Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (18 page)

Yet, reclaiming virginity seems antithetical to the belief, so common to gifters, that virginity’s value lies in its unique, nonrenewable nature. The- ories of gift giving help shed light on this seeming contradiction. If gifts are
voluntary,
then an individual should be able to choose to give his (os- tensibly unique) virginity when and how he wishes, including giving it a second time. The opinions of the women and men I interviewed differed depending on the nature of their own experiences. Those who lost their own virginity in nearly ideal circumstances stressed virginity’s uniqueness over volition and dismissed the possibility of secondary virginity. As Bryan Meyers put it, being able to reclaim one’s virginity “would, like, defeat the purpose of it. . . . It would, totally take the specialness out of it.”
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In contrast, people whose own experiences had fallen short of their expectations—Karen and Julie among them—expressed sympathy for nonvirgins who hoped to start over and
choose
a better second time.

Being a born-again virgin didn’t stop Andrew from engaging in inti- mate sexual activities altogether. Rather, he reverted to the guidelines he’d followed before having sex with Michelle. He refrained from vaginal sex in order to preserve his secondary virginity for a future girlfriend, but felt free to do “just basically anything besides actual intercourse.” (One might describe his conduct as technical secondary virginity.) As a born- again virgin, Andrew enjoyed considerable latitude when describing his sexual status to others. Although he didn’t explicitly tell any of his friends that he’d lost his virginity with Michelle, not wishing to relive the trauma through the telling, he didn’t try to hide his nonvirginity; nor did he take pains to inform his friends of his decision to reclaim his virginity (in con- trast with the three female born-again virgins). Especially at college, where no one knew his sexual history, Andrew chose to reveal or conceal his secondary virginity according to the situation. Although he shared his story with a few close women friends, Andrew said that if any of his fra- ternity brothers had asked if he were a virgin, he could have honestly said “No,” and declined to volunteer any further information.

Andrew didn’t attribute his conduct to gender norms, but it is likely that knowing that virgin men are often derided as effeminate or gay fu- eled his circumspection. Indeed, two male virgins who favored the gift metaphor told me that they downplayed their virginity with all but a few good friends. Chris Albrecht, an 18-year-old White heterosexual and de- vout Southern Baptist, said that, if someone asked if he were a virgin,

I would say, “Yes.” I don’t have problems with that. If I did, then I would . . . fix the problem [laughs]. . . . Well, it depends on the situation. I suppose if some stranger came up, I would say, “Get out of my face” or “Go away.” But if, you know, I suppose, if there were a real reason, or I didn’t mind, then I would say, “Yeah.”

In short, although men like Andrew and Chris defied gender norms by in- terpreting virginity as a gift, they also took account of (and superficially complied with) social norms stigmatizing male virginity. Women who saw virginity as a gift were, in contrast, decidedly open about their virginity; a few even hoped to be taken for virgins after they’d had sex. (Karen was the only woman to intentionally misrepresent her status.) Andrew’s story, like Bryan’s, indicates both the attractions of the gift metaphor for young men today and the difficulty of displacing its historic association with femininity.

Andrew’s Chinese American heritage also appears to have influenced his beliefs and behavior around virginity loss. Studies consistently find that Asian American youth hold more traditional attitudes about sexual- ity and lose their virginity at later ages on average than youth from other racial/ethnic groups.
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Most scholars trace this pattern to Asian and Asian American parents’ tendency to transmit to their children their own relatively restrictive sexual values and overall reticence about sex.
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Al- though Andrew did not personally attribute his approach to virginity loss to his ethnic background, it is likely that the culturally conditioned val- ues encouraged him to interpret virginity as a gift, a stance not typically associated with masculinity or atheism. Andrew’s attitudes and conduct did, however, closely resemble those of male gifters from other racial/eth- nic backgrounds.

After more than 2 years of abstinence, Andrew gave his secondary vir- ginity to a special girlfriend, Nita. Andrew had told Nita that he was a born-again virgin, and that he was very concerned about pregnancy pre- vention, as soon as he realized he was falling in love with her. Andrew re- called:

I told her I wasn’t just, you know, that I didn’t just have sex with any- one. Before we did it, we sat and, you know, talked about it for a while. [That] I always had bad associations with sex because of that whole first experience. And like, it really, just, we sat down and talked about it and it alleviated a lot of my stress.

Nita also reassured him that she was on the Pill and STI-free.

Much to Andrew’s relief, the first time he had sex with Nita was as per- fect and romantic as he had hoped his first encounter with Michelle would be. He was especially glad that Nita had known in advance how much the decision to have vaginal sex meant to him.

I think it was a lot better . . . having her know how big of a step it was for me to do that, than to have just done [it] and said, “Oh, by the way, all this.” And then she’d be like, “Oh, no . . . I did this to you!” So she knew all of it ahead of time and she accepted the responsibility and so did I. And it was pretty good. . . . Like emotionally and everything it was just healthy, I think, this time. . . . And we’re still together, so I think it’s fine.

By declaring himself a born-again virgin, Andrew was able to deepen his relationship with his cherished partner through a romantic first sexual en- counter, even though he no longer had his true virginity to give.

Giving the Gift of Virginity:

Loss and Gain, Continuity and Change

The stories recounted here leave little doubt that love and emotional reci- procation were vitally important to women and men who interpreted vir- ginity as a gift. They described virginity as a unique and precious part of the self and believed that giving it was not only a way of expressing love but also, more crucially, a way of strengthening ongoing romantic rela- tionships. Although few of them were strangers to physical desire, their decisions about virginity loss were motivated primarily by relational con- cerns. To help ensure that their gift of virginity would be reciprocated, they chose their sexual partners with the utmost care and typically took an incremental approach to sexual intimacy, most often with a single partner. Like the people profiled in this chapter, everyone in my study who viewed virginity as a gift had been exposed to diverse understandings of virginity while growing up. Why did they come to favor the gift metaphor over the available alternatives? Gender, sexuality, and other social identi-

ties, especially religion, influenced their preferences in two ways.

First, although it is widely assumed that young people’s sexual beliefs and behavior are greatly swayed by mass media, my research supports previous findings that mass media tend to reinforce beliefs fostered by family, friends, religious institutions, and schools, rather than instilling new beliefs or inspiring radical changes in perspective.
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All of these in- dividuals and institutions tend to encourage young people to embrace the interpretations of virginity deemed appropriate for people “like them.” Traditionally, the gift metaphor has been associated with femininity and Christian morality. Not surprisingly, more young women reported being urged to perceive virginity as a gift than did young men. Devout and/or conservative Christians recalled receiving similar encouragement from clergy and fellow believers (especially family and friends). Racial/ethnic identity also appeared to shape approaches to virginity. Two of the four Latino Americans I interviewed (one man and one woman) likened vir- ginity to a gift, a belief they personally attributed to Hispanic cultures’ high regard for women’s virginity and general sexual conservatism.
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And

two of the three African American women I interviewed thought of vir- ginity as a gift, a perspective favored in Black Protestant churches (to which both women belonged) and by Black families intent on countering popular stereotypes of Black women as promiscuous.
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Beliefs and identity did not correspond 100 percent, however, in part because people have multiple identities that may pull them in different in- terpretive directions. For instance, Andrew’s parents persuaded him, as a Chinese American, to interpret virginity as a gift, while his friends urged him, as a young man, to view it as a stigma. Furthermore, social changes have expanded the interpretive stances available to many social groups.
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This expansion is particularly evident in the case of gender. The men who told me they saw virginity as a gift were disproportionately young. Sec- ond- and third-wave feminism, by promoting new models of masculin- ity; the HIV/AIDS crisis, by giving men a compelling reason for sexual caution (akin to women’s concern with pregnancy); and the populariza- tion of conservative Christian sexual ideology, which portrays virginity as a gift, have all contributed to the gradual loosening of the gift metaphor’s association with femininity.
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The beliefs and experiences of female and male gifters were largely similar, suggesting a weakening of the sexual double standard. Yet, I observed one gender difference that demonstrates how stubborn gender inequality can be. Several women, but no men, experienced lasting feelings of sexual disenfranchisement after giving their virginity to nonreciprocating partners—a gendered pat- tern resulting from a combination of the power imbalance inherent to gift relationships and gender differences in social power, which on aver- age benefit men.

Interestingly, gifters appeared to have been exposed to more consistent messages about virginity than members of other interpretive groups. All had at least one parent who saw virginity as a gift; and, in many cases, these beliefs stemmed from their families’ religious traditions.
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More- over, gifters tended to have close friends who not only shared their view of virginity but also behaved in accordance with their beliefs.
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Karen’s story shows how young people approaching virginity loss must negotiate discrepancies—between friends’ words and actions and between personal beliefs and broader peer cultures—while Bryan’s tale reveals the impor- tant role of peer support in sustaining young men who prefer a gender- atypical stance.

Young people often come to prefer the metaphors that they have learned to see as appropriate to their social identities. Yet they also select

particular metaphors as ways of establishing and enacting preferred
ver- sions
of their identities. Since women in the contemporary United States no longer need to treasure their virginity in order to remain respectably feminine (as they did before about 1970), when Kelly, Julie, and other women of their generation approach their virginity as a gift, they are con- structing (more or less consciously) a conventional version of feminine, heterosexual identity. Conversely, when men of the same generation ap- proach virginity as a gift, as did Bryan and Andrew, they are rejecting a traditional style of masculinity for a more relational, less aggressive al- ternative. The fact that men in this group were much more circumspect than the women when it came to disclosing their virginity suggests that it is not yet wholly acceptable for men to treat their virginity as a gift; gen- der unorthodoxy still carries the threat of sanctions. For women and men, the gift metaphor additionally facilitates the performance of heterosexu- ality, presumably because the metaphor’s traditional girl-meets-boy con- notation leaves little room for same-sex desire.

The interviews I conducted also indicate that interpreting virginity as a gift may help young people from devout mainstream and conserva- tive Christian backgrounds to demonstrate the centrality of religious devotion to their identity.
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Other researchers have suggested that men and women use virginity loss to construct their racial/ethnic identity. By choosing to approach virginity as a gift, for instance, African Amer- ican women like Danice Marshall are effectively enacting a “morally upstanding Black woman” identity in contrast to the hypersexual stereotype psychologist Deborah Tolman calls the “myth of the urban girl.”
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The patterns I observed help reveal how broader social changes affect individual lives. In addition to the gender-related changes just described, I found little support for gifters’ historic claim that men and especially women should give their virginity only to their spouse. Almost everyone I spoke with believed that it was acceptable to give one’s virginity to a beloved partner in a committed nonmarital relationship. Even the few who spoke of virgin marriage as an ideal, like Julie, typically conceded that few people could realistically achieve it, a concession echoing Britney Spears’s about-face. This perspective—treating virginity as precious but accepting its premarital loss—has steadily grown in popularity since the 1960s, as American society has grown more secular, marriages have be- come less stable, and more people accept the feminist claim that women should enjoy the same sexual freedoms as men.