Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (11 page)

There is a different feeling when you love somebody and when you just care about somebody. So I would have to say if you feel that way then I guess you could be a virgin again. Christians get born all the time again, so . . . when there’s true love involved, yes, I believe that.

Women were twice as likely as men to contend that a person could po- tentially resume her or his virginity. This is not surprising, for, as we will see, women are more apt than men to sympathize with (or to have per- sonally felt) the desire for a second chance at virginity loss—in part be- cause women typically place greater value on having “special” virginity- loss experiences and in part because women are more often disappointed with virginity loss.
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Women born after 1972 were substantially more likely than those born between 1962 and 1972 to argue that a person could be a virgin again, suggesting that the conservative Christian notion of secondary (or born-again) virginity has infiltrated mainstream U.S. cul-

ture through abstinence-focused sex education curricula, mass media campaigns, and growing membership in conservative denominations. Men’s opinions did not differ by age.

A handful of people I spoke with mentioned a third domain in which nonphysiological criteria for assessing virginity status may be gaining im- portance: the spiritual. Some conservative Protestants claim that almost every non-genital sexual activity, including kissing and perhaps even looking at sexually explicit magazines or movies, is tantamount to vir- ginity loss. This argument essentially represents a resurrection of Victo- rian thought. Dana Hagy, a 30-year-old White heterosexual homemaker and born-again Christian, explained: “Some people even say if you’ve looked at—obviously these people, I think, are radical—if you’ve looked at a pornographic magazine, well now you’re not a virgin anymore, in some sense, in innocence.” Dana was one of four conservative Protestants who told me that this perspective was circulating in their religious com- munities; all four quickly declared that they personally rejected it.

On Second Thought . . .

Definitions of virginity loss do not change only at the broad societal level; people can also revise their perspectives over time. Almost two-fifths of the women and men I interviewed informed me that they had, at some point, rethought the way they defined virginity loss. The majority of them were self-identified lesbigay men or women who had begun to include same-sex encounters in their definitions of virginity loss when they began questioning and rejecting heterosexual norms during the process of com- ing out. Several heterosexual people also told me that they had added same-sex virginity loss to their definitions after they’d discussed sex with lesbigay friends or undergone career training that sensitized them to GLBT concerns. Gaining more firsthand sexual experience inspired a few other heterosexuals to redefine sex
and
virginity loss. Heather Folger, a 28-year-old White office worker, told me that, although as a teenager, “I probably would’ve said, ‘Yeah, [having only oral sex] would still make you a virgin.’ . . . Not ever having done it, you know, not knowing what it really entails,” when she started having oral sex, some years after los- ing her virginity, she decided that fellatio and cunnilingus were just as much sex as vaginal intercourse. A similar pattern was observed by psy- chologists Stephanie Sanders and June Reinisch; they found that young

adults who had engaged in coitus were more likely to include oral- and anal-genital contact in their definitions of “sex.”
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More Than One Virginity Loss

Given the myriad changes in understandings of sex and sexuality in re- cent history, one might expect that American youth would be on the verge of abandoning the concept of virginity loss as outdated or irrelevant. My research suggests that, on the contrary, young people are in the process of redefining virginity loss. Although vaginal sex still epitomizes virginity loss to most Americans, the definition is expanding and becoming more flexible, inclusive, and individualized overall. I observed a clear genera- tional difference among the men and women I interviewed, with those born between 1973 and 1980 being more likely to allow for the possibil- ity of virginity loss between same-sex partners, to exclude nonconsensual sex from their definitions, and to accept the possibility of resuming vir- ginity than were people born between 1962 and 1972.

The increasing visibility of lesbigay people and new patterns of com- ing out brought about by gay rights activism and the HIV/AIDS epidemic have also contributed to new definitions encompassing virginity loss be- tween same-sex partners. Feminist theories of rape have paved the way for definitions that exclude nonconsensual sex, while the resurgence of conservative Christianity has helped to popularize the idea that virginity can be regained and lost anew. Although today’s young Americans follow their post-Victorian forbears in defining virginity loss primarily in terms of specific bodily acts, social and psychological criteria are enjoying a re- naissance with respect to nonconsensual sex and secondary virginity. Cri- teria emphasizing spiritual and moral contamination may be making a comeback among a minority of very conservative Christians.

In addition to redefining virginity loss in response to a changing social landscape, young Americans are also in the process of interpreting vir- ginity loss in more individualized ways. The women and men I spoke with made sense of virginity loss through four primary metaphorical frames, comparing virginity to a gift, a stigma, a process/rite of passage, or an act of worship. Although these metaphors have historically been associated with particular genders, religious beliefs, and other aspects of social iden- tity, my research suggests that these links are weakening and growing more flexible over time. In the next few chapters, I will explore in depth

the most common ways that virginity loss is understood today. Each chapter examines the distinctive constellations of beliefs and behaviors associated with a metaphor, showing how they produce characteristic tra- jectories—some positive, some negative—before, during, and after vir- ginity loss.

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A Gift of One’s Own

Was Britney Spears really a virgin until the age of 21? From 1992 to 1994, preteen Britney epitomized wholesome American girlhood as a Mouseke- teer on Disney TV’s revival of
The Mickey Mouse Club.
The young girls who admired Spears then helped propel her to superstardom a few years later, buying her first album and mimicking her wardrobe and dance moves by the millions. When Spears’s debut single reached No. 8 on
Bill- board
’s pop charts at the end of 1998, she was not yet 17.
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By 2000, the 18-year-old Spears boasted a decidedly sexy public persona, strutting the stage in skin-tight leather while crooning lyrics like “I’m not that inno- cent” and “I’m a slave for you.”

In the first flush of success, Britney embraced the job of teen role model, explaining to a reporter from
Rolling Stone,
“You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid.”
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Among her exemplary attributes were regular church attendance and disapproval of smoking, drinking, and premarital sex. A fawning 1999 biography told of the 17-year-old innocently flirting with members of the popular boy band ’N Sync while on tour as their opening act, and “blushing” to admit that she’d kissed “[f]ive or six” boys in her lifetime.
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Most famously, Brit- ney openly shared her desire to remain a virgin until she married. “I’ll try not to have sex before marriage,” she told one interviewer. “My girl- friends always say once you do that, there are so many other emotions in- volved, and I can’t deal with that right now.”
4
Britney’s purported home- town sweetheart, Reg Jones, confirmed her claims in a British tabloid, saying, “She treasures her virginity above fame and fortune.”
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In short, whether as a result of her small-town, Southern Baptist upbringing or as a move calculated to reassure her young fans’ parents and her own cor- porate sponsors, Spears described her virginity as something she trea- sured, or as a gift.

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Some male fans took Spears’s avowed chastity as a challenge. In 2000, when the singer was just 18, a wealthy American businessman reportedly offered to give her over $7 million if she would lose her virginity with him. Britney was outraged, telling journalists, “It’s a disgusting offer. He should go and have a cold shower and leave me alone. . . . I want to wait until I get married before I sleep with anyone.”
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Her reaction, perfectly understandable for any young woman not keen on a career in prostitu- tion, took on an additional resonance given her understanding of her vir- ginity as a gift. The women and men that I spoke with who drew on this metaphor invariably appraised virginity as a very valuable gift, based on its uniqueness, nonrenewability, symbolic import, and status as an exten- sion of the giver’s self.
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Typically, people see the value of a gift as reflect- ing the worth of its recipient and, accordingly, bestow the choicest gifts on the special individuals in their lives. Recipients conversely tend to in- terpret gifts as tokens of their own value in the eyes of the giver. When a virgin who views virginity as a gift decides to give her virginity to a spe- cific partner, she is effectively declaring that he (or she), and their rela- tionship, are valuable and unique. From the perspective of the gift metaphor, virginity is far too special to be purchased by a stranger; it is literally priceless.

Spears was lauded from many quarters for publicly taking such a tra- ditionally feminine stance on virginity. A typical magazine columnist commended her for being “very sexy” but still having “strong principles and religious views.”
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Even officials from the Church of England praised Britney as “a great ambassador for virginity,” in the wake of her con- fessed crush on her royal contemporary, Prince William.
9
Those who lauded Spears seemed to suggest that if all young women similarly valued their virginity, teen pregnancy, AIDS, and even welfare-dependency would become problems of the past. In a decade that had seen a prolifer- ation of virginity-cherishing young women in American mass media— Donna Martin on TV’s
Beverly Hills 90210
being the best known—Brit- ney was the reigning queen of Virgin Cool.

But it wasn’t long before the pop star’s increasingly sexy image—with ever-skimpier stage outfits, more suggestive dance routines, and steamier song lyrics—and her advancing age raised doubts about her virginity sta- tus. By 2001, Spears was 19 years old, 2 years past the age at which half of American women of her generation have had vaginal intercourse.
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But the chief challenge to Britney’s assertions came when she and her boyfriend of one year, singer Justin Timberlake, bought a $3 million Hol-

lywood mansion together. Spears told
US Weekly
that, although she was “very in love” with Timberlake, “I want to wait to have sex until I’m married. . . . But it’s hard.”
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In light of the couple’s cohabitation, her claims to virginity seemed implausible at best.

Speculation about Spears’s virginity reignited when she and Timber- lake broke up in early 2002. Within months, Justin had publicly refuted Britney’s avowals of virginity and — not surprisingly, given the stigma often associated with virginity in men—done what he could to dispel per- ceptions that he might be a virgin, for instance, appearing in the company of sexy, presumably nonvirgin, women such as pop icon Janet Jackson.
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Spears, for her part, couldn’t seem to decide what image to project. As 2002 progressed, she was observed smoking cigarettes, giving the finger to paparazzi, and remarking on the similarity between her life and the sex-soaked TV series
Sex in the City.
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In September,
People
magazine quoted an increasingly defiant Britney as saying, “Who really cares if I’ve had sex? . . . It’s nobody’s business. . . . If I mess up, I’m human . . . I’m no different than anyone else my age.”
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Finally, in a tell-all interview for
W
magazine in August 2003, Spears confessed:

I’ve only slept with one person my whole life. . . . It was two years into my relationship with Justin, and I thought he was the one. . . . But I was wrong! I didn’t think he was gonna go on Barbara Walters and sell me out.
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Most difficult was forsaking the permanent bonds that giving her virgin- ity had seemed to promise:

We were together so long and I had this vision. You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life together. Where I come from, the woman is the homemaker, and that’s how I was brought up.

Spears’s tale indicates some of the risks inherent to gift giving. Schol- ars have discerned three intertwined obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
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To label gift giving as an obligation may seem peculiar, since common sense dictates that gifts are by definition voluntary. Indeed, they are. Yet, gifts are also, paradoxically, virtually mandatory in certain social circumstances — such as between family members on birthdays, Christmas, or Hanukkah. Accepting a gift is likewise nearly compulsory, not least because refusing a gift entails symbolically refusing the giver.