Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

Introduction: The First Time

Introduction The First Time The headlines read: “A is for Abstinence” (2001), “Choosing Virginity” (2002), “Like a Virgin (Sort Of)” (2002), “More in High School Are Virgins ” (2002), “1 in 5 Teenagers Has Sex Before 15” (2003), and “Young Teens and Sex” (2005). News stories about adolescent sexuality appear in the popular press like clockwork. Almost all of them focus on virginity and virginity loss, the touchstones of American conversations about young people and sex. In some stories, what is news is that teens are losing their virginity; in others, the point is precisely that they’re not. More than a few accounts pause to ponder the conflicting ideas that characterize American sexual culture. As Nina Bernstein noted in a 2004 New York Times front-page story, today’s adolescents cannot escape mixed messages about sex, or the complication of deciding if, when and how to sample it. They are picking from a new multiple -choice menu, where virginity and oral sex can coexist, and erotic rap makes the case for condoms.1 Whatever their focus, news stories about virginity loss often suggest that teens are approaching sex, especially first sexual encounters, in ways their parents can barely comprehend—in some cases, wanting to have sex at earlier ages and, in others, pledging abstinence and “saving” their virginity for marriage. Though the tone of these stories is often one of shock, or at least unease, regardless of whether teens are or are not having sex, these struggles over how, when, and under what circumstances one might “lose it” are actually nothing new. In fact, what first got me interested in the topic was one such media story. A little over a decade ago, I was floored to see a Newsweek cover story proudly bearing the headline: “Virgin Cool.” This pronouncement 1 knocked me for a loop. When I was a teenager growing up in suburban Maryland in the mid-1980s, the last time virginity ranked among my personal concerns, being a virgin was the antithesis of cool. Virginity, if it was spoken of, was implied by my peers to be socially backwards, prudish , undesirable—but never cool, and when Madonna’s saucy song “Like a Virgin” came on the radio, friends and I winked and sang along, knowing that “like” was the operative word. I vividly remember gloating with one of my girlfriends that, should President Reagan’s foreign policies trigger a nuclear war, at least we wouldn’t die virgins—not like some unfortunates we knew. Virgin cool? No way. Still, try telling that to the pair of adolescent women whose photograph appeared in my copy of Newsweek. Pretty and posed in body- flaunting outfits, they smiled defiantly beneath the provocative headline, as if to say, “We are too cool!” Reporter Michele Ingrassia had clearly anticipated reactions like mine. “A lot of kids are putting off sex, and not because they can’t get a date,” she began. “They’ve decided to wait, and they’re proud of their chastity, not embarrassed by it. Suddenly, virgin geek is giving way to virgin chic.”2 The article went on to profile ten teenagers—eight women and two men—all heterosexual, diverse in race and religion. Some planned to remain virgins until they married, others until they were older or in love; their reasons ranged from religious beliefs to fears of unintended pregnancy and HIV. Perchance some nonvirgin readers longed to attain this novel form of chic, Ingrassia even tendered the option of “secondary” virginity, a state of renewed chastity available to “any person who . . . decid[es] to change.”3 Had things really changed so much since I was an adolescent? That they had was, of course, the central claim of the Newsweek story and what qualified it as news. Many adult readers then would have assumed, as I did, that reverence for virginity was, if not quite a thing of the past, then a thing of a prim, perhaps devoutly religious, minority. As a teenager, insistent on my right to enjoy every liberty that men did, I intended to value sexual activity for its own sake, rather than for the love it might represent , as I imagined my mother’s generation had done. “What if I don’t want to get married?” I remember challenging my mother, then a recently divorced opponent of premarital sex. “Does that mean I should never have sex?” I could also remember reading about secondary virginity in a pamphlet from...