Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (33 page)

Before Kate became a born-again Christian, she took a pragmatic ap- proach to sex. In high school and college, she and her friends had shared what she described as, “The typical view of . . . sex. Which is just, quote, ‘Be responsible about it, but it doesn’t really matter [morally].’” Virgin-

ity loss represented a significant, if value neutral, “turning point.” Kate explained:

I expected [virginity loss] to be a big deal in the sense of. . . . You’re not married one day and you’re married the next day, and it’s this whole huge life change. . . . You are one thing one day and all of a sudden you can never say that you’re that thing again. . . . To me, in my mind, that was a very big deal. Not because it was a moral thing to do or an im- moral thing, but just because that’s what. . . . People talked about it as being such a big deal.

In short, she saw virginity loss as a rite of passage.

Not surprisingly, Kate’s early sexual history resembles that of other women and men who favored the process metaphor. She had been curi- ous about sex, but not in such a hurry that she couldn’t wait for a part- ner who mattered to her. “The first person should be someone you care about and then after that, you can kind of do whatever you want—that’s what I used to think,” she said. Starting in the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Kate had a handful of “short-lived boyfriend-girl- friend relationship things” in which sexual contact was confined to “kiss- ing and like, you know, having a guy like feel you up.” She laughed re- calling the terms she and her friends had used: “First base and second base—that’s what we called it then.”

Kate had just turned 16 when she started dating Jack, the “first boyfriend [whom] I had for a long enough time that [genital petting] . . . happened more than once.” Although Jack was a year younger than Kate, he had lost his virginity with a previous girlfriend. He told Kate that he’d like to have sex with her, too, but did not pressure her. After they’d seen each other for “a couple of months—that’s like dog years in high school,” Kate decided she really liked Jack and was ready to lose her virginity. Looking back, she said, “I don’t think we had a wonderful relationship. I thought we did at the time. It was probably an okay one, for high school.” The pair spent weeks preparing for the night they’d first have sex, discussing everything from details, “like . . . how the room would be, or how the music would be,” to Kate’s insistence on safer sex. “Besides, like, just getting pregnant and having sex, I was thinking about stuff like AIDS. . . . It was understood that he would wear a condom,” she said.

One weekend, when Jack’s parents “went away . . . and I said I was sleeping at my girlfriend’s house,” Kate and he had sex. Kate found vagi-

nal penetration “horribly painful,” which she attributed in retrospect to their mutual inexperience and the tension of trying something new.

I was . . . tense and maybe nervous. And also the fact that I don’t think he really knew what he was doing enough to get a woman aroused, where it wouldn’t be painful. Because, you know, he’s a young kid.

Virginity loss both was and wasn’t the “big deal” Kate had anticipated. “I didn’t feel like I had changed,” she said, “but I felt like everyone knew.” Her overall approach to sex also changed. “I think that made it kind of a given then, if you did it once, that you were going to do it in all your relationships after,” she explained.

Kate and Jack’s relationship lasted 6 months in all. They had sex only a few more times “because of . . . being in high school and when would you do it?” By the end of her freshman year in college, Kate had had sex with 3 or 4 more boyfriends and had started thinking of sex as “more of a pleasurable experience and not just practice. Which I think was proba- bly all it was in high school, because it wasn’t ever good.” Discovering pleasure was not, however, to be the last, or even the biggest, turning point in Kate’s sexual career.

The summer after her junior year in college, Kate found herself “think- ing a lot about God.” Not wanting to remain in the Roman Catholic Church, in which she’d “always felt kind of alienated,” Kate wound up joining what she later discovered was a Pentecostal congregation. Her newfound faith didn’t affect her sexual life at first. She explained:

I was still dating the guy that I dated [before joining the church] . . . and [our] behavior didn’t change at all. . . . I didn’t even really know that the Bible says that . . . sex is a sin before marriage, because I never read it.

. . . I didn’t have any other Christians to talk about this with. That might have said, you know, “Maybe you should think about what you’re doing,” or, “Here is the scripture that says this.”

Kate broke up with that boyfriend shortly before college graduation. Later that summer, she had lunch with a man she had dated in high school. In the intervening years, Keith had also become a born-again Christian and he was concerned about Kate’s lax approach to sex. He told her, “You know, Kate, you shouldn’t be having sex. . . . God doesn’t

want you to,” and explained that
he
wasn’t having sex. Kate was half shocked, half dismissive.

I was like, “No way, you? You are not!” And he’s like, “No, I’m not, I’m not doing it anymore.” And I was like, “Right.” And so he tried to tell me about . . . what he believed is God’s plan for his life and how he should . . . live his life as far as dealing with women. And basically . . . what he believed was that God would lead him to whomever he was supposed to marry. And that he wouldn’t have to go around dating the entire world by process of elimination to try to find the, quote, “One.”

Keith called his decision “born-again virginity.” Kate had heard the term once before, from a similar source as Andrew Lin: “that really dumb show” on MTV. One of the episodes featured “a girl who was a born- again virgin,” but at the time, Kate said, “I think that kind of went in one ear and out the other.”

Even after she heard Keith’s story, and knew that the Bible forbade sex before marriage, Kate said, “The whole not having sex thing seemed to- tally ridiculous to me.” But, over the course of the next year or so, Kate began talking with people at her church—many of whom shared Keith’s beliefs about virginity—and gradually began to think that she ought to change her ways. She recounted:

So finally I said, “All right God, if you don’t want me to do it, then . . . you have to keep me from doing it and I can’t do that, because I don’t want to. . . .” And He did. . . . Like my, the way I viewed [sex] and the way I felt about it changed in a dramatic but kind of slow way. And got to the point where I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I didn’t miss it and I didn’t think, “I’m missing out,” or . . . I wouldn’t go out with a guy and be like, you know, “Well that would be really great.” It didn’t even come to my mind. . . . I had been totally and completely changed.

Like Keith, Kate referred to her new mode of behavior as born-again vir- ginity. Though she knew she couldn’t be a “true” virgin when she mar- ried, she said: “My intent is . . . not to have sex again until I am married and . . . I guess that would be considered losing your second virginity.”

For about a year after undergoing this change, Kate continued to date but limited sexual intimacies to kissing and petting above the waist. Yet,

she increasingly found herself pondering God’s instructions for “not just sex, but dating in general.” She explained:

[I]f God wants you to get married . . . He’s chosen someone for you and you don’t need to go through this process of elimination. . . . [Keith] was so committed to his future wife that he didn’t want to cheat on her now. And I was like, “What? You’re not even married. You don’t even know her.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but she’s, right now, she’s my wife, wherever she is. . . . So anybody I go out with, it’s almost like cheating on her and she the same for me.”

By the time I interviewed Kate, she was intent on applying these prin- ciples in her own life. “I don’t date anybody now,” she said, “and that’s so—like, to be a born-again virgin is almost, like, ancillary. . . . It’s not even the point really, for me now.” She admits to having “thoughts about [sex], because I think that’s human nature,” but intends not to kiss any man except her eventual husband. Like Carrie, Kate now believes that physical intimacy hinders a person’s ability to develop a truly lasting re- lationship. As she put it:

[M]y goal is not just to go out with a guy and not have sex. My goal is to find the person that I want to marry and then have a relationship that’s not based on sex, but that’s based on friendship and love and a commitment to God, and not just emotional and physical things. I

know I don’t want my marriage to be based on something that fleeting.

I felt almost cruel when I asked Kate whether she would do things dif- ferently if she could go back in time. But she refused to berate herself for choices she couldn’t undo. On the one hand, she felt:

It would be even nicer if I never kissed a guy . . . ’Cause then, when I got married, everything I experienced with my husband would be just him. And there would be nothing to compare it to . . . he would never have to imagine me with someone else.

But at the same time, she said, “Everything I’ve done is, kind of made me the way I am today. And . . . by not doing that, I would never get to . . . experience God’s grace in that way” or develop as much “compassion . . . for other people.”

Since the virginity-as-worship perspective shares the gift metaphor’s emphasis on love and relationship, it is not surprising that Carrie and Kate, the only study participants who saw their virginity in these religious terms, are both women. Other researchers and I have found women more inclined than men to view virginity as a gift, and also to hold premarital virginity as an ideal.
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Both inclinations are fostered by traditional gender beliefs and serve as ways for young women to enact traditionally feminine identities.
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Not coincidentally, many evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches advocate the pursuit of traditional gender roles in all realms of life, including the sexual.
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Nor is it surprising that the two who saw virginity as an act of worship are both devout and active members of evangelical churches, for conser- vative Christian institutions are the chief proponents of this perspective. None of the other former or current conservative Protestants I inter- viewed had personally thought of their virginity in these terms, however, though a few mentioned knowing people who did.
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To the extent that my respondents are broadly representative of evangelical and fundamen- talist Americans, this finding could suggest that relatively few conserva- tive Christians find the act-of-worship frame appealing. Alternatively, given Kate and Carrie’s relative youth, it may be that future generations of conservative Christians will adopt the virginity-as-worship perspective in greater numbers.
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Whether the act-of-worship metaphor will gain currency outside the community in which it originated remains to be seen. Conservative Protestant denominations rank among the fastest-growing religious groups in America, and moral conservatives currently enjoy a great deal of influence over national, state, and local sex education policy.
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If these trends persist, an increasing number of young men and women from all religious backgrounds will be exposed to the belief that virginity is an act of worship. It is possible that, as people discover the metaphor, they will adopt it as their own. Something of the sort appears to have taken place with secondary virginity during the early 1990s. Yet, Andrew Lin’s secu- lar account of becoming a born-again virgin suggests that nondevout and/or non-Christian youth are liable to adapt “Christian” sexual con- cepts to their own circumstances and belief systems. Andrew decided to retain his secondary virginity not until marriage but until he was in a committed love relationship. Likewise, a young person might opt to honor God with her virginity until graduating from parochial school or falling in love with a fellow believer, rather than until marriage.

Moreover, American society has been growing steadily more secular since the 1960s, the revival of Christian conservatism notwithstanding; and a majority of American adults believe that sex before marriage is ac- ceptable, for young adults if not adolescents.
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Secular adults are not likely to encourage young people to view their virginity as an act of wor- ship (although they may promote approaching it as a gift); and those who approve of premarital sex are not likely to advocate preserving virginity until marriage (though they may applaud maintaining it until late ado- lescence or early adulthood). Also arguing against a wholesale future shift toward the act-of-worship and gift perspectives is my finding that a ma- jority of men and women who lose their own virginity thinking of it as a stigma subsequently reject that metaphor in favor of the process/passage alternative. Such people, as adults, may encourage their children to inter- pret virginity loss from the start as a step in the process of growing up.

In short, my research reveals the contradictory influence of two trends

—ongoing secularization and the expansion of conservative Christianity

—on virginity loss in the United States today. With the exception of ac- tive conservative Protestants and devout Christians of other denomina- tions (who tended to favor the gift metaphor), the majority of women and men in my study did not attribute their beliefs about virginity to religious training they received as youths; nor did they appear to favor certain metaphors as a way of enacting their religious identities. When people from different religious backgrounds shared an interpretation of virgin- ity, they reported very similar beliefs and experiences (with the partial ex- ception, among gifters, of devout/conservative Christians’ greater propensity to describe virginity at marriage as ideal).
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Other scholars have likewise observed a diminishing association between religiosity and sexual beliefs and behavior, except among conservative-religious and/or very devout youth.
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