Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (17 page)

leled importance, as Julie and many young Americans do, giving one’s virginity to a nonreciprocating partner did appear to set in motion a se- ries of unhappy decisions and practices which might have otherwise been avoided. (Likewise, the positive experiences of people like Kelly and Bryan may have prompted them to repeat felicitous choices in the future.) However, people who were less emotionally invested in virginity loss or who tended to view it as one of many sexual encounters — men and women who favored the process/passage metaphor, for instance—seemed to be spared from such enduring effects.

One might expect that people whose virginity-loss experiences fell short of the gift ideal would consequently reject that approach (it had, after all, left them miserable), but this did not prove to be the case. Every one of the women whose partners hadn’t reciprocated continued to view virginity as a gift. I found this perplexing at first, for had these women ret- rospectively reinterpreted virginity as a stigma or a step in a process, they might have been able to relieve their regret at “wasting” a precious gift. Upon further reflection, I have come to believe that the gift metaphor may hold a special appeal for women who feel betrayed by their partners. Steadfastly interpreting virginity as a gift may help women like Julie maintain an image of themselves as “good girls,” even though their poor choices of partners and subsequent “promiscuity” suggest otherwise. Within the gifter “worldview,” they had obeyed the rules, been wronged, and responded accordingly; whereas from the standpoint of the stigma or process metaphor, they would have only themselves to blame for their misery and their ostensibly unfeminine sexual careers.
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“I Basically Considered Myself a Born-Again Virgin”

When people who drew on the gift metaphor were deeply disappointed with their virginity-loss experiences, they typically followed Julie’s lead, resigning themselves to having given their gift unwisely and trying to make the best of their nonvirgin futures. But one man and two women in this group responded to “lost gifts” more proactively, by deciding to be- come born-again (or secondary) virgins. That is, they opted to refrain from the most intimate sort of sexual contact until a specified point in the future, usually marriage or committed love relationships, and to refer to their behavior as a form of renewed virginity.
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Born-again virginity and the gift metaphor were closely linked in my study. Three of the four sec-

ondary virgins I interviewed interpreted virginity as a gift, and gifters were disproportionately likely to believe that virginity could be renewed in some sense.
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Yet, on another level, the idea of born-again virginity is incompatible with seeing virginity as a unique and precious gift. This final profile explores these tensions.

Andrew Lin, a 19-year-old college sophomore, was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where his parents had settled after emigrating from Taiwan in the 1970s. For as long as he could remember, his father and mother had been in the restaurant business, working their way up from waiting tables at a cousin’s diner to owning a small chain of pizza parlors. Andrew described his parents as highly acculturated yet very Chinese. Like many East Asians, they preferred to avoid talking explicitly about sexuality—more so, he thought, than the parents of his European-Amer- ican friends—but what they did say about sex echoed the sentiments of other parents he knew.
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The one direct conversation Andrew could re- call took place when he was 13. His mother had asked him, “Are you a virgin?” When he replied in the affirmative, she snapped, “Keep it that way!” He took her admonition with a grain of salt, however; he didn’t think his parents
really
expected him to delay sex until he was married. Rather, “I figured that was just my mom being a mom,” telling him to be careful the best way she knew how.

Like Bryan Meyers, Andrew superficially fit the stereotypical image of collegiate masculinity. He belonged to a fraternity and, like many of the brothers (most of whom were White), dressed in a tough style inspired by hip-hop performers. Yet, Andrew also surprised me by describing virgin- ity in terms customarily linked with femininity—and identical to those used by the women in this group. To him, virginity loss meant “the emo- tional giving of yourself to the other person, while you’re having sex also,” and “falling in love with the person that you’re going to be doing it with, and at least spending a long, long-term relationship.”

Andrew was deeply aware that his understanding of virginity diverged from that of most of the men he knew. In his high school, boys encour- aged one another to “get it over with” and received “a pat on the back” for losing their virginity, whereas girls focused on romance and had to worry that their peers might “think, ‘Oh, she’s easy,’ or, ‘Oh, now she’s going to start having sex with everyone.’”
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But Andrew found his male classmates’ views less than convincing. He knew he wanted to give his vir- ginity to a special girlfriend, as a way of showing how precious she was to him. As he put it:

[There’s] a big . . . difference between just having sex with someone and losing your virginity to them. Because it’s like saying that you waited for this person, rather than just, “Oh, you’re one in many.” Like you’re one, you’re special and you’re, like, different than everyone else that they could’ve had sex with but they didn’t. But they’re having sex with you, because they wanted to wait for someone that was like you. That’s kind of saying, “Well, you’re the person I was waiting for.”

When Andrew met Michelle, he knew he’d found that special girl. At- tractive, smart, and fun to be around, Michelle was 17, a year older than he—“Like Mrs. Robinson or something,” he laughed.
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Andrew thought he was in love with Michelle and, although he’d never dated a girl for more than a few months, he felt certain that “this [relationship] would last for a long, long time.” When they started dating, Andrew and Michelle were both virgins, a fact they discussed on several occasions. He found the pos- sibility that they might give their virginity to one another very appealing. “We never verbalized it before, that we were going to lose our virginity to each other,” he recalled. “But I think we both felt that we would. So I thought that our relationship would last a lot longer than it actually did.”

In their first month together, Andrew and Michelle explored a variety of sexual activities, expanding their repertoire from kissing to caressing to fellatio and cunnilingus. Despite their mutual virginity, this degree of physical intimacy was nothing new to either of them; they’d both, in An- drew’s words, “basically done everything, except have sex, with, like, five or six [different-sex partners] or so.” Andrew told me that he had inten- tionally refrained from having vaginal sex so that he could give his vir- ginity to someone he loved. As with Karen Lareau, this strategy seemed to help him reconcile his desire to wait for the “right” partner with the norm of sexual experimentation that prevailed among his peers.

One evening, Andrew and Michelle decided not to stop at foreplay.

We’d just gotten back from a date. And we were just upstairs in my room, hanging out, and we started fooling around, just kind of the usual, not having sex. And then we just both kind of looked at each other and I said, “Should I get a condom?” And she said, “Yes.” And then we had sex.

Unfortunately, the condom broke. “I flipped out and we thought she was pregnant for a little bit,” Andrew said. When the pregnancy

turned out to be a false alarm, their relief was immense. Michelle wanted to continue dating, but Andrew’s anxiety wouldn’t fade. Nor could he get over his disappointment that giving his virginity had had exactly the opposite effect from what he’d intended. Rather than grow- ing closer to Michelle, he felt emotionally distant and distressed. Hav- ing sex again was decidedly out of the question. “I think she mentioned it once and that kind of flipped me out even more,” he said, shaking his head.

After a few weeks, Andrew regretfully ended the relationship, because “every time I looked at her . . . I automatically associated all that stress, for like, about two weeks of thinking [she] was pregnant.” Knowing that the untoward turn of events had been beyond his and Michelle’s control did little to relieve Andrew’s misery. In retrospect, he recalled:

It’s a shame that we had that little scare, because I honestly I think our personalities were to the point where we would’ve gotten along really well. But, just having that mentally anguished association with her, just like, I couldn’t deal with. . . . If we wouldn’t have had that, I would’ve probably have associated it as a pretty good experience.

Andrew’s decision to break up with Michelle resembles Julie’s rejection of Scott. But the circumstances in which Andrew made that decision dif- fered in one crucial respect: he felt that Michelle was willing to recipro- cate his gift of virginity with emotional intimacy, whereas Julie believed that Scott was not. This knowledge apparently allowed Andrew to feel he could assert himself in his subsequent sexual relationships. Being male likely also enhanced his sense of agency, as many studies have shown that boys are socialized to take a more active and independent approach to so- cial relations than are girls, and prevailing gender norms and structural advantages give men more power than women on average in heterosex- ual relationships.
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In fact, Michelle may have interpreted Andrew’s deci- sion to break up as a failure to fulfill his obligations as the recipient of
her
virginity.

Ultimately, Andrew’s anguish and disappointment prompted him to decide to refrain from vaginal sex and “wait for that special person to come around”—that is, for another girl as special as Michelle. Scholars such as Sharon Thompson have noted that many adolescents, especially girls, purposefully postpone sexual activity after disappointing virginity- loss encounters.
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But Andrew went a step further:

I had sex once and then I stopped for a long time because my first expe- rience was bad. . . . Well, not bad, but it just wasn’t, I wasn’t happy with it. And then so I said, “Fine, I’m not going to have sex until I’m sure I want to have sex with someone.” And I basically considered myself a born-again virgin until about two, two months ago.

Although he believed that anyone who wanted to could reclaim his or her virginity, Andrew felt that it was relatively easy for him “because I’d only had sex once before then, and then it was with someone I had been seeing for a while.” In effect, he saw himself as more like a “true” virgin than someone who’d had vaginal sex many times or who’d approached sex cavalierly in the past. The contrast with Julie Pavlicko’s intentional chastity is instructive. Despite believing that a person could “emotionally

. . . go through the whole process of being a virgin again . . . losing your virginity to the one really, really special person in your life,” Julie didn’t claim secondary virginity for herself. I suspect that she may have felt that she’d had too many sexual partners to adopt a virgin identity or that Scott’s mistreatment made her too diminished to try.

Although the concept originated in conservative Christian circles, born-again virginity was for Andrew a purely secular matter. A life-long atheist (like his parents), he’d first heard the expression not in church or from a religious text, but on a risqué TV show: “I was watching
HBO Real Sex
. . . and they had, like, a whole episode on born-again virgins.” Whereas religious born-again virgins told me how spiritual texts or dis- cussions with clergy or devout peers had motivated their retreat from sex, Andrew had already abstained for a year before he discovered the term. The phrase simply struck him as the perfect shorthand for a choice he’d already made. Secondary virginity may also appeal to secular men and women because of the cultural tendency to think about sexuality in di- chotomous terms.
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Americans typically posit virginity loss as a kind of sexual off-on switch, as when public health researchers lump individuals who have had vaginal sex a single time into the same “sexually active” category as those who are currently involved with heterosexual partners. For Andrew, being an abstinent secondary virgin may have produced less psychic stress than being an abstinent
non
virgin.

Neither Andrew nor the other study participants who described them- selves as born-again virgins appeared to believe that they were virgins in the same sense as people who had never had sex. Rather, they used the term as a way of indicating that their current sexual behavior was identi-

cal to their conduct as virgins and that they still valued virginity and the emotional aspects of sex. In effect, Andrew and his fellow secondary vir- gins saw themselves as so similar to virgins in practice that they merited an analogous designation. While the concept may seem strange or un- necessary—after all, couldn’t a person just refrain from sex without in- voking virginity?—it may be quite beneficial for women and men who see virginity as a precious part of the self and whose self-worth depends on making the “right” decisions about virginity loss. If, for example, Julie had been able to perceive herself as virtually a virgin, she might have felt more capable or justified in rejecting the sexual advances of men she dated after Scott.

One powerful incentive for embracing secondary virginity is the desire for a perfect virginity-loss experience—a desire shared by gifters. Another motive common to gifters stems from the power of gift exchanges to bind people together. Who, after all, would wish to be tied to someone with whom they endured an unpleasant ordeal? Styling himself as a born-again virgin eased Andrew’s regrets that he’d squandered his only chance to forge a special bond with a beloved partner via a perfect encounter. He, too, could enjoy those aspects of virginity loss—albeit when he lost his
secondary
virginity. Notably, the desire to regain virginity also depends on finding virginity intrinsically valuable. Men and women who saw vir- ginity as a stigma told me they couldn’t imagine wanting to resume that shameful trait, while people who viewed it as a step in a process had a knack for framing the negative aspects of their encounters as learning ex- periences.