Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (47 page)

a
Figures include virgins’ beliefs at time of interview.

b
“Virginity is irrelevant” and “virginity as an act of worship.”

c
Percentages total more than 100 because some participants reinterpreted virginity over time.

table 3

Interpretations of Virginity at Time of Virginity Loss and Ever, by Sexual Identity*

At Time of Virginity Loss
a
Ever

* Sexual identity at time of interview.

a
Figures include virgins’ beliefs at time of interview.

b
“Virginity is irrelevant” and “virginity as an act of worship.”

c
Percentages total more than 100 because some participants reinterpreted virginity over time.

table 4

Interpretation of Virginity Ever, by Gender and Age Group

a
Percentages total more than 100 because some participants reinterpreted virginity over time.

Notes
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notes t o the intr od uction

1. Bernstein, 2004. Headlines cited: Jeff Barker, “A Is for Abstinence,”
   Balti- more Sun,
   July 26, 2001; Lorraine Ali and Jule Scelfo, “Choosing Virginity,”
   Newsweek,
   December 9, 2002; Alex Tresniowski, Shermakaye Bass, Vicki Bane, and John Slania, “Like a Virgin (Sort Of),”
   People,
   September 9, 2002; Tamar Lewin, “More in High School Are Virgins, Study Finds,”
   New York Times,
   Sep- tember 29, 2002; Tamar Lewin, “1 in 5 Teenagers Has Sex before 15, Study Finds,”
   New York Times,
   May 20, 2003; Michelle Tauber et al., “Young Teens and Sex,”
   People,
   January 31, 2005.
   

2. Ingrassia 1994, 59.
   

3. Ingrassia 1994, 64.
   

4. “Conservative Christian” is an umbrella term referring to conservative Protestants — denominations with evangelical and fundamentalist worldviews (e.g., Southern Baptists, Pentacostals) and doctrinally conservative groups such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses—as well as to Roman Catholics with sim- ilarly conservative beliefs about social issues like abortion (Roof and McKinney 1987).
   

5. On changing depictions of adolescent sexuality in movies, see Douglas 1994, Lewis 1992. On virginity-loss films specifically, see Carpenter 2002.
   

6. The plotline involving Donna’s virginity was already pronounced in 1994 (Rexfelis).
   

7. Singh and Darroch 1999; Ku et al. 1998; U.S. Census Bureau 2001.
   

8. As in a
   Penthouse Forum
   (1985) letter titled, “De-Virginized — Both Ways” (i.e., through vaginal and anal sex).
   

9. For example, when survey researchers use the term “virgin” as shorthand for people who have never had vaginal sex or when sex educators advocate ab- stinence as the best protection against pregnancy and STIs, they imbue virginity loss with exceptional significance.
   

10. Solin 1996, 93.

1. Berger and Wenger (1973, 667) proposed to treat virginity as a social cat- egory rather than as a “residual category of . . . experience,” but few researchers
   

   217
   

   have followed suit. Given my interest in virginity loss as a cultural phenomenon (“What is this thing people call virginity loss?”), as well as an experience, I have chosen to retain the conventional term. That said, many study participants did not experience the transition called virginity loss as a loss of something either positive or negative.
   

2. Much of this literature additionally assumes that people who have had coitus once are thereafter “sexually active” (despite research indicating that first coitus is frequently isolated) and tends to ignore activities like oral and anal sex when designating who is sexually active. For a critique and alternative approach, see Singh and Darroch 1999.
   

3. A handful of popular volumes on virginity loss have been published (Fleming and Fleming 1975; Bouris 1993; Crosier 1993), along with a psychoan- alytic volume (Holtzman and Kulish 1997) and two memoirs (McCarthy 1997; Wolf 1997). Two early monographs were poorly documented, largely specula- tive, and focused almost exclusively on women (de Lys 1960; Nemecek 1958).
   

4. Studies addressing subjective aspects of first sex among
   heterosexual
   women
   and
   men include those by Holland, Ramazanoglu, and Thomson 1996; Rubin 1990; Sprecher, Barbee, and Schwartz 1995. Studies looking at first sex among women of
   various
   sexual orientations include Brumberg 1997, Thomp- son 1995, Tolman 1994. Wight 1994 explores sexuality among heterosexual Scottish boys.
   

5. Foucault (1978), among others, would argue that the scientific study arises out of, and enables, the impulse to social control.
   

6. Berger and Wenger 1973; Bogart et al. 2000; Kelly 2000.
   

7. Following Carrington’s (1999) example, I use the increasingly common term “lesbigay,” which includes people who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisex- ual, as an occasional alternative to variants of the more cumbersome expression, “gay, lesbian, and bisexual.”
   

18. Elder 1996; Hart 1995.

1. Further information about study participants and my research methods can be found in chapter 2 and the Methodological Appendix.
   

2. These designations by sexual identity are based on participants’ self-de- scriptions at the time of the interview. Presumably, anyone I interviewed could reevaluate their understanding of their sexual identity at some later juncture. No one I interviewed identified as queer without also identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
   

3. I chose to sample according to social class and religious background, rather than current status or practice, because people typically lose their virginity while they are dependent on their parents (or newly independent). However, my analyses take current socioeconomic status and religious beliefs and practice into account. I measured social class background by parents’ occupations and educa- tional attainment.
   

4. More specifically, I used a theoretical sampling strategy; see Glaser and Strauss 1967, Miles and Huberman 1994.
   

5. I did not have the opportunity to interview anyone raised in the Muslim or Hindu religious traditions, both of which take distinctive perspectives on gen- der, sexuality, and virginity. See, e.g., Mernissi 1991 and Kakar 1990, respec- tively.
   

6. On the utility of comparing “typical” groups to “exceptional” ones, see Goffman 1974. Born-again virginity has been examined in the popular press (Dobie 1995; Hayt 2002) and promoted in self-help literature (Keller 1999), but has not yet been the explicit subject of empirical research. Although about a dozen participants’ sexual histories included events resembling born-again vir- ginity, I interviewed only four self-professed born-again virgins.
   

7. I do not presume to explore change over time, within individual lives, in the sense that a longitudinal study can. The effects of aging/maturation and gen- erational differences are confounded in my study. Because most Americans be- come sexually active during adolescence, interviewing young adults rather than teenagers further ensured that most would be nonvirgins who could reflect on virginity loss in relation to earlier and later experiences.
   

8. Mills 1959.
   

9. HIV/AIDS was widely recognized as a serious health threat to gay men in 1982–83 and to heterosexuals several years later. Basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive in 1991.
   

10. See, e.g., Bruni 1998. I explore this issue further in Carpenter 2001a.
    

11. Twenty-two of the final 25 people I interviewed were nonvirgins.
    

12. The ability to extrapolate the distribution of a practice or belief in a probability-based sample to a larger defined population is called
    statistical gener- alizability.
    Alternatively, one can generalize that the meanings and processes ob- served in a theoretically chosen, socially diverse nonprobability-based sample will reflect those that exist in a broader social group or groups overall. Because the vagueness of qualitative expressions like “many” and “seldom” can obscure important patterns in the data, I use a combination of such words and percent- age statistics. These percentages should not be taken to imply that the distribu- tion of phenomena in my sample can be generalized to a broader population.
    

13. National surveys have documented modest regional differences in Ameri- cans’ approaches to sexuality, with residents of the New England, Pacific, and Mid-Atlantic states exhibiting relatively permissive attitudes, whereas people from the Southern Central and Mountain states hold comparatively conservative views (Laumann et al. 1994; Klassen, Williams, and Levitt 1989). Urbanites and suburbanites also tend to be more permissive about sex than their rural counter- parts. State and local control of the public school systems also contributes to re- gional variation in sexual socialization (Landry, Kaeser, and Richards 1999). As the majority of people I interviewed grew up in metropolitan areas in “permis-
    

    sive” states, my findings may not fully reflect the beliefs and experiences of the most conservative Americans. However, I deliberately sought participants with conservative stances.
    

14. Most of the participants who made a referral offered to initiate contact with the referee on my behalf. I stopped searching for new participants only when I found that every new person I interviewed raised the same general themes that I had heard before, a phenomenon often referred to as
    saturation
    (Glaser and Strauss 1967).
    

15. See Bernard 1994, Biernacki and Waldorf 1981. Scholars have found this to be true for a wide variety of topics typically perceived as very private (e.g., Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996). Although random sampling methods have successfully been used in survey research on sexuality (e.g., Laumann et al. 1994), such tech- niques are less appropriate for gathering detailed subjective accounts of the most intimate aspects of sexual life. Snowball sampling also enables the researcher to identify members of groups that are not numerically common, readily “visible,” or evenly distributed throughout a population, such as lesbigay women and men. To offset the potential for bias due to the relative homogeneity of most social networks, I drew on multiple snowballs (17 in all) and interviewed no more than 5 people in a given network (most contained 2 or 3 members).
    

16. The interview guide is available from the author on request.
    

17. Research suggests that people’s recollections of events perceived to be es- pecially salient or transformative tend to be more accurate than memories of everyday events (Denzin 1989a; Berk, Abramson, and Okami 1995; Lee and Sasser-Coen 1996). Limiting the upper age of study participants to 35 also helped ensure that participants would be able to recall their virginity-loss experi- ences in detail. The time elapsed between virginity-loss experience and interview ranged from several months to 25 years, with an average of 9 years.
    

18. Three gay men described virginity as irrelevant to their lives (see chapter 2), and two heterosexual born-again Christian women interpreted virginity as an act of worship (see chapter 6).
    

19. More specifically, I relied on the systematic procedures referred to as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967).
    

20. Lakoff and Johnson 1980. Metaphors are social; that is, they are shared and communicated among individuals and social groups.
    

21. The concept
    sexual scripts
    refers to the socially learned sets of sexual de- sires and conduct that guide people’s choices about when, where, how, why, and with whom they should be sexual (Gagnon and Simon 1973, 1987). Metaphors for virginity can also be conceptualized as frames (Goffman 1974).
    

22. Lorber 1993.
    

23. Women were twice as likely as men to have ever interpreted virginity as a gift, while men were over twice as likely to have ever seen virginity as a stigma; this gender difference was more pronounced at the time of virginity loss. Men
    

    and women were almost equally likely to have ever viewed virginity loss as a rite of passage. Lesbians and gay men were underrepresented in the gift group and overrepresented in the stigma and process groups; bisexual women and men fell somewhere in between. See Methodological Appendix for details.
    

24. See Weber 1946.
    

25. I find it useful to conceptualize metaphorical understandings of virginity loss as cultural resources (Griswold 1987) and virginity loss itself as a cultural object — one of the meaningful social symbols that make up a cultural system (Blumer 1969). Swidler (1986, 273) defines culture as the “publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning,” includ- ing formal and informal practices, skills, habits, and styles. In other words, cul- ture is social; it does not exist before or outside of society. Cultural resources are created, perpetuated, and altered through human action.
    

26. On the uses of culture, see Swidler 2001.
    

27. Seeking to theorize how people come to trust or distrust particular un- derstandings of the world, sociologist Andreas Glaeser (2004, 3) differentiates between
    possible
    understandings—those that an individual knows to exist—and
    actual
    understandings, those they perceive as “true, good, reliable, and right.” Possible understandings become (and remain) actual when they are validated by the people and institutions an individual accepts as authorities, are corroborated through actions or events, and when they resonate with other things a person “knows.” Conversely, a person confronted with repeated evidence and authori- ties that counter his actual understanding will tend to reject it in favor of a new one. People vary in the degree to which they are conscious of the cultural choices they make.
    

28. The terms “social status” and “social identity” are not precisely synony- mous. Status typically refers to social-structural aspects of group membership, whereas identity refers to social-psychological dimensions. As I am interested in both aspects of group membership, I use the terms somewhat interchangeably, generally favoring identity.
    

29. Budgeon 2003, 104. See also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996, Bradley 1996, and Giddens 1992.
    

30. There are, of course, limits to the identities young people can fashion through virginity loss, not least because they cannot choose their gender or their racial/ethnic, social class, or religious background (scholars disagree as to whether sexual identity is chosen or inborn) (Budgeon 2003). That said, social identity can change over a person’s lifetime. Social class and religion are most volatile, but people may also refashion their racial/ethnic identity (as when an African American “passes” as White).
    

31. Whatever interpretation of virginity a person favors, the life event of vir- ginity loss offers a vehicle for achieving one aspect of adult status: sexual “matu- rity.” See chapter 7.