Unpleasant Consequences: First Sex in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, and Gilmore Girls

Contemporary conceptions of female sexuality offer complexly layered and contradictory messages about girls' and young women's sexual agency, self-perception, and activity. Dominant social discourses, including those in popular media, instruct young girls to be sexy and yet expect that they will regulate their own expressions of sexuality as well as the response of others to them. Young women's virginity, in particular, is a highly contested concept. In the prevailing social discourse about sexuality in the United States, virginity in teen women is valued, even revered. Young adult fantasy novelist and blogger Robin McKinley notes that "[v]irginity is one of the biggest and most oppressive— and most misused—metaphors in our society, and it is horrible to be persuaded to feel that if you've 'lost your innocence' about anything important then you're ruined for life" ("Questions"). In her article "Virginity Loss Narratives in 'Teen Drama' Television Programs," Maura Kelly cites a plethora of critics writing between 1991 and 2005 who "demonstrate that teenagers' experiences of virginity loss are shaped by the socially constructed meanings of virginity and virginity loss" (479). A critique of the ideological uses of virginity, then, offers an opening for critics, producers, and viewers who hope to create space for the voices of teen women making their own choices about their sexualities.

In the media, sex becomes a commonplace, something "everybody" does or wants to do or thinks about doing or plans to do—or fails to do. While many popular television series for teens use sex as a plot complication or a tension builder, others treat sexual intimacy less casually, depicting it as emotionally and physically meaningful or as socially significant. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (FOX, 1997-2003), Veronica Mars (The WB, 2004-07), and Gilmore Girls (The CW, 2000-07) offer strong female lead characters for whom sex is not a primary concern but who take the decision to have sex very seriously. These overtly feminist television shows intersect intriguingly— and troublingly—with dominant social discourses when it comes to the lead characters' initial sexual experiences. An exploration of these intersections suggests that a series of conflicting and occasionally antiquated ideologies continues to operate in these series. Ideologies of "girl empowerment" clash with those of "girl as victim," and contradictions emerge among the diverse and divergent traits that make up the American cultural ideal of strong, sexy, sensitive, and virtuous girlhood. In exploring the narratives of first sexual experiences (what I call "first sex") in mainstream media, I consider a series of questions. What does each protagonist "lose" with her first sex? How are other characters impacted by this event? How do writers rely on the convention of the inevitable negative consequences of first sex? How do those negative consequences frame the characters' narratives of their own first sex? Finally, I consider how (or if) these characters are able to reframe those consequences as their series progress. To begin, however, I look briefly at some sociological studies of virginity.

The Significance of Virginity: History and Culture

Unsurprisingly, the social and psychological concept of virginity has been the subject of a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century studies that have pursued questions about experiences of first sex from a variety of perspectives. In their 1973 study, David G. Berger and Morton G. Wenger note that virginity "has been handled in the literature as an immediately obvious 'given,'" but that it is, in fact, "a highly complex and variable set of interrelated concepts" (675). The observation of complexity is one of several common threads that emerge from the studies on virginity. Another significant thread is that the value and significance currently placed on women's virginity has archaic roots in cultural ideals of ancestral and hereditary lineage. Alice Schlegel offers an explanation of how virginity is valued in a variety of "preindustrial societies" (719): "[i]n many pastoral societies the virginity of daughters and sisters, like the chastity of wives, is a marker of the integrity of individual men and of lineages" (727). Catherine Blackledge also recognizes those...