Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (10 page)

Opinions differed as to whether oral and anal intercourse could result in virginity loss, depending especially on the sexual identity (and sexes) of the virgin and partner and of the person offering the definition. Several of the gay men I spoke with mentioned a lack of consensus in the gay com- munity as to whether oral sex between men “counts” as sex or as virgin- ity loss. According to Ettrick Anderson:

A lot of people break it down by like, the acts that correspond to your sexual orientation. . . . So if you’re a gay male, you’re supposed to have anal sex because that’s what gay men do. And if you’re a gay woman, then you’re supposed to have oral sex, because that’s what gay women do. And so those become, like, markers for when virginity is lost. So . . . I could probably go out and find like, twenty queer boys in this building

who would say that, if someone’s never had anal sex, then they’re still a virgin, if they’re a gay male.

Yet, 6 of the 9 gay men (including Ettrick) and both of the bisexual men in my study argued that a virgin man would lose his virginity by en- gaging in fellatio with another man. Opinions varied according to men’s personal preferences. The 3 gay men who insisted that gay virginity loss entailed anal intercourse all enjoyed the practice, or expected to. Fer- nando Garcia, a 21-year-old gay Cuban American performing-arts stu- dent and self-described virgin, said:

Personally, I don’t look at oral sex as, like, capping virginity. . . . If that were the case, then I wouldn’t be a virgin. I think, oral sex for me does- n’t pass that line of, like, losing virginity. It’s like still sexual behavior, but it’s not like, going all the way.

The remaining men saw anal sex as considerably less appealing. As Seth Silber explained:

Well, I haven’t, um, had anal sex. I’ve tried, it just seemed too painful.

. . . And since I haven’t had, like, vaginal sex, I’ve just had a fair bit of oral sex [laughs]. Like, I know that in people’s eyes, I’m a virgin, but . . . I think of myself as sexual, I think of the things I’ve done as sex. I don’t, like, see the word virgin as applying to me.

To men like Seth, it made no sense to call themselves or other sexually ac- tive people virgins. All of the bisexual women and lesbians I interviewed (except for Miranda) believed that a virgin woman could lose her virgin- ity by engaging in cunnilingus with another woman (as opposed to, say, requiring digital penetration).

In contrast to lesbigay men and women, most of whom claimed that oral and anal sex would result in virginity loss for any combination of partners, the majority of heterosexuals I spoke with placed oral sex be- tween men and women squarely in the category of foreplay—“That’s . . . fooling around, in my terminology,” said Marty Baker, a 26-year-old White retail manager—or argued that while oral sex might be sex, it wouldn’t amount to virginity loss. More than half of heterosexual women and men argued that female-male anal intercourse would not result in vir- ginity loss. As Karen Lareau, a 21-year-old White student, explained, “I

guess [hetero anal sex] would go along the same lines as oral sex. . . . Sex has always been defined to me as the vaginal way. . . . As far as virginity goes.” A few individuals excluded male-female anal sex from their defin- itions of virginity loss because they saw it as perverse or demeaning. Wendy Hargrave, an 18-year-old White student, declared, “Yes, it’s sex, but I personally think that anal sex is, like, degrading. So if that’s hap- pening, it’s not really . . . giving anybody else that little piece of you.” The practice of classifying anal and oral intercourse as (heterosexual) foreplay dates to the late 1600s, with explicit “rules” appearing around the turn of the twentieth century, as in marriage manuals defining petting as “lit- erally every caress known to married couples but does not include com- plete sexual intercourse.”
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It seems, then, that former President Bill Clin- ton is far from alone in distinguishing fellatio from “real” sex.

Yet, for the heterosexual people who claimed that anal intercourse
would
result in virginity loss between a man and woman, the key issue was the physiological or emotional
resemblance
between anal and vagi- nal sex. As Kate O’Connor, a 24-year-old White radio producer, put it, “What [anal sex] involves is so close to vaginal intercourse that you might as well just be doing that. . . . I’ve always heard of kids who do that, so that they won’t, quote, lose their virginity, and it’s kind of like, well, isn’t that just a minor technicality?”

Straight men and women who had not engaged in fellatio or cunnilin- gus before their first vaginal sexual experience were considerably more likely than those who had done so to perceive oral sex as potentially re- sulting in female-male virginity loss.
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Paul Duval, a 25-year-old Haitian American bookstore clerk who’d had vaginal sex before any other kind of genital sex, said, “Personally I don’t consider someone who’s done ba- sically just everything except vaginal-penile intercourse [should] try to pass themselves off as a virgin.” Paul and Kate were two of only a hand- ful of heterosexuals who pointedly disparaged the behavior often called “technical virginity.” More than half had, in fact, acted in ways consis- tent with maintaining technical virginity—that is, they had repeatedly had manual, oral, or anal sex with partners before the partners with whom they lost their virginity.
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Gay and bisexual women and men al- most necessarily saw technical virginity in a different light, insofar as they typically viewed oral and/or anal sex as resulting in virginity loss (espe- cially between same-sex partners).

As I noted in the Introduction, I had interviewed only 36 people when allegations of a sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and

White House intern Monica Lewinsky came to light. At the time, I won- dered whether the ensuing national dialogue on the definitional ambigu- ity of sex would affect the way people defined virginity loss, thereby bi- asing my later interviews. Fortunately, this did not seem to be the case. Of the 25 people I interviewed after January 1998, only 5 spontaneously mentioned the Clinton-Lewinsky controversy, suggesting that it was not particularly salient to their understandings of virginity loss. More im- portant, only 6 of the 25 self-identified as heterosexual. My “pre-Mon- ica” interviews had indicated that most if not all lesbigay women and men had questioned the prevailing equation of “sex” with vaginal-penile intercourse while they were coming out, typically long before we met. In effect, then, only heterosexual people were “at risk” for redefining vir- ginity loss as a result of the scandal; and I could discern no differences between the definitions I heard before and after January 1998. In the long run, however, the Clinton-Lewinsky controversy may alter popular definitions of virginity loss. For example, media accounts suggest that, after the impeachment proceedings, adults increasingly worried that teenagers saw engaging in oral sex as consistent with retaining their vir- ginity.
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Pinpointing Personal Virginity Loss

Not surprisingly, the kinds of sexual activities people identified as result- ing in their own loss of virginity also differed by sexual identity. Fifty-six of the 61 people I spoke with described themselves as non-virgins. All 37 of the nonvirgin heterosexual women and men said that they had lost their virginity by engaging in vaginal sex, as did 4 of the 5 nonvirgin bi- sexual women and men. In contrast, only one of 8 nonvirgin gay men and 4 of 6 nonvirgin lesbians lost their virginity through vaginal sex.
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Two lesbians reported losing their virginity the first time they exchanged cun- nilingus with a woman. Five gay men and one bisexual man lost their vir- ginity through oral sex with other men; one gay man (Seth) lost his vir- ginity when he exchanged oral sex with a woman; and two gay men lost their virginity through anal sex with men. Few of the people who lost their virginity with same-sex partners had ever engaged in vaginal sex, and those who had understood these encounters as distinct from virgin- ity loss, popular definitions notwithstanding. Abby Rosen, a 33-year-old White lesbian science librarian, emphatically declared that the first and

only time she had vaginal sex with a man, after several sexual relation- ships with women, “I didn’t consider myself then losing my virginity.”

Women and men who had lost their virginity with a different-sex part- ner did so on average between the ages of 16 and 17, in all but one case through vaginal sex. The women were just slightly older than the men when they lost their virginity—16.8 compared with 16.5—which is con- sistent with recent survey estimates.
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Boys who lost their virginity with other boys (through oral or anal sex) were somewhat younger on aver- age, between 13 and 14, while girls who lost their virginity with other girls (through oral sex) were slightly older, about age 19. These figures are consistent with recent research finding that gay and bisexual boys’ first erotic encounters with same-sex partners (including kissing) occur earlier than do lesbian and bisexual girls’ (at about age 13 and 15, respectively, on average).
15
(Reliable estimates of the ages at which self-identified les- bigay youth first have genital sex with same-sex partners do not exist, to my knowledge.)

Exceptions: Nonconsensual Sex and Secondary Virginity

In categorizing certain sexual acts as resulting or not resulting in virgin- ity loss, the women and men I spoke with were following the century-old practice of defining virginity loss in primarily physiological terms. But when it came to two specific scenarios—nonconsensual first sexual en- counters and secondary virginity—many of them preferred to assess in- dividuals’ virginity status based on social and psychological criteria.

Just under half of the people I interviewed believed that a virgin who was forced to have sex would no longer be a virgin, an assertion they based on physiological grounds. According to Danice Marshall, a 28- year-old heterosexual African American nurse practitioner:

To say someone is a virgin or not does not have to do with whether or not they had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator or the partner. If you’re no longer a virgin, it’s just because of the fact that a penis en- tered a vagina.

Discontent with this aspect of the definition of virginity loss was com- mon, however. Said Karen Lareau, “It’s not the way that I would . . . de- fine losing your virginity . . . in a romantic kind of world. [But] it would

definitely be intercourse, so I wouldn’t consider them a virgin. Unfortu- nately.”

The remaining half claimed, in contrast, that nonconsensual sex could not result in virginity loss, or could do so only in a technical sense. Some said that this was because rape was not “really” sex. Matt Bergquist, a 24-year-old White heterosexual engineer, explained:

For some reason I don’t think of rape and molestation . . . as sex in the same way. I guess losing your virginity is at least partially defined by the experience you gained about sex and relationships. And I think that there’s so much that’s strange about [coerced] encounters that they may not really fall into that category.

Others suggested that virginity loss depended on volition. In the opinion of Carrie Matthews, a 20-year-old White heterosexual nursing student:

I see virginity as definitely something that you can choose into, and peo- ple . . . don’t get to choose into rape. . . . If their only sexual experience has been something like a rape, I would call them a virgin even though technically something did happen.

Both arguments give social and psychological changes equal weight as physiological experiences in determining whether a person has “truly” lost her or his virginity.

The women I spoke with were considerably more likely than the men to exclude nonconsensual sex from their definitions of virginity loss. Nearly two-thirds of the women said that rape could never or could only technically constitute virginity loss, compared with only half of the men. This stands to reason, given women’s greater susceptibility to rape and the fact that a larger proportion of women in the study had personally been the victims of sexual assault—8 of 33 women, compared with one of 28 men. Every one of the nine former victims maintained that virgin- ity could not be lost through coerced sex.
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Gender differences in beliefs about nonconsensual sex and virginity loss probably also stem from women’s greater familiarity with the feminist argument that rape is an act of violence rather than a sexual act. First voiced in the 1970s, this claim has spread through magazine articles, support groups, and events such as Take Back the Night marches.
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In fact, I found a generational difference, with only one-third of women and men born between 1973 and 1980 be-

lieving that coerced sex could result in virginity loss, compared with over half of those born between 1962 and 1972. This pattern suggests that this feminist understanding of rape is gradually being incorporated into main- stream understandings of sexuality and virginity loss.

For many of the people I interviewed, social and psychological criteria also overshadowed physiological ones when it came to the possibility of regaining virginity. Half believed that under no circumstances could a person become a virgin, or lose their virginity, more than once. Although some made this argument on physiological grounds, others pointed to ex- periential factors. As Tony Halloran, a 21-year-old White heterosexual busboy, saw it:

I’ve seen commercials about [born-again virginity], but I don’t see how they do it. Like, they can’t forget that experience. . . . They’ll always have that memory of when they lost their virginity, for the first time. So I don’t see how they can become a virgin again.

Experiential factors also figured prominently in the reasoning of the other half of participants, who believed it
was
possible to be a virgin more than once. Most of these men and women saw renewing virginity as an emotional, psychological, or spiritual matter. As Terence Deluca, a 27- year-old White heterosexual heating and air conditioning mechanic, put it: