Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (35 page)

drew on the passage metaphor
not
to achieve what they saw as the chief goal of virginity loss — learning something — no matter what went “wrong” in the process. The fact that learning is largely an internal ac- complishment moreover helped them maintain a sense of agency during and after virginity loss, regardless of their partners’ level of experience, and whatever their gender or sexual identity.

Processers practiced birth control or safer sex almost as often as gifters. Prompted by their understanding of virginity, they chose partners they knew well, either romantically or as a friend, in hopes that doing so would facilitate gradual sexual exploration, greater knowledge, or heightened pleasure. Ironically, however, the belief that virginity loss was a “natural” step in a process also resulted in a few failures to use birth control/safer sex. (These failures were exceptions, not the rule.) All in all, viewing virginity loss as a step in a process tends to enhance physical and emotional well-being, and to sustain sexual agency, for women and men alike.

Although two interviews are too few to permit a definitive assessment of the act-of-worship perspective, a brief discussion of its possible effects is warranted. My conversations with Kate O’Connor and Carrie Matthews suggest that people whose religious beliefs encourage them to treat premarital virginity as an expression of faith do reap spiritual ben- efits from doing so. If they realize their intentions—eschewing sexual in- tercourse and most other sexual contact before marriage—they will be well protected against unintended pregnancies and STIs. Yet, research shows that the vast majority of teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage wind up breaking their pledges; and when they do, they are significantly less likely than nonpledgers to practice safer sex.
3
Other studies, drawing on in-depth interviews, find that adolescent women who intend to remain chaste are less likely to take precautions when they do have sex.
4
Moreover, women and men who see premarital virginity as an act of worship but fail to live up to their own high standards may suffer guilt and emotional distress.
5

That said, my cautious prediction is that young people who adopt the act-of-worship metaphor out of deep religious convictions are likely— provided they have peers, parents, and schools that support their goals— to enjoy physically and emotionally positive virginity-loss experiences, possibly on their wedding nights. But youth who lack spiritual incentives to embrace this stance are unlikely to benefit to the same degree. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them doing more than going through the motions

—and they would have little motivation for doing even that, especially when other, possibly more appealing, interpretive alternatives are avail- able. Notably, until same-sex marriage is a viable option, lesbigay youth are left out of the act-of-worship equation entirely.

Comparing the differential effects of the gift, stigma, passage/process, and act-of-worship metaphors, as experienced by the people I inter- viewed, suggests that viewing virginity loss as a rite of passage is, on bal- ance, most conducive to physical health, emotional well-being, and the exercise of sexual agency—for men and women alike. Parents, policy makers, sex educators, and others who wish to enhance the sexual health and well-being of future generations would, therefore, do well to encour- age young Americans, one-on-one and through public policies, to ap- proach virginity loss as a step in a process.

Insofar as certain metaphors for virginity are emphasized by different models of sex education, I recommend a turn away from abstinence-only curricula and urge a move toward comprehensive education. Absti- nence-only programs tend to frame virginity as a gift or as an act of wor- ship, presenting the stigma metaphor as the implicit alternative, whereas comprehensive curricula tend to depict virginity loss as a step in a learn- ing process. The gift metaphor, while encouraging contraception and safer sex, potentially diminishes women’s emotional well-being and agency; the stigma metaphor discourages safer sex and potentially distresses and dis- enfranchises men. Further study may reveal that the act-of-worship frame promotes well-being and a sense of agency for young people who share its religious worldview; but there are compelling reasons to be- lieve that it will have different effects on less- or otherwise-religious youth.

It would, of course, be possible to develop sex education programs that combine an understanding of virginity as a rite of passage with an emphasis on sexual abstinence until marriage (or lesbigay commitment ceremony). Yet several factors argue against doing so. Used consistently and correctly, condoms and oral contraceptives are virtually as effective in preventing STIs and pregnancy, respectively, as sexual abstinence is as- sumed to be. Data from western Europe indicate that 16- and 17-year- olds are capable of having sex without getting pregnant or contracting STIs. And when chastity-minded teens do have sex, they are much less likely to practice safer sex than peers who foresee sex in their futures. Fur- thermore, studies have repeatedly demonstrated that comprehensive sex education programs are effective in changing teens’ conduct in ways that

reduce rates of pregnancy and STIs, while abstinence-only curricula have not been shown to have similar effects.

In addition, lacking spiritual incentives to postpone sex until marriage, young men and women who forgo responsible sexual activity before (or instead of) marriage merely seem to lose an opportunity to benefit from the emotional and intellectual growth that sexual relationships can bring.
6
With the exception of Kate O’Conner and Linda Jenkins (a devout Presbyterian who saw virginity as a gift), none of the nonvirgins in my study suggested that it would have been advantageous to postpone sex past mid- to late adolescence. In fact, it seems likely that encouraging young people to remain virgins until marriage would promote early mar- riage—teens who take virginity pledges are twice as likely to be married by age 23 as their nonpledging counterparts, for example. Early mar- riages are undesirable for several reasons, not least that, other factors being equal, they are disproportionately likely to end in divorce.
7

In sum, a comprehensive approach to sex education, in which virgin- ity is framed as a step in the process of growing up, appears likely to ben- efit a majority of young women and men, whereas an abstinence-only ap- proach, in which virginity is depicted as a gift or act of worship, is likely to be detrimental on balance. Putting this recommendation into practice may be easier said than done, however.

Rethinking Sex Education

Abstinence-based sex education has become well entrenched in American public policy since its (re)emergence in the early 1980s.
8
Even during the moderate Clinton administration, moral conservatives won major victo- ries in their struggle to transform sex education, most notably the expan- sion of federal funding and other structural supports that were put in place under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Abstinence-only sex education has received even stronger support from George W. Bush, who promised in 2000 to “elevate abstinence education from an after- thought to an urgent policy,” and whose Office of Faith-Based and Com- munity Initiatives is poised to channel even more federal monies toward the development of sex education programs by religious organizations.
9
The Bush administration has been harshly criticized by the Union of Con- cerned Scientists for “distort[ing] science-based performance measures to test whether abstinence-only programs were proving effective” and for

ignoring, even suppressing, the scientific evidence in support of compre- hensive sex education.
10
Several high-ranking scientists at the Centers for Disease Control resigned in protest over a trend toward “promot[ing] condoms as ineffective in preventing disease” and “omit[ting] informa- tion about contraception on web sites.”
11
With Bush winning a second term in office, abstinence advocates are well placed to capitalize further on their successes thus far.
12

It remains difficult for Americans to talk about sexuality in the sex- positive pragmatic terms favored by our western European cousins. Moral conservatives have been able to capitalize on a historic legacy of framing sexuality, particularly nonmarital sexuality, as inherently im- moral, stigmatizing, and negative, such that they control the terms of de- bate around sexuality and virginity in the United States today.
13
Parents, teachers, and policy makers who have publicly opposed strict abstinence- only measures have been branded “perverts” and suffered damage to their reputations and even careers. Perhaps the best-known case of this in- volves former U.S. surgeon general Jocelyn Elders, who was fired in part for suggesting that public school boards
consider
including the topic of masturbation in sex education curricula.
14
The ability of the moderate mainstream to disrupt moral conservatives’ dominance and have their own voices heard depends in part on developing new ways of speaking about sexuality.

Unfortunately, research findings about the comparative effectiveness of sex education programs are not likely to sway parties that favor par- ticular stances toward virginity on the grounds of their moral superiority, nor, in all likelihood, are my findings about the relative merits of differ- ent popular metaphors for virginity. Notably, moral conservatives are in- creasingly framing their advocacy of abstinence education in terms of health and well-being, rather than moral/religious superiority, a move presumably intended to influence secular opinion in their favor. And yet, moral-religious conservatives represent only a minority of American par- ents and the general public. Opinion polls routinely find that the vast ma- jority of U.S. adults approve of sex education programs in public schools and want them to include information about abstinence
and
about birth control and safer sex.
15
Although most American adults disapprove of sex among teenagers, especially young teens, relatively few condemn consen- sual sex between unmarried adults.
16
Indeed, starting with the baby- boom generation, most Americans lost their virginity before marriage, typically while they were adolescents. Furthermore, decades of high di-

vorce rates have left many people skeptical about the viability of youth- ful marriage.
17
Together, these opinion trends suggest that a majority of American parents would support sex education programs that promote virginity until late adolescence or young adulthood, but not until mar- riage.

Advocates of comprehensive sex education express frustration that people who agree with their position remain aloof from the fray, such that the minority control the policy agenda. However, free speech ac- tivists, led by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), have joined the debate on sex education, arguing that the federal abstinence- only guidelines represent an unacceptable bounding of teachers’ speech.
18
Parents in several states have filed—and won—lawsuits against absti- nence-only curricula on the grounds of medical inaccuracy.
19
In late 2004, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman released a report demonstrat- ing that the majority of federally funded abstinence-only curricula “con- tain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health”; it received heavy press coverage and prompted numerous calls for critical examinations of current sex education policy.
20
The ACLU has argued that Sex Respect textbooks treat gender and marriage in ways that violate state laws prohibiting discrimination “based on gender, marital status, sexual orientation and religion.”
21
And a wide variety of public health and medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and American Public Health Association, have voiced support for comprehensive sex education in public schools.
22

Additional challenges to the ascendancy of abstinence-only sex educa- tion come from new developments in media and information technology. Teen magazines have offered a source of accurate and increasingly non- judgmental information about birth control and safer sex since the 1980s.
23
More recently, nonprofit organizations and media producers have formed partnerships to incorporate sexual health-related themes into top-rated teen television programs like
Dawson’s Creek
and
Felic- ity.
24
Less formally, a growing number of pop, hip-hop, and R&B per- formers have been touting the benefits of condom use in their songs, as when Jay-Z raps, “I wrapped the rubber tighter.” Perhaps most impor- tant, the Internet and rapid expansion of personal computers have not only enabled people to access all manner of sexuality-related material from virtually any geographic location, but have also inspired a steady stream of new content, such as personal Web pages and ’zines in which

teenage girls semipublicly share their experiences of wrestling with com- plex sexual issues.
25

Why Virginity Loss Is Significant Today

My analysis of virginity loss in contemporary America would not be com- plete without a closer examination of the significance currently attributed to virginity loss by youth, parents, laypeople, and policy makers alike. Specifically, it is worth asking whether treating virginity loss as one of the most important sexual experiences of a person’s life—a tendency that is particularly pronounced when virginity is framed as a gift or stigma—ul- timately works to young people’s advantage or disadvantage. I recognize the apparent irony of concluding a book devoted to virginity loss with a critique of the tendency to endow virginity loss with significance. Yet, I believe that it is possible—even necessary—to mount such a critique, not least because understanding the potential benefits and costs of this ten- dency can help American parents, educators, and policy makers guide youth more effectively through their early sexual careers.