Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (8 page)

The 1953 motion picture,
The Moon Is Blue,
perfectly captures the prevailing beliefs about virginity in this era.
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When the film’s whole- some heroine, 22-year-old Patty O’Neil (Maggie McNamara), accepts a dinner invitation from handsome stranger Don Gresham (William Holden), she agrees to have a predinner drink at his apartment on the condition that he not try to seduce her. In her estimation, “girls” who visit bachelors’ homes must either be “willing to lose their virtue” (i.e., vir- ginity) or “to fight for it”—and she declares herself a steadfast member of the latter camp. Despite his playboy persona, 30-year-old Don also draws a sharp line between good women and bad. Only the night before meeting Patty, he broke his engagement to cool and elegant Cynthia Slater (Dana Addams) because she tried to seduce him. Patty’s professed virgin- ity does little to deter Don from his attempts at seduction—at first. But in the ensuing comedy of mistaken intentions, Don is won over by Patty’s innocence and quirky charm, not to mention her nurturing personality

and considerable domestic skills. The movie concludes with Patty accept- ing his proposal of marriage (and planning to give up her acting career). Many young Americans shared Patty and Don’s beliefs about virginity and marriage and strove to emulate them in their own lives. However, as in the 1920s and 1930s, cultural ideals linking love and sexual expression had the unintended effect of encouraging committed couples to have sex before marriage. Nearly four-fifths of the men and half of the women who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s lost their virginity before they wed.
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Middle-class men and women were less likely than their working-class counterparts to lose their virginity before marriage, probably because they had more to lose—college, career, and a “good” marriage—through unintended pregnancies.
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Within social classes, Black men were more likely than White men to have sex before marriage, but Black and White

women behaved in very similar ways.
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The tension between ideals and conduct around virginity was one of several postwar sexual paradoxes that set the stage for the sexual “revo- lution” of the late 1960s.
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This tension had existed in the 1920s and 1930s, of course; but the American public had largely been able to ignore it until the publication of Alfred Kinsey and colleagues’
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
in 1948 and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
in 1953. Collectively known as the Kinsey Reports, these hefty com- pendiums of sexual habits became surprise best-sellers.
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Many readers were shocked to learn, from an ostensibly scientific authority, that over half of the women interviewed for the study—and many more of the men

—had lost their virginity before they married.
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The Kinsey studies also shook the widespread assumption that homosexual desire and activity were rare, with the claim that as many as one in three men and one in ten women had experienced an orgasm with a same-sex partner.
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These rev- elations helped facilitate the evolution of urban gay communities, which had already received a boost from the sex-segregated employment and relative freedom of the war years.
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Still, virginity loss remained equated with vaginal sex and “homosexually inclined” youth often felt isolated and found their desires difficult to name. It is likely that most gay and les- bian adults who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s began their sexual careers with other-sex partners.
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The commercial success of the Kinsey Reports points to another post- war paradox: the growing sexualization of commodities and commodifi- cation of sexuality during an era of sexual conservatism.
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The Moon Is Blue
is a case in point. Although the film seems remarkably traditional

from today’s perspective, depicting virginity as women’s ticket to wedded bliss, in 1953, Hollywood Production Code officials refused to certify it on the grounds of its “unacceptably light attitude toward seduction, illicit sex, chastity, and virginity.”
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When director Otto Preminger decided to release
Moon
without official approval, it became one of the year’s top- grossing films. As with the best-selling Kinsey books, the public’s favor- able response to
Moon
hints at a permissive undercurrent running just be- neath the era’s conservatism. Not coincidentally, 1953 also marked the premiere of the remarkably successful, sexually explicit men’s magazine,
Playboy,
which from its inception unequivocally celebrated bachelors’ sexual escapades and tended to portray male virgins as effeminate losers.
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Thanks to corporations’ realization that sex sells, plus the first stirrings of second-wave feminism (Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique
was pub- lished in 1963), it wasn’t long before women could purchase their own fantasy of a sexy singles lifestyle. The indisputable queen of this new regime was Helen Gurley Brown, whose irreverent 1962 advice guide,
Sex and the Single Girl,
and revamped version of
Cosmopolitan
magazine (from 1965) explicitly refuted the prevailing view that sex outside of mar- riage brought women nothing but despair. Brown didn’t seek to devalue women’s virginity per se, but she denounced the good girl/bad girl di- chotomy, asserting that it was perfectly acceptable for an unmarried “girl” to say “yes” “when a man ‘insists.’”
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She also expressed pro- found distress at the effects of traditional sexual socialization on Ameri- can women: “One fine day—maybe on her wedding night but probably before—she will want to unlock her chastity belt and she won’t be able to find the key.”
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The Revolution Begins, 1965 and Onward

The permissive undercurrents reflected in the sexual paradoxes of the Cold War years, along with major demographic changes, ultimately helped produce the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The baby boomers—the immense cohort of children born between 1946 and 1964—were the chief architects of this transformation.
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Having grown up in a time of material abundance, members of this generation rarely had to abandon school for work during adolescence (with the ex- ception of the truly poor), and they enjoyed unprecedented leisure time

and disposable income. Advertisers and consumer-goods manufacturers were quick to capitalize on this fact: the youth market, touting products that emphasized teens’ difference from adults, quickly came into its own.

By the mid-1960s, U.S. college campuses swelled with record numbers of students. Able to postpone adult responsibilities, influenced by the Beat and Hippie subcultures, and appalled by American involvement in Viet- nam, many White college-age boomers lashed out against what they saw as the complacent conservatism of older generations. Rejecting their par- ents’ cherished sexual norms formed a key strand in their rebellion. Black students likewise took up arms, though their rebellion focused more on the failure of the civil rights movement to deliver racial equality than on parental values per se.
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Different motivations notwithstanding, White and African American youths’ sexual beliefs and behaviors changed largely in concert.

Where their parents had drawn a veil of silence around premarital vir- ginity loss, making it seem less common than it was, American youth in the late 1960s advertised their nonvirginity and openly rejected premari- tal chastity as an ideal. They were also willing to lose their virginity with partners they didn’t expect to marry—to engage in what sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon memorably described as
pre
-premarital sex

— and at earlier ages on average.
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Other scholars reflected that, al-

though approaches to virginity loss had changed, it continued to mark a key social transition, one that had, along with driving and drinking, largely taken the place of such traditional, but increasingly delayed, markers of adulthood as marriage and entry into the paid labor force.
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Changes around virginity loss were especially dramatic among young women, in part because standards for men were less conservative to begin with, in part because of the development of the Pill and IUD (intra-uter- ine device), and in part because the feminist movement’s demand for com- plete equality enhanced women’s ability and desire to breach traditional sexual standards.
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Young men, for their part, felt the effects of a new model of masculinity, brought about by the weakening of adult authority and rigid gender norms, which favored a more egalitarian ethos in pro-

fessional and personal life.
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Yet, the sexual double standard did not fade away. In fact, a new ver- sion rapidly crystallized, whereby casual sex was deemed acceptable for men but women were expected to make sex—thus virginity loss—con- tingent on love or at least strong affection, and preferably the title of girl- friend.
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Many young women complained of being treated as “out of it”

for delaying virginity loss, but those who wished to maintain “good” rep- utations still found it necessary to proceed with caution.
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Still, from the late 1970s on, scholars observed a small but growing cadre of teenage girls actively resisting the new double standard, eagerly forsaking virgin- ity loss with a beloved partner for “getting it over with,” as did so many men.
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Young men found that the freer climate simply made losing vir- ginity more imperative, at earlier ages, than before.

Racial/ethnic differences in attitudes about virginity and ages at first vaginal sex began a steady diminution in the late 1960s, apparently due to growing racial equality and integration.
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Social-class differences like- wise narrowed, as middle-class Americans embraced increasingly liberal attitudes about sexuality and gender, and working-class and poor youth gained material incentives to postpone sex (or otherwise avoid preg- nancy) during the 1960s expansion of higher education.
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Yet, some dif- ferences persist into the present day. On average, African American ado- lescents become sexually active at earlier ages than Whites, who become sexually active before Latino/as, who in turn become sexually active be- fore Asian Americans.
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Overall approaches to sexuality also appear to differ by race and ethnicity, with Black men tending to favor a recre- ational stance, Black women and Latinas thinking of sex in more tradi- tional/relational terms, and Latinos and Whites favoring a relational ap- proach.
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However, recent studies suggest that socioeconomic status af- fects adolescents’ sexual conduct more profoundly than racial/ethnic background, with working-class and poor teens initiating sex earlier than their middle-class counterparts and, once sexually active, using birth con- trol less often.
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An ironic effect of the late-1960s shift toward more permissive stan- dards for virginity loss was an apparent increase in the number of youth, primarily women, who regretted losing their virginity so much that they decided to postpone further sexual encounters until some point in the fu- ture. Scholars in the 1970s called this pattern “regretful non-virginity” or “secondary virginity”; neither term caught on among lay people until the mid-1980s, when conservative Christian groups began to promote sec- ondary virginity and coined the synonym “born-again virginity.”
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The sexual revolution also inspired new approaches to petting. In the mid-century, heterosexual couples rarely engaged in fellatio and cun- nilingus before marriage, and then only after they had engaged in vaginal sex.
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But as public discussions of sexuality became increasingly explicit and varied in content, more and more heterosexual Americans became

aware of oral sex—popular media from Dr. Alex Comfort’s best-selling manual,
The Joy of Sex
(1972), to the pornographic crossover hit,
Deep Throat
(1972), positively celebrated it—and began incorporating oral sex into their own sexual repertoires. By the mid-1980s, many adolescent peer groups saw oral sex as an activity compatible with retaining (tech- nical) virginity.
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Yet another sexual sea-change that began in the late 1960s involved Americans’ understandings of homosexuality. Catalyzed by the riot that ensued when the New York police raided the gay bar, Stonewall Inn, in the summer of 1969, gay men and lesbians began to organize and vocally demand an end to their social and legal oppression. Key early victories in- cluded the American Psychiatric Association’s 1974 decision to drop ho- mosexuality from its list of mental disorders and the abolition of many state antisodomy laws.

Like the generation before them, many gays and lesbians who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s began their sexual careers with different-sex partners and appeared to share the mainstream culture’s belief that vir- ginity loss was irrelevant to same-sex encounters. This belief is exempli- fied in nationally syndicated advice columnist Abigail (Dear Abby) Van Buren’s pronouncement, in 1983, to a young woman who’d “had a few affairs with females”: “Technically you are a virgin. . . . (A few lesbian ex- periences during one’s adolescence does not necessarily a lesbian make.)”
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But the post-Stonewall generation developed its own stan- dards and rituals, including coming out: the public proclamation of one’s homosexual or bisexual identity that has since become an almost obliga- tory rite of passage for lesbigay women and men.
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As the visibility of— and tolerance for—lesbigay sexuality increased, the average age at com- ing out declined significantly, from about 22 for gay men and 25 for les- bians in the early 1970s to about 17 and 20 (or even younger), respec- tively, in the mid-1990s. Equipped earlier to identify their own desires as well as potential same-sex partners, more and more lesbigay youth would begin their sexual careers with same-sex partners, and at earlier ages on average.