Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (25 page)

think that’s why people freak out, because they haven’t changed, they, their lives haven’t been turned around. They’re not suddenly Men, with capital M’s, and Women with capital W’s. They’re still, same people, same fears, same everything that they had going into it, but now they have the added burden of thinking that somehow this is all supposed to be different.

It would be more sensible, he thought, to recognize that, “for a lot of guys, it’s just fumbling and not knowing what you’re doing and thinking that you screwed up and being pretty damn sure that you sucked. And for a number of women, either being painful, unenjoyable, or just—,” he trailed off. Although his own experience had left him with “a really, re- ally, really poor opinion of the whole process of losing one’s virginity,” he was convinced that, if approached with subdued expectations and a mod- icum of care, virginity loss could be a relatively harmless step in the process of exploring one’s sexuality.

Shedding a Stigma

The stigmatized shared much in common, whether they were men or women; gay, bisexual, or straight; Black or White; raised in religious or secular families.
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Like Francis Cornworth of eBay fame, these women and men approached virginity loss above all as a means for getting rid of a shameful condition, for casting aside the sexual identity of virgin—with its attendant dorkiness, embarrassment, and social backwardness—and embracing the identity of nonvirgin, with its connotations of status, cool, and masculinity or unorthodox femininity. In short, they saw virginity loss as transforming them from one kind of person into another; as bring- ing their actual identities (who they really were), in sociologist Erving Goffman’s terms, into line with their virtual identities (who they ap- peared or wished to be). The stigmatized expressed relatively little inter- est in romance and relationships, especially compared with people who saw virginity as a gift. They focused instead on the physical pleasures of sex and worried little, if at all, about having “perfect” virginity-loss en- counters.

Given their relatively minimal expectations, the stigmatized were more easily satisfied with their virginity-loss encounters than their counterparts in the gift group. Even so, there were some conditions under which they believed virginity loss should not take place. As Bill and several other men learned from unpleasant experience, losing one’s virginity with a partner who derided you for your sexual inexperience wasn’t much of an im- provement over retaining the stigma of virginity. Ed was adamant that being coerced into virginity loss was worse than spending a few more years hiding the stigma.

Stigmatized men and women further differed from devotees of the gift and process metaphors in the tremendous effort they put into the im- pressions they made on others. Every one of them reported actively or passively disguising their virginity from friends or peers on at least some occasions, and many had hidden their virginity from sexual partners as well. This distinctive bent toward concealment was the chief reason that the stigmatized were the group least likely to use birth control or practice safer sex.

Broad social changes can have a profound impact on individual lives, as the stories in this chapter demonstrate. The most obvious change con- cerns the gendering of the stigma metaphor. The belief that men’s virgin- ity is stigmatizing was well established in American culture before the

oldest participants in my study were born. As one might predict, a larger proportion of the men I spoke with saw their virginity as a stigma than did the women. But the stigma metaphor was not rare among the women. By the time Emma and the other women in this group were nearing ado- lescence, the feminist movement and new media images of feminine sex- uality had helped make this perspective on virginity loss available to young women.
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The younger women I interviewed were considerably more likely than their older sisters to have interpreted virginity as a stigma. Approaching virginity as a stigma allowed them to challenge the sexual double standard and defy traditional feminine norms.

The feminist movement has also helped transform understandings of virginity loss with regard to coerced sex; Americans now recognize that such a thing as acquaintance rape exists. Ed’s ultimate decision to exclude coerced encounters from his definition of virginity loss suggests that the feminist argument that rape is a form of violence, not sex, has gradually pervaded mainstream American culture.

Despite changes in the gendering of the stigma metaphor, traditional beliefs about gender and sexuality have endured, helping determine the power relations between virgins and their partners. The very nature of stigmas ensures that virgins who favor the stigma metaphor will always be somewhat beholden to their sexual partners. Yet, Bill’s and Emma’s stories show us how social norms about gender and sexuality interact with the less and more powerful roles of the virgin and partner, in ways that tend to empower female virgins while disempowering their male counterparts. One’s gender had precisely the opposite effect among gifters, with relatively powerless gift givers suffering further disadvan- tages if they were women.

Examining the relationship between gender and the stigma metaphor highlights the reciprocal relationship between interpretations of virginity and social identities more generally. The people I spoke with were drawn to the metaphor in part because of their childhood sexual socialization; but they also favored it because of the kinds of social identities it allowed them to construct. Given the popular equation of virginity with homo- sexuality, men like Bill and Marty approached virginity loss as a public demonstration of their heterosexuality, while Kendall and others used it to test the suspicion that they might be gay.
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For these men, losing the stigma of virginity also provided a way of claiming a traditional kind of masculinity; whereas for women like Emma, it signified achieving a lib- erated, sex-positive sort of femininity. Having a denigrating virginity-loss

encounter like Bill’s meant having one’s masculinity called into question. These gendered meanings varied further depending on the virgin’s racial/ethnic background. In a society where racism shapes access to re- sources as well as understandings of sexuality, African American men may approach shedding the stigma of virginity as a practical avenue for proving masculinity, whereas White women may view it as a means of re- jecting the stereotype of sexually pure femininity. In short, despite the similar beliefs and behaviors it fosters, the stigma metaphor takes on dif- ferent nuances depending on individuals’ intersecting gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic identities.

A religious upbringing and identification appeared to have had little ef- fect on the interpretive preferences of the stigmatized, especially as com- pared with gifters. Many of the stigmatized came from families that were not particularly devout or were actively skeptical about the religious tra- ditions to which they belonged. Others, like Kendall, found the teachings of the churches they attended too extreme, and too different from the opinions they heard all around them, to take seriously.

Interestingly, although the men and women in the stigma group learned about different possible interpretations of virginity from the same sources as gifters—family, friends, mass media, school, and religious in- stitutions—the stigmatized received less consistent messages about vir- ginity. Every gifter had at least one parent who vocally supported the gift metaphor, and they typically reported that their close friends had shared their parents’ beliefs. In contrast, many of the stigmatized told me that they weren’t altogether sure what their parents thought about virginity. Others, like Ed and Bill, had one parent who clearly disdained virginity, even as the other framed it as precious. People in the stigma group also remembered being surrounded by friends and acquaintances who viewed virginity as shameful and embarrassing. Not surprisingly, friends’ en- dorsements took precedence over equivocal or unknown parental beliefs. And, although both groups of young people were avid consumers of the diverse visions of virginity in the mass media, they differentially attended to the media that reinforced their preexisting interpretive inclinations. For example, Emma McCabe and Kelly Lewis (profiled in chapter 3) both consumed the same sex-themed teen movies, magazines like
Seventeen
and
Cosmopolitan,
and the novel,
Forever.
But where Kelly took to heart those images that matched her mother’s and friends’ vision of virginity as a gift, Emma gave credence to the messages that confirmed her and her peers’ impression that virginity was stigmatizing.

The vast majority of the men and women in my study who lost their virginity, seeing it as a stigma, told me that certain experiences—disap- pointment with the physical aspects of sex, coming out as gay, or merely being released from their stigma—inspired them to reconceptualize vir- ginity loss as a step in the process of growing up. Almost one-third of the people I interviewed had, however, interpreted virginity loss as a process

—or rite of passage—while they were still virgins. It is to their experi- ences that I now turn.

5

A Natural Step

Margaret Mead’s best-selling volumes on South Pacific youth, published between 1928 and 1935, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s sensationally titled 1929 monograph,
The Sexual Lives of Savages,
introduced educated Americans to the concept of puberty rites—ritualized celebrations of an individual’s passage from childhood to adolescence or adulthood.
1
An- thropologists noted that these transitions typically entailed a shift from relative asexuality to potential or actual sexual activity, often marked by virginity loss (customarily defined as first vaginal sex). Virginity loss ac- cordingly came to be understood as a
rite of passage
through which boys were transformed into men and girls into women.
2
In some non-Western societies, virginity loss was closely associated with marriage, as it is in Judeo-Christian tradition; in other societies, the two passages could be separable, a fact that, at the time, many Americans and Europeans found disturbingly “uncivilized.”
3

Once Americans viewed virginity loss as a rite of passage in other cul- tures, it took but a small leap to train that interpretive lens on themselves. The popular reach of the passage/process metaphor is evident in any number of semiautobiographical recollections of the 1940s.
4
Although men penned the majority of these reminiscences, anthropologists applied the rite of passage concept to both female and male virginity loss; the per- spective therefore offered an implicit alternative to the sexual double standard embodied in the gift and stigma metaphors.
5

As college enrollments swelled following the Second World War, more and more young Americans had the opportunity to take anthropology courses in which they learned that virginity loss could be interpreted as a rite of passage. By the late 1950s, as the baby-boom generation began to enter adolescence, reassuring anxious parents with anthropological in- sights had become something of a cottage industry, with Margaret Mead at its helm.
6
It was in this context that movie director William Asher re-

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leased his 1963 youth hit,
Beach Party.
Primarily a vehicle for singing stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, the romantic comedy clev- erly unfurled its central love story through the eyes of a culturally tone- deaf “developmental biologist, social anthropologist, and explorer” in- tent on recording the sexual mores of American youth. In the film, Dr. Robert O. Sutwell (Bob Cummings) has made his name studying puberty rites (his term) in the South Pacific. But for his latest project, the bearded and bespectacled Sutwell has decided to scrutinize college-age surfers (all male) and their female friends, whom he describes as “a true subculture

—they live in a society as primitive as the aborigine of New Guinea.” Among the titles he’s considering for his eventual book are
Post-Adoles- cent Surfing Subculture, The Behavior Pattern of the Young Adult and Its Relation to Primitive Tribes,
and, with a broad wink at Alfred Kinsey’s best-selling scientific study of sexual behavior,
The Sutwell Report.

Armed with a telescope, camera, and tape recorder, Sutwell observes the “kids” as they surf, dance, and flirt on the beach and at a local beat- nik club. His attention inevitably centers on the crowd’s informal leaders, Frankie (Frankie Avalon) and Dolores (Annette Funicello), whose ro- mance wavers when Dolores’s “cold feet” stop her from sharing a beach cottage with Frankie, “all alone . . . just like we’re married.” When Sutwell rescues Dolores from the clutches of a local biker gang, she agrees to become his “first contact” (i.e., key informant). Finding “Bob” re- freshingly mature for not making sexual advances on her, Dolores con- fides that she intends to remain a virgin until she marries and that she hopes Frankie wises up—and rebuffs the blonde bombshell he’s currently chasing—before it’s too late.