs of the ‘harem’” and freely admits, “I drink and gamble and pet.”
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When Carl implies “by sly innuendos that there wasn’t anything that he hadn’t done,” Hugh feels “a slight disapproval—and considerable envy.”
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Yet, he is relieved to find out that Carl, too, is a virgin.

But it isn’t long before Carl loses his virginity, one drunken night on summer vacation. Hugh finds him “neither better nor worse for his ex- perience,” and thus increasingly questions his own “very strict” sexual standards.
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But he’s not sure what path to follow. Some of his classmates applaud men like Carl and “hate to admit they’re pure,” while others speak ill of “dirty” fellows who “chase around with rats” (cheap women) or even disapprove of petting altogether.
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Hugh wavers, neither wanting to be a virgin when he marries nor wishing to have sex without love. Over time, he learns to flirt and pet with sophisticated girls and falls in love with Cynthia Day, blithely ignoring warnings that “Cynthia runs with a fast crowd.”
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After a heady evening of dancing and drink at the Sanford junior prom, Cynthia asks Hugh to “take me somewhere.”
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They are in- terrupted before they can have sex, and Cynthia subsequently ends the re- lationship, fearing that they are motivated by “sex attraction” rather than love. A year later, despite the possibility that Cynthia has lost her virgin- ity with another man, still-virgin Hugh considers her worthy of a mar- riage proposal (which she declines).

Mainstream American beliefs about virginity loss had clearly changed since the days of
Sister Carrie.
By the mid-1920s, Victorian standards no longer governed the sexual lives of White middle-class youth, although the precise details of the new sexual regime remained open to debate. Middle-class youth were embracing the hitherto working-class practices of dating, extensive sexual intimacy before marriage, and a weakened double standard.
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Conventional morality still favored premarital virgin- ity, especially for women. But nonvirgin women like Cynthia Day were no longer automatically labeled immoral or unmarriageable; and the growing equation of masculinity with sexual prowess prompted more than a few middle-class men to follow their working-class brothers in re- jecting premarital virginity as a personal ideal and using “boastful talk of sex conquests” to “confirm their masculinity among other men.”
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The moral definitions of virginity loss that prevailed during the Victorian era had fallen by the wayside, in favor of primarily physiological definitions equating virginity loss with first vaginal sex.
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