Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (21 page)

all these people standing around drinking, [asking] “Where have you been?” questions. And your hair’s all messed up, her hair was all messed up. So it was, like, obvious. . . . There was tons of pressure to spill out what it is you’ve done upstairs.

Although he and the girl had just been acquaintances before that night, they decided to become “boyfriend and girlfriend,” an arrangement that lasted about a month. In the next 2 years, Marty “approached the same caliber of things, you know, being naked and fooling around,” sometimes with girls he was dating, sometimes with more casual partners. But, he explained, “the situations were either, you know, the person wasn’t will- ing to or it had never gotten this far.” One-third of the stigmatized en- gaged in heavy petting with at least one partner before the person with whom they lost their virginity—the same proportion as among gifters. But where heavy-petting gifters expressly intended to maintain their vir- ginity until they found the “perfect” partner, heavy petters in the stigma group remained virgins only because they hadn’t found partners willing to go “all the way.” For this reason, sexually experienced virgins in the

stigma group were typically older (over 16) at virginity loss than were their inexperienced counterparts, and should be distinguished from tech- nical virgins.
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The more sexual experience Marty amassed, the more intensely he wanted to lose his virginity. His ventures with foreplay suggested that vaginal sex “would feel really good” and he wanted “to find out what everyone was ranting and raving about.” Indeed, almost everyone who interpreted virginity as a stigma described their quest for virginity loss as motivated not only by the desire to escape their stigma, but also, secon- darily, by the incentives of physical pleasure, which they typically spoke of as an end in itself, and curiosity about sex. These latter motivations were rare among gifters, given their focus on the emotional aspects of sex, but common among people who saw virginity loss as a process.

Although Marty enjoyed dating and felt it would be nice to lose his vir- ginity with a girlfriend, he wasn’t interested in waiting until he fell in love or established a committed relationship. In fact, he confessed, if he had remained a virgin much longer, he would have sought out a casual part- ner for the express purpose of virginity loss. He therefore considered him- self lucky that he started dating Pam when he did, in the winter of his ju- nior year. At 18, Pam was a year older than Marty and a senior, like his three closest male friends. They had gotten to know each other at parties, said Marty, and “it wasn’t really long at all, maybe three weeks’ dating, before we had sex.” During those weeks, Marty and Pam had quickly proceeded from kissing to genital touching to giving and receiving oral sex. They liked one another but were not in love. The nature of their re- lationship and the speed with which their sexual intimacy progressed were typical of people who lost the stigma of virginity with a girlfriend or boyfriend; only 2 of the 9 who had boyfriends or girlfriends had been in love with their partners and few had been dating for more than a few weeks.

Though it embarrassed him to do so, Marty told Pam that he was a vir- gin. He felt obliged to be honest with his girlfriend, and he knew that Pam could easily discover the truth from their mutual friends. (For these rea- sons, only three men in this group hid their virginity from a partner they were dating.) Happily, Pam—who was not a virgin—reacted to Marty’s revelation with enthusiasm. As he put it, “She was kind of excited about it—to have her be with me, so she would be my first.” On the surface, Pam’s reaction to Marty’s virginity is surprising: the classic responses to stigma are derision, discrimination, and social rejection. Yet, in the case

of stigmas that are nearly universal or easy to identify with—as virginity likely was for a recent nonvirgin like Pam—negative reactions are often leavened with compassion.
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Stigmas may also invoke sympathy when their possessor has positive personal traits or respects the group norms that condemn him—and Marty was an attractive teenager eager to lose his virginity. For his part, Marty saw Pam’s greater sexual experience as “kind of neat, because then it wasn’t a fumbling thing—she kind of knew what to do.” Indeed, the majority of people who interpreted virginity as a stigma had preferred sexually experienced partners, and none of them hoped to lose their virginity with another virgin.

Marty and Pam didn’t know in advance when they’d find a private space for having sex. Rather, one night when Pam’s parents were spend- ing an evening away from home, “it ended up happening, and I just kind of followed suit. So I guess maybe I was led. But it was quite all right.” They used a condom, thinking primarily of pregnancy prevention. Marty laughed remembering how much he had worried about “whether or not I was going to do it right.” What if he had lost his virginity only to be branded sexually incompetent? He was careful to point out, “[T]hat’s my own pressure. Not by her. And not my friends.” Fortunately, the en- counter went smoothly. “I kind of knew what I was supposed to do,” he said. “It was just, you know, the actual act. Everything else was pretty up to par.” Relieved to have shed his virginity, Marty shared the news with his longtime friends. He said nothing to his newer acquaintances, how- ever, lest he shatter the impression of nonvirginity he had worked so dili- gently to foster. He also wanted to protect Pam’s privacy. He did, how- ever, enjoy a newfound freedom to talk about sex without fear of having his virginity discovered.

Over the next 2 months, Marty chuckled, “We did [it] a lot. And I be- came fairly obsessed with it.” Then, out of nowhere, Pam decided to break things off. Although their relationship hadn’t been particularly deep, Marty was upset by the suddenness of Pam’s decision and the ten- sions it produced among their mutual friends. He also regretted losing “the woman I had prospects of having sex with. I’m sure that wasn’t what was in the forefront of my mind at that point, but it would have a good portion to do with it.” Marty recovered quickly from the breakup, espe- cially compared with gifters who got dumped after virginity loss, and went on to have sex with casual partners as well as serious girlfriends, the last of whom became his wife.

In retrospect, Marty declared himself wholly pleased with the way he lost his virginity, even though the encounter hadn’t been as physically pleasurable as he’d hoped for. “It’s been a lot better since then,” he said with a laugh. “As far as like, looking back on it, I wouldn’t consider that an awe-inspiring sexual encounter. But it was definitely pretty neat.” This minor disappointment, combined with having been freed from his stigma, inspired Marty gradually to reevaluate his beliefs about virginity loss. By the time I interviewed him, he understood virginity loss less as a way of eliminating a stigma and more as the beginning of a lifelong process of learning about sex:

I guess, like, losing your virginity—everything up until that point was like geared about losing it. And then after you lost it, then it was like, “Okay, now what can I do to improve what’s going on?” . . . Right off the beginning, it was just being able to have done it. And then, like, you kind of knew what you were doing. . . . And then after that came explo- ration into ways of, types, and places. Yeah, so there’s definitely a before and after.

“It Was My First Time, and . . . I Didn’t Want to Look Foolish”

Where Kendall and Marty relished the stories of how they lost their vir- ginity, Bill Gordon remembered his experience as singularly traumatic. He had scarcely shared it with anyone. For although Bill succeeded in ex- punging the stigma of his virginity, he failed to hide his sexual inexperi- ence from his partner; and when she ridiculed him for it, he wound up feeling stigmatized all over again. His story illustrates how important suc- cessful concealment and avoiding further stigmas were to people in this group, and how much power they ceded to their partners by virtue of the metaphor they preferred.

When I met Bill, he was 31 years old and living in southern New Jer- sey, not far from the town where he grew up. The first in his family to graduate from college, Bill worked for a national tutoring service, in- structing high school students in the finer points of the SATs. He wore khaki trousers and a white button-down shirt, which echoed his sandy brown hair and fair skin and seemed at odds with his bluff and blustery

demeanor. He had lived with a girlfriend briefly in his late 20s, but it had- n’t worked out. Since then, he had gravitated toward more casual rela- tionships, though he hoped eventually to marry and have children.

When I asked Bill what he had thought about virginity while growing up, he began by telling me about what his mother, a full-time home- maker, and father, an auto mechanic, had taught him. His mother main- tained that sex was “a gift from God that should be shared only by peo- ple who really love each other,” even though she rarely managed to herd the family to their Methodist church. Especially after Bill had a steady girlfriend, “my mother made it clear that she didn’t believe in premari- tal sex.” The message from Bill’s father was less straightforward, how- ever.

My father asserted that . . . you shouldn’t do it. But he revealed to me experiences when he was in the army. So there was a conflict there, where my mother was saying one thing. My father was supporting my mother, but also saying, “Look, I did it, too.”

Despite prolonged exposure to their parents’ and pastors’ conservative stance on virginity, Bill and his friends found it less than persuasive, es- pecially by the time they were teenagers. To them, virginity was a cause for embarrassment, one that they intended to rid themselves of as soon as possible. People who hadn’t had sex, Bill recalled, “were deemed less than the people who had.” Virginity was especially demeaning for men in Bill’s high school. If a guy was a virgin, he explained, “somehow they weren’t man enough.” But many of his friends saw women virgins in a different light:

It would’ve been more embarrassing and probably would’ve been harder on the guy. . . . They wouldn’t have made fun of the girl, but they would’ve made fun of the guy. Some of the guys might even be intrigued by the fact that this [girl] never had sex. . . . Being possibly the one per- son who devirginizes her.

This pattern is consistent with the sexual double standard and with pop- ular culture’s tendency to eroticize women’s virginity while disparaging men’s. Not coincidentally, Bill and his friends were avid fans of the soft- porn magazines and videos in which this gendered vision of virginity is particularly pronounced.

And yet, Bill said, “I could never quite get with that idea. . . . I didn’t want somebody who was a virgin. It would make me more uncomfort- able. It would remind me of my sister.” His preference for sexually expe- rienced partners was typical, though even more pronounced than Marty’s. On the surface, this predilection seems to pose a threat to these virgins’ intense desire to hide or minimize the stigma of virginity. Logi- cally speaking, sexually adept partners would be especially well equipped to identify and criticize a virgin’s inexperience, a danger few virgins seemed to recognize. Theories of stigma can help unravel this apparent paradox. In addition to the negative connotations of stigma, which ren- der virgins inherently degraded and thus undesirable as partners, the stig- matized may fear symbolic contamination from associating closely with virgins. Sociologists call this phenomenon—being stigmatized through contact with the stigmatized—
courtesy stigma
; it has been observed in all manner of stigmatizing situations.
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Although Bill never valued his virginity, losing it had seemed neither imperative nor practically possible to him until his peers started having sex, around the time he entered high school. From then on, Bill felt the stigma of his own virginity growing more acute with every passing year. By twelfth grade, he said, “It was assumed that no one was still a virgin.” In addition to the peer culture and advancing age that heightened his sense of stigma, an experience Bill had as a boy may have given him fur- ther incentives to lose his virginity. As he put it, “I went through a
ho- mo
sexual phase, around second grade, until like, fifth grade.”

In second grade, I had anal intercourse with a friend of mine. . . . We used to go into the woods and lay a blanket down and then take down our pants and just rub our penises on top of each other in the woods. That was the first sexual experience I had. And then eventually we had anal intercourse. I penetrated him. . . . Those are my first experiences. And then [I] hit a period of like. Just, in fifth grade it started, not being interested in
guys
anymore, I just was interested in women.

Experimenting with his friend gave Bill firsthand knowledge that genital sex could feel very pleasurable. It also suggested that he might be homo- sexual, which may have lent a particular urgency to his desire to lose his virginity, as doing so would prove his heterosexuality. His emphatic dec- laration of his heterosexual identity at other points in our interview strongly supports this interpretation.

But despite his intentions, Bill remained a virgin until he was an 18- year-old college freshman. Three things had, he believed, conspired against him. First, high school sex education classes, TV specials, and news reports had left him morbidly afraid of catching an STI, particularly herpes. He had also worried about making a fool of himself the first time he had sex.
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Most important, the girl he dated throughout high school had been reluctant to have vaginal sex.

Bill and Colleen had started dating as sophomores and, by the end of junior year, their sexual relationship had grown very intimate — they often exchanged oral sex. Bill described their emotional relationship as based less on love than on the status and social security that came with having a steady partner. But Colleen’s traditional beliefs about premari- tal sex combined with Bill’s fears about STIs and appearing inept—which were undiminished by knowing that Colleen, too, was a virgin—to keep them from going further. Bill said: