Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (22 page)

It was never really discussed. . . . She never directly stated that she wanted to have sex. Although one time we were in a car and we were both naked and she said that she wanted me to lie on top of her, so that she could see what it was like for us to be married. So she had some idea that this couldn’t be done unless we were married.

Like Marty Baker, Bill gained experience with heavy petting in part be- cause he didn’t immediately find a partner who was willing to go “all the way.”

By the time he and Colleen broke up, the summer after high school, Bill felt as though he had fallen far behind his peers. He hadn’t hidden his vir- ginity from Colleen since he believed that dating necessitated honesty and because his feelings of stigma had been mitigated by their youth when they met. But with his friends, Bill did his best to keep his virginity a se- cret. Reluctant to lie outright, he pursued a strategy of selective silence and omission. He was particularly happy to take advantage of his friends’ assumption that sex was bound to be part of any relationship as lengthy as his and Colleen’s. Only in retrospect did Bill realize that, despite the scorn they all heaped upon virgins, some of his friends must have been virgins, too.

When Bill arrived at college, a state school a few hours from home, he was unattached for the first time in 3 years, determined to lose his vir- ginity, and resigned to subterfuge until it was gone. After his frustrations

with Colleen, he found the informal “hook-ups” that prevailed at his col- lege vastly preferable to dating. And he was surprised and delighted to discover that many young women there were actually eager to have sex. In his first sexual encounters at college, fear of rejection and appearing in- experienced kept Bill from proposing vaginal sex. Then he found out that one of his partners had taken offense at his restraint. He recounted:

When I first got into college . . . there was opportunities to have sex, but I didn’t even take advantage of them because I was afraid. And one time I, a woman that I met at a party . . . spent some time rolling around the bed with her, but short of intercourse. She told her friend that she was pissed off with me because I didn’t fuck her. And that’s when I started thinking, like, “Oh my god, maybe these women don’t like what I’m doing. Maybe I’m doing something wrong here.”

Bill’s self-reproach was predictable: people who can potentially remove their stigmas face considerable pressure to do so and are often harshly criticized for failing to take advantage of whatever stigma-erasing oppor- tunities arise.
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Once Bill realized that having sex might be as easy as asking, he hoped to lose his virginity the next time he hooked up. Although the stigmatized harbored a slight preference for losing their virginity with girlfriends or boyfriends, they had few compunctions about doing so with casual part- ners. In fact, for virgins who want to keep their virginity secret, choosing a relative stranger may have distinct advantages. Strangers possess no knowledge of one another’s sexual histories and are unlikely to seek any, especially in the absence of mutual friends. Nor do social norms compel people to tell strangers the complete truth about themselves.
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Further- more, if an unfamiliar partner did identify a virgin’s secret—perhaps from a fumbling performance—the negative consequences would be relatively minor. A stranger couldn’t broadcast the news of a virgin’s deceit to friends she didn’t know; and the shamed virgin would never need en- counter his betrayer again. No wonder, then, that so many people in the stigma group were glad to lose their virginity with people they barely knew.

One Friday afternoon, Bill’s dorm-mate Amy introduced him to Diane, a friend who was visiting for the weekend. When he saw Diane again that evening, Bill knew nothing about her except that she was very attractive, around his age, and from Amy’s hometown. He reminisced:

Later on that night, I was at [the] tavern and there she was, out on the dance floor dancing, and all these guys . . . were like gawking at this woman from out of town. Like, “Who’s this lady, where did she come from?” And I’m, I’m staring at her, too. And the next thing I know, she stopped dancing, she comes over to me and she says, “I’ve had enough of this, let’s get out of here and do something else.” So [I] just literally walked out of the place with her, and like my friends were like, slack- jawed, you know. . . . So it was like a heroic thing, you know, it was like an ego booster.

What Diane meant by “something else” became apparent when she es- corted Bill back to Amy’s dorm room. When she asked for a moment to “get . . . comfortable,” Bill ran to his room for a condom, hoping he had- n’t misread her signals. When he got back, Diane “had taken all of her clothes off and had nice mellow music on.”

Diane’s obvious experience with sex, while intoxicating, aggravated Bill’s anxieties about turning in a first-rate performance and steeled his determination to keep his virginity secret. Even so, he recognized that achieving the latter goal depended partly on accomplishing the former, and that worrying about ineptitude might ironically cause it. When I asked if he’d told Diane he was a virgin, Bill laughed:

Of course not. I don’t think so! “Uh, I’ve never done this before.” ... You know, it might’ve happened had she been a virgin, then it would’ve been maybe okay, really, learning about this for the first time. But it was so ob- vious to me that she wasn’t, that I felt demeaned by, if I had said that.

Bill’s intense desire to avoid appearing inexperienced also stopped him from insisting on using the condom he’d fetched. He recalled:

I said, “Well, I have this condom here.” And she said, “Oh, you don’t need any protection, I’m okay.” And because I was so nervous, it was my first time—and I would’ve never done this, as I got older—but I, I didn’t want to look foolish, so I ended up having sex with her without any protection. And she said that she was okay, she had that taken care of. And I didn’t go into any great details, I was just so nervous.

Ultimately, Diane’s desirability and Bill’s longing to lose his virginity out- weighed his reservations. As he put it, “She was so good-looking that I

said, ‘This is it. This is it!’” Indeed, Bill was one of several people who es- chewed contraception and safer sex
precisely because
they saw virginity as stigmatizing and believed that demanding safer sex would make them seem inexperienced or, worse, expose them for the virgins they were.

Unfortunately, Bill’s worst fears came to pass. He laughed anxiously as he told the tale:

I was so nervous, it was my first time, and . . . I didn’t want to look fool- ish. . . . And we had sex and I didn’t know anything about it. . . . I tried to do what I saw the people do in the porno movies, move my body in a certain way, and do it really fast, because that’s what they seemed to do.

. . . She was saying to me, “There’s another person here, you know.” . . . And that’s like, totally, you know, kind of scared to death, feeling like, okay this is like the biggest moment of my life, this is the greatest thing ever, and . . . I ejaculated very quickly. It was like, just, interested in get- ting myself off and didn’t even think about her. . . . And then we had sex from behind and [I] ejaculated again. And then I was ready to go. That was terrible. And one of the reasons I was ready to go was because I just felt like I was, I wasn’t performing well, you know. I felt like I had really fucked this thing up. She was totally unsatisfied and I had no control, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Although Diane made no effort to disguise her frustration and disap- pointment, she didn’t accuse Bill of being a virgin—a small mercy for which he was deeply grateful.
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Still, he felt newly stigmatized as sexually incompetent. If Diane
had
attributed Bill’s awkwardness to virginity, the stigma of lying would have been added to his load.

Bill’s experience with Diane demonstrates the power a sexual partner may derive from firsthand knowledge of a virgin’s sexual conduct. Sexual partners are uniquely well situated to identify and publicize virgins’ sex- ual ineptitude and, by extension, their virginity—this is doubly true in the case of experienced partners like Diane. Ironically, then, it is especially difficult and perilous to disguise virginity from precisely the kind of part- ners that the stigmatized preferred. Insofar as sexual experience tends to increase with age and people tend to choose partners near them in age, older virgins like Bill may find it particularly difficult to conceal their sta- tus. Indeed, the men whose partners uncovered their hidden virginity/in- experience were all 18 or older when they lost their virginity with women who were similarly aged but sexually more practiced.

As if proving himself sexually inept were not enough, Bill was also ter- rified that he’d gotten an STI. The morning after his night with Diane, he “woke up and had this big nodule on the side of my penis and I was con- vinced that I had herpes.” A doctor assured him that the spot was “just a pimple,” but that did little to relieve Bill’s concern. Nor did the physical sensations of vaginal sex live up to his lofty expectations. “I expected it to be more . . . physically pleasurable than it was,” he said, “the way I had heard it talked about. It just, my first experience in no way near matched that. I didn’t feel the ecstasy.” All things considered, Bill said, “It was a dreadful experience.”

Bill did find some consolation in knowing that he’d lost his virginity with an extremely attractive partner and in being able to tell his friends that he’d had sex with a woman they’d all desired.

It just felt like, “Oh my God, I’ve just had sex with this gorgeous woman.” And it was like, it was more important that I could say that and know that and, it was much more enjoyable than the actual experi- ence itself. . . . It was like a trophy, you know. And then it was nice that my friends wanted to know what happened. And, you know, I was, it was wonderful to be able to tell them that I had sex with her.

He carefully concealed the fact that he had lost his virginity with Diane, however. “I think in later years I’ve talked about when I lost my virginity, who it was with,” Bill explained. “But I don’t think, I think a certain amount of time had to have passed. . . . I had to get some years beyond it.” He prolonged his deception partly in order to hide the fact that he had been lying; but he also worried that the stigma might taint him even after it was gone (as many stigmas do).
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Being derided for his past stigma was a very real possibility for Bill, who had, as he saw it, remained a virgin embarrassingly late in life and possibly as a result of his own shortcom- ings.

Consolations notwithstanding, Bill felt so mortified by his clumsy per- formance—and his long-standing fear of contracting an STI was magni- fied to such an extent—that when Diane propositioned him on a subse- quent visit to campus, he declined. He said:

She came back on subsequent weekends, and wanted more of the same. I just was totally turned off by her, because of what had happened, my penis, I had a big nodule on. . . . And then she started telling me that she

thought she might be pregnant . . . and it was like, “Oh my God, so not only do I, I narrowly escaped disease and death, she’s telling me she thinks she might be pregnant.” So it was terrible, it was a terrible experi- ence.

In fact, Bill swore off vaginal sex for the next 3 years, although he did continue to exchange oral sex with casual partners, a practice about which he felt “safe.”
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When he at last gave vaginal sex another try, it was with a girlfriend—not because he’d come to disapprove of casual sex, but because he felt being in a relationship insulated him from derision and disease. He said:

The next girlfriend I had, in my senior year of college . . . was the first person that I ever engaged in a sexual relationship with where we had sex on a regular basis, not just like once or twice and that’s the end of it.

. . . And that was the first time that I was able to have sex and . . . have some, good feelings about it. And that to me was, that was a step in a more positive direction.

Bill’s later experiences might conceivably have prompted him to revise his understanding of virginity. Yet Bill and the two other men who felt de- graded by their virginity-loss experiences were the only ones in this group who did
not
ultimately reject the stigma metaphor for the passage alter- native.
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Although it is possible that they were more attached to this tra- ditionally masculine perspective than other men who held it, it is more likely that the nature of their virginity-loss encounters served to reinforce, rather than challenge, their interpretations. Where people like Kendall felt relieved of their stigma following virginity loss, men like Bill felt just as stigmatized as before, albeit in a new way.

The very nature of stigma — which involves being labeled by more powerful persons—ensures that virgins who see themselves as stigma- tized are always to some extent at the mercy of others, especially their sexual partners. Like many who shared his interpretive stance, Bill tried to protect himself from shame and ridicule by concealing his inexperience from the woman with whom he had sex. But for a variety of reasons, not least their discrepant levels of sexual experience, Diane discovered Bill’s lack of expertise. To make matters worse, she reacted harshly, as people are wont to do when faced with stigmatized individuals. Her response probably would have been even more severe if she and Bill had been dat-

ing. For example, Dan Levy, a 29-year-old White heterosexual chef, be- lieved that his girlfriend refused to continue having sex with him after he lost his virginity with her (at age 18) precisely because she surmised that he had hidden his virginity. By making fun of Bill, Diane may even have been attempting to influence their sexual encounter in one of the few ways women are “allowed” to.
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In retrospect, Bill believed that Diane might have responded more sym- pathetically if he had confessed his virginity; but he maintained that such an admission had been impossible in practice. Not only was it too em- barrassing to admit he was a virgin, but what if Diane had laughed at his confession, then refused to have sex with him? He’d feel degraded and still be a virgin! As it was, Bill suffered from knowing that Diane, not he, had been in control of their encounter. Worse yet, because he (like many men) saw shedding the stigma of virginity as a way of proving his mas- culinity, the way he lost his virginity left him feeling distinctly unmanly.