Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (19 page)

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An Unendurable Stigma

One of the most curious incidents in the history of virginity loss in America took place in the summer of 1999. Late one evening in July, an unprecedented offering appeared on the Web site of Internet auction house eBay: the virginity of Francis D. Cornworth. A 17-year-old boy about to begin his senior year in high school, Francis explained his mo- tivation for placing the advertisement succinctly: “I decided I’d like to lose my virginity. I figured with the latest eBay craze, I’d see exactly how much I could get.”
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The yearbook photo accompanying “item No. 138277430” (quantity: “one”) depicted a gamely smiling White boy with a weak chin, bad overbite, dorky haircut, and unfashionably large eyeglasses.

As enticements to potential bidders, Cornworth listed his membership in the National Honor Society, presidency of his high school’s computer club, proficiency as a trumpet player, and “extensive record” of commu- nity service. “I think I am desirable if I can find the right woman (or man, I’m willing to experiment),” Francis wrote. His expansive definition re- flects young Americans’ increasing willingness to define virginity loss as applying to encounters with same- as well as other-sex partners. He did, however, request that women and men over 60 and people known to have STIs refrain from bidding.

According to one account, the value of Cornworth’s virginity rose within hours of the posting from an initial bid of $10 to $10 million.
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If any of those bidders were in earnest, their hopes were quickly dashed. Less than 24 hours after the page appeared, eBay removed it from its site. Describing the incident as a prank, eBay spokesman Kevin Purseglove ex- plained to reporters that the company reacted swiftly and severely both because the alleged advertiser was under age and because it is company policy to drop ads for illegal activities—including prostitution and the sale of body parts—immediately upon discovery. The hoax ultimately

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made the human-interest rounds in news outlets from the
New York Post

to Salon.com.
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In attributing potentially great worth to virginity, the attempted auc- tion of Cornworth’s bears a superficial similarity to the furor over Britney Spears’s sexual status. But in every other respect, the two incidents stand in dramatic contrast, highlighting the difference between the gift and stigma metaphors. Not only can gifts by definition not be purchased— this is partly what gifters mean when they proclaim virginity to be price- less—but accepting monetary recompense for the gift of a sexual act is moreover tantamount to prostitution.
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The Cornworth auction, by contrast, suggests that virginity is a stigma. Sociologists consider a person to be stigmatized if he (or she) pos- sesses a condition or attribute that, if it were known to others, would dis- credit him socially and change him “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”
5
Attributes become stigmas through a social process whereby some individuals are labeled—or set apart from “nor- mal” people—in a way that leads to loss of status and discrimination.
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Francis Cornworth perfectly fit a stereotype seen in countless movies—
Risky Business
(1983) and
American Pie
(1999), to name but two—of an adolescent boy taking desperate measures to rid himself of his virginity before his advancing age further compounds his shame. That the hapless lad was plagued not only by his virginity but also by physical unattrac- tiveness and social ineptitude (implied by his hobbies and academic bent) is no surprise, for one stigma tends to accompany others.
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Cornworth’s effort to join the ranks of nonvirgins is typical of people suffering from stigmas that aren’t permanent—they typically try to ex- punge such stigmas as soon as possible. If the poor guy was trying to make the best of an unfortunate situation by earning a bit of cash in the process, well, who could blame him for trying? In fact, the alleged Fran- cis could even be seen as trying to downplay the intensity of his stigma by recasting his unwanted virginity as valuable enough for a stranger to pur- chase. Cornworth’s willingness to reveal his stigma publicly is, however, rather unusual. Most stigmatized individuals try to conceal the condition that taints them, to
pass
as normal, until they are able to remove it.
8
Stig- mas that are undetectable by the casual observer, such as virginity (high school folklore notwithstanding), are most easily disguised.
9
But just be- cause a person
can
hide a stigma doesn’t mean he will. Someone caught concealing a stigma may be branded deceitful and face sanctions for the stigma and deception alike. Consequently, most stigmatized people opt to

share their status with a few intimates while disguising it from everyone else.
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These tendencies point to the relative powerlessness of stigmatized women and men. A person can only make a negative designation stick to someone less powerful than himself; and having a stigma reduces a per- son’s social status and power even more.
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People try to resist becoming or remaining stigmatized, but they often lack the power to prevent others from identifying or exposing their stigma, sanctioning them for it, or even conferring new stigmas upon them.

Of course, not everyone interprets virginity as a stigma, nor is every case of virginity deemed equally stigmatizing. Whether a trait is stigma- tized depends on social context: what is normal in one town or high school or for one type of person may be abnormal in or for another. Corn- worth’s gender, for instance, is crucial to understanding the eBay prank. As we have seen, Americans have historically viewed men’s virginity as a stigma and women’s as a gift—perceptions that undergird the sexual dou- ble standard. I therefore suspect that many who viewed Francis’s adver- tisement automatically interpreted the boy’s virginity as a stigma (or at least understood that
he
saw it that way), whereas they might have been dismayed or disturbed by a hypothetical girl “Frances” who declined to cherish her virginity. Yet we should remain leery of assuming a gender di- chotomy. Although the young men I interviewed
were
considerably more likely than the women to view their own virginity as a stigma at the time they began having sex, a substantial minority of the women also felt stig- matized by their status.
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The existence of such an “unfeminine” stance has not gone unrecognized in American popular culture—as viewers of the 1980 teen movie
Little Darlings,
in which Tatum O’Neal and Christy McNichol played two 15-year-olds competing to lose their virginity first at summer camp, can testify.

This chapter examines the beliefs and experiences of young men and women who share Francis Cornworth’s vision of virginity as a stigma—or the “stigmatized,” as I will call them.
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More than the simple converse of the gift metaphor, the stigma frame gives rise to a specific and complex set of expectations, concerns, and practices, all of which are rooted in social understandings of stigmas generically. To chart this constellation of ideas and actions, I draw on theoretical and empirical research on stigma in gen- eral.
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My analysis explores points of similarity and difference between women and men who see their virginity as a stigma and considers how vir- ginity loss helps them fashion their identities not only as gendered beings, but also as possessors of particular sexual and racial/ethnic identities.

“Growing Up It’s Always Been a Stigma,

It’s Always Been a Bad Thing . . . to Be a Virgin”

Kendall James tells the story of how he lost his virginity with gusto. In fact, as he confessed in our interview, it is one of his favorite personal anecdotes. At 28 years old, Kendall manages a men’s clothing boutique in Philadelphia’s Old City arts district. When we met, he was clad in gear from the trendy shop and sporting a thick silver nose ring, which con- trasted dramatically with his mahogany complexion. Most of his ances- tors had come from West Africa during the slave trade, he said, but he had some Cherokee blood as well. Kendall’s had been one of the few African American families in the suburb where he grew up and one of the few sup- ported by a single mother. Kendall’s mom, a nurse’s assistant, divorced her construction worker husband before Kendall started high school. He’d been happy to trade that isolating environment for the cosmopoli- tan city as soon as he had his diploma in hand. As a teenager, Kendall had been sexually involved with both men and women; as an adult, he iden- tified as gay. He had lived with boyfriends twice in the past, but was cur- rently single and “enjoying my space.”

When I asked Kendall how he’d seen virginity as a boy, he explained that he and his friends first started thinking about virginity as it applied to them when they were in sixth or seventh grade. “There was a point in grade school and high school where it was a big deal to lose it,” he said. “Or bet- ter yet, it was a bigger deal if you didn’t lose it, if you were a virgin.”

Scarcely anyone Kendall knew, himself included, had discussed sex or virginity with their parents; and the Baptist church he and his mother at- tended held premarital sex in such disdain that he dismissed its teachings as irrelevant. (As an adult, he rejected organized religion for interfering with his “relationship with whatever power is out there.”) Instead, he and his friends gleaned what information they could from one another, older siblings and cousins, and movies like
Porky’s
and
Fast Times at Ridge- mont High.
Kendall recalled:

I think almost every teenlike movie . . . was about getting laid or not get- ting laid, and what an idiot you were for not getting laid. And then girls, you know, hemming and hawing, “Should I put out? Should I not put out?” . . . Growing up it’s always been a stigma, it’s always been a bad thing, per se, to be a virgin. I’m sure I knew a lot more virgins than let on. But [you] couldn’t be a virgin in public.

Although they knew that some adults, and even some kids, felt other- wise, to Kendall and his crowd, “virginity was a sign of dorkiness.” Just remembering their anxious efforts to hide their sexual inexperience made him laugh: “It’s funny . . . I’m sure I lied. I’m sure, you know, at ten, I was like, ‘Hey, I’m not no virgin!’ You know, not even knowing what the word meant, probably, at that point.” In my study, such zeal for masking virginity set the stigmatized apart from people who preferred the gift and process metaphors.

By the end of elementary school, Kendall had resolved to lose his vir- ginity as soon as he could. After all, having sex not only made you “cool,” but was also supposed to feel great. Yet while Kendall was eager to expe- rience sex, he wasn’t at all interested in romance or dating. In fact, he was mystified to discover that a few of his buddies hoped to lose their virgin- ity with girlfriends. Seeing virginity loss as an end in itself and remaining relatively aloof from love and relationships were typical of men and women who interpreted virginity as a stigma. Most of them took a prag- matic approach to choosing sexual partners. Half lost their virginity with casual partners—friends, acquaintances, or strangers—and even those who lost their virginity with boyfriends or girlfriends were seldom in love or in relationships of more than a few weeks’ duration.
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In short, they se- lected their virginity-loss partners on entirely different bases than gifters. Kendall’s eagerness to shed his virginity and his belief that sex was meant for personal pleasure—both characteristic of people who framed virginity as a stigma—helped determine the kinds of sexual things he did while still a virgin. Although he’d masturbated dozens of times before turning 12, Kendall had scant sexual experience with girls and none with

boys. He said:

We had like, you know, done doctor and played and fondling and stuff. But nothing like, even out of clothes. It was like, “We’ve got boobies,” and you know, stupid stuff like that. . . . I mean, I was aware and I knew what could happen. But . . . there wasn’t anybody to experiment with.

The first time he had a chance to do more than “stupid stuff,” Kendall was with a girl who wanted to have sex—and he saw no reason to stop short of getting rid of his virginity and getting on with pleasure. Nor did the majority of stigmatized men and women. Two-thirds had never tried heavy petting before losing their virginity because, like Kendall, they had been able to have “real” sex right away.
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What happened the day 12-year-old Kendall lost his virginity took him by surprise. It was as if he’d been swept onto the set of one of the over- the-top teen movies he’d seen. Late in the afternoon, his mother had rushed off to help her sister with “some family emergency,” leaving Kendall in the care of Tammy, the pretty older sister of his best friend from next door. “She could only have been three or four years older,” Kendall said. Bored with the TV show they were watching, Kendall and Tammy started joking around and got into a playful wrestling match. Then: “Wrestling and erections and curiosity and. . . .” Before he knew what was happening, they were having sex on the living room floor. “It was kind of a surprise!” he exclaimed, laughing. “It was a shock and it was, it was mind-blowing.”

Kendall didn’t know whether Tammy had realized that he was a vir- gin. He certainly didn’t tell her; and she never said what she thought. Be- cause he’d been so “big for his age” at 12, even his parents tended to treat him as older than his years, and Tammy may have done the same. Kendall was relieved to have kept his secret—as 5 of 8 people who concealed their virginity from their partners had—though it is likely that, if Tammy had discovered his virginity, his extreme youth would have minimized the in- tensity of his stigma.

Another topic that neither Kendall nor Tammy raised was the possi- bility of pregnancy or STIs. “Probably because I was so young,” he sur- mised.

I can’t remember any kind of talk about the Pill or rubbers or anything.