Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (20 page)

. . . [I]t wasn’t really a planned thing. But when it did happen . . . when I was in the middle of everything, it really didn’t even occur to me. And

. . . I didn’t really have enough information about birth control. I mean, I knew that babies could come of sex. But I didn’t think this was neces- sarily sex to begin with. And then, secondly . . . adults have babies, kids don’t have babies. So it really . . . never came up.

Few people had been concerned about HIV at the time (it was 1982) and besides, he recalled with chagrin, “It was always the girl on the Pill.

. . . You know, it’s really sad and stupid, but that’s how it was until, like, the [late] ’80s.” Overall, the stigmatized were much less likely to take pre- cautions against pregnancy and STIs than people who interpreted virgin- ity in other ways. Two-fifths practiced neither safer sex nor contracep- tion. One reason for their disinclination was their impatience to lose their

virginity, which often meant—as it did for Kendall—being unwilling to postpone sex if an opportunity arose at a time when they weren’t “pre- pared.”

Although Kendall was ecstatic to have lost his virginity, especially in such an exciting way (and without embarrassing himself), he nonetheless chose to keep his news a secret. First and foremost, he was afraid that sharing the story might get him or Tammy into trouble with their parents, or upset his friend Kevin, Tammy’s brother. He was also loath to dispel the impression of nonvirginity he’d so deliberately cultivated among his peers. He explained:

All throughout my school career, I rarely confirmed or denied any virgin or sex issues. Everyone always assumed, because I was bigger, I had a deeper voice, you know, and I was mature for my age. . . . So they al- ways assumed. And I never said, “Oh, not until last week.” . . . And I was a popular guy.

Concealing the details of virginity loss after the fact is virtually manda- tory for virgins who have disguised their stigma, lest they risk being de- nounced as liars. Many of the people I interviewed noted that, although it would have been humiliating to have their former virginity made pub- lic, it could have been just as bad to be labeled as deceitful. Luckily for Kendall, by the time his friends asked outright about his virginity, “It was already done,”
and
he’d been able to regale them with true tales of sex- ual encounters with girls he met after Tammy. “If I would call back all of my friends in sixth grade,” he said, “I would imagine that all of them would have thought that I wasn’t a virgin. And it wasn’t from me saying, ‘Oh yeah, Kevin’s sister, blah blah blah.’”

Kendall used two common strategies for concealing the stigma of his virginity. He actively bragged that he wasn’t a virgin when he actually was; and he emphasized personal traits that are typically associated with nonvirginity, like his physical maturity and popularity. Kendall further benefited from belonging to a group of friends among whom sexual bravado and reluctance to call one another’s bluffs (perhaps for fear of self-exposure) were the norm.
17

For several months after he had sex with Tammy, Kendall suffered from “the crush that wouldn’t end” and found himself daydreaming about being her boyfriend. But, he said, “Tammy and I never, never spoke about it ever again. . . . There was never sex again and it was never

brought up again.” He could only assume that she saw their tryst as a mo- mentary diversion or even a mistake. In fact, I spoke with only one per- son who lost his virginity with an acquaintance or stranger and went on to have sex with them subsequently; such is the nature of casual encoun- ters. Since Kendall wasn’t interested in dating and didn’t go out of his way looking for new sexual partners, almost two years passed before he had sex of any kind again. “But,” he quipped, “in that two years I became a master at masturbation.”

Around the time he turned 14, Kendall decided, “I’ve had enough fun myself and I want to try something else.” He embarked on a decade-long odyssey of sexual experimentation, trying all manner of sexual activities with all sorts of partners, which he later understood as part of the process of coming out as gay. He said:

My first experiences were with women and my third experience was with a guy. And my fourth experience was with a girl. . . . So for a while it, you know, I tried it. And I, it was, I told myself, experimentation. You know, just being curious.

This approach to sex with casual partners differs dramatically from that taken by Julie Pavlicko and other gifters. Men and women who saw vir- ginity as a stigma spoke of their experiences with casual sex in terms of experimentation, not promiscuity; and none of them attributed their be- havior to feeling powerless to stop or refuse. Their only regrets were oc- casional lapses in practicing safer sex and choosing partners who, in ret- rospect, repelled them.

Looking back, Kendall wondered whether one of the reasons he’d been so eager to shed the stigma of virginity was the degree to which it had been mixed up with the stigma of being gay. He’d certainly
felt
sexually attracted to boys by the time he longed to lose his virginity, even if he was- n’t yet comfortable admitting it to himself. In the contemporary United States, virginity, especially men’s virginity, is routinely associated with ho- mosexuality in popular culture and media, including several of the films Kendall saw as a youth (
Fast Times
and
The Breakfast Club,
to name but two). In this context, losing virginity with a different-sex partner offers young men (and women) a way of demonstrating their heterosexuality and proving—to themselves or to others—that they aren’t gay.
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All of the stigmatized who knew or suspected they were gay recalled feeling that the stigmas of virginity and homosexuality were somehow intertwined.
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Through virginity loss, they had sought, more or less consciously, to lose two stigmas at once. Given the conflation of these two stigmas, it is not surprising that most of the gay men in my study interpreted virginity as a stigma.
20

Coming out in such a protracted way, coupled with the fact that vagi- nal sex was “not [as] mind-blowing pleasurable” as he’d expected, changed Kendall’s understanding of virginity loss. He began to perceive it less as a one-time escape from a shameful trait and more as a first step in an ongoing process of learning about sex. From this new perspective, Kendall saw losing his virginity as an event that took him from “having the knowledge but not the experience” to “making them mesh together.” That revelation marked the beginning of an educational journey he thought no one should forgo:

I don’t object to saving yourself until marriage, I just don’t think it’s smart. I think, because we’re experimental animals, I think that the rela- tionship with someone’s first should be a relationship that grows and evolves and not necessarily stays sexual.

In fact, after losing their virginity, all but three of the stigmatized came to prefer other metaphors. Once relieved of their own stigmas, they felt free to reconsider virginity anew; and their own experiences suggested that sex improved with practice. Perhaps because they saw pleasure as the pri- mary purpose of sex, virgins in this group tended to harbor unusually— and unrealistically—high expectations about the physical enjoyment to be had from first sex.
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Kendall’s sexuality was not the only aspect of his social identity impli- cated in his approach to virginity loss. Historically men have been en- couraged to frame virginity as a stigma; and the men in my study were more likely to favor the stigma metaphor than the women. This tendency was pronounced among the African American men I interviewed; other scholars have observed similar patterns. Sociologist Elijah Anderson’s ethnographic research suggests that young urban Black men often see sex as a “game” for achieving personal aggrandizement and status among peers.
22
Benjamin Bowser’s interviews with African American men reveal a similar worldview, accompanied by the tendency to begin sexual activ- ity early, with little experimentation before first vaginal sex, followed by serial sexual relationships with relatively casual partners.
23
National sur- veys likewise find that Black men tend to approach sexuality in recre-

ational terms and become sexually active at younger ages and in less-com- mitted relationships than men from other racial/ethnic backgrounds.
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According to Bowser, this “hypersexual” posture appeals to young African American men as a means of achieving manhood in a society where routes to economic success are often blocked by institutionalized racism.
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From these men’s perspective, virginity would undoubtedly rep- resent a stigma; and losing it would mark the achievement of a com- pelling gendered and raced sexual identity. In this way, Kendall’s story supports what scholars have noted about young African American men; though certainly in many ways his experiences resemble those of stigma- tized men of other races.

The beliefs and experiences of the African American men I interviewed differed dramatically from those of their female counterparts, all but one of whom interpreted virginity as a gift. Danice Marshall, profiled earlier, typifies these women in her careful avoidance of becoming “one of [a player’s] statistics” and her choice to give her virginity to her first long- term boyfriend because he was “different than the other guys I had . . . dated and I trusted him more.” Though I interviewed only three Black women, their stories closely resemble those recorded by other researchers. Many of the African American women interviewed by anthropologist Claire Sterk-Elifson described sex as something given in “return” for love, affection, and respect; women who spoke with psychologist Gail Elizabeth Wyatt often said they’d lost their virginity to show love for a partner; the adolescent girls in Renee White’s study cherished the roman- tic ideal of reserving sex for a loving, perfect partner even while behaving in ways that recognized a more pedestrian reality; and Elijah Anderson concluded that many poor young Black women approach sex as part of a “dream” about romance and family building.
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In my study, gender differences in approaches to virginity loss were considerably more pronounced among African Americans than among other racial/ethnic groups. This difference may be an artifact of the rela- tively small number of Blacks I interviewed; however, other researchers have found similar patterns in more extensive samples.
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Since most young people choose same-race sexual partners, if it is true that African American men and women are strongly disposed to view virginity as a stigma and gift, respectively, then misunderstandings and distress at vir- ginity loss may be especially common among heterosexual African Amer- icans.
28
Virginity loss may, therefore, contribute to what various scholars have characterized as a pervasive and harmful climate of sexual mistrust

between African American women and men.
29
That said, none of the Black men and women I interviewed mentioned experiencing such con- flicts, whereas several White participants did.

“Is There Something Wrong with You?”

Although half of the stigmatized lost their virginity with a friend or on a one-night stand, an equal number were dating their virginity-loss part- ners. Twenty-six-year-old Marty Baker had been one such virgin. Marty, who is White, had grown up in a predominantly middle-class suburb, though his father was a plumber and his mother a sales clerk. He shared his parents’ ambivalence toward their Presbyterian faith. His lifelong fondness for the outdoors was reflected in his career, managing a specialty camping goods store, and in the flannel shirt and well-maintained hiking boots he wore when we met. At that time, Marty had been married for 3 years and had a year-old daughter.

As a teenager, Marty had been eager to lose his virginity. When he was in high school, he said, “To be called a virgin was demeaning,” for both guys and girls. Although it would have seemed “too mature to want to have sex” at age 13 or 14, by the time Marty and his friends were 15 and 16 and some of their acquaintances had become sexually active, they increasingly viewed virginity as a stigma. “Everyone was supposed to [have sex],” he explained, “and you, if you wanted to be older . . . if you were going to grow up—people were starting to, hav- ing some sex.” To Marty’s crowd, being a virgin after high school would have signaled a deep personal flaw, triggering questions such as: “‘[W]hy are you still a virgin . . . why haven’t you deflowered yourself?’ So to speak. ‘Is there something wrong with you?’ Or, ‘[Are] there overbear- ing parents involved?’ Or, ‘Is there something like religious attitudes?’” Positing virginity as abnormal and in need of explanation was a com- mon reaction among the stigmatized, as was linking virginity to other stigmatized statuses, like religious fanaticism or being tied to a parent’s apron strings. Indeed, people frequently interpret one stigma as indicat- ing the existence of another — Francis Cornworth’s multiple burdens being a case in point.

Marty’s conviction that nonvirginity was the normal condition for high school juniors and seniors guided his conduct around his peers.
30
He and the four boys he’d been good friends with since childhood knew who

among them were virgins and who were not, but they did their best to keep that knowledge secret from others. Marty explained:

I guess maybe in the locker room . . . if I had been in a situation where I was around people who all had [had sex], maybe I would’ve been put down for it. But . . . I saw it in other people, without letting on that I was or wasn’t [laughs].

Needless to say, he’d looked forward to the day when he’d “stand a little bit taller” as a nonvirgin and feel relieved of “the pressure of wanting to know what it was all about, personally.”

Marty’s discontent intensified during his junior year, a time when many of his acquaintances (though only one close friend) lost their vir- ginity. He had experimented sexually with half a dozen casual partners by then. He’d kissed some girls in sixth grade and, in seventh grade, “played spin the bottle and second base and . . . touched breasts.” Then, at a party the summer before eighth grade, Marty and a girl he knew from school had gone to an upstairs bedroom where “I received oral sex and every- thing up to that, you know, touching below [the waist].” When they re- turned to the party, he recalled, there were