Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (15 page)

than most gifters may have given her more time to develop a thorough sense of her sexual needs. Indeed, scholars have found that young women (and men) who first have vaginal sex at relatively older ages report en- joying it more than their younger counterparts.
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Karen’s coping strategies notwithstanding, after almost 3 years at a university where casual sex was the norm, hardly any of her friends re- mained virgins and she began to feel increasingly “weird,” almost stig- matized. Her story echoes research suggesting that virgins’ behavior is in- fluenced more strongly by friends’ actual sexual conduct than by their opinions.
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To alleviate feeling odd, Karen decided, at age 20, that she ought to lose her virginity, even if she couldn’t do so in a way befitting her lifelong ideals. At the time, she had been sexually involved with a close friend, Chip, for about 6 months. Over that period, their sexual encoun- ters had grown progressively more intimate, eventually including cun- nilingus and fellatio. Karen liked Chip, but didn’t love him, nor did she consider him her boyfriend. Yet, she stressed, “It wasn’t like I felt like it was a one-night stand or anything.” She reasoned:

From the very beginning, he was always like, “I want to make love to you, I want to have sex with you.” And I think that I finally was just like, well . . . I was curious, I really wanted to have sex, I was very at- tracted to him. I knew that emotionally we weren’t in the type of rela- tionship that was really going to pay out . . . but I guess I just put that aside for a while.

Despite her decision to settle for a less-than-ideal partner, in choosing someone she cared about and whom she trusted to remain her friend after sex, Karen was more selective than many who interpreted virginity loss as a stigma or a rite of passage. Chip, at 21, wasn’t a virgin; but Karen made sure that he knew she was. Beyond sensitizing him to the magnitude of her decision, she believed her truthfulness had encouraged him to be more attentive to her needs. “He was really cool about it and helped me along and stuff like that,” she said with a grin.

Like Bryan, Karen resisted planning her first time in advance, even though she’d determined that it would happen with Chip. One evening, after attending a basketball game, she and Chip started “fooling around” and he asked her if she wanted to try vaginal sex. “Okay,” she replied, “but you have to use a condom.” Unlike many of her friends, for whom vaginal sex had been painful at first, Karen found it pleasurable:

For me it was a great experience. . . . I guess that’s because I probably, you know, fooled around with enough guys and . . . had other things done, that I wasn’t going to be sore from it. . . . I guess I was . . . hoping that it would be a good time [laughs]. But didn’t know.

Karen’s experience confirms researcher Sharon Thompson’s claim that young women who recognize their sexual desires and make sexual activ- ity contingent on them are more likely to find pleasure in virginity loss than are women who deny or disregard their desires.
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Although Karen felt some remorse at missing the special experience she’d once dreamed of, she didn’t regret her decision—at least not at first. She’d even felt a bit relieved not to be a virgin anymore. When she told her closest friends what had happened, they were supportive and under- standing.
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Karen continued to spend time with Chip, and to have sex with him now and then, for several months. In her mind, he was never more than a friend; but, she said, “I think
he
actually did think that we were in a re- lationship for a while.” She explained:

He’s like, “Well, you know, if I could be with someone right now, it would be [you], but . . . I have to sort things out first before I can think about being with someone.” So . . . he wasn’t giving me emotionally what I needed, I mean . . . ’cause emotionally he wasn’t stable himself.

Karen wasn’t disappointed that Chip couldn’t reciprocate her gift by “being with” her, because she had never expected him to be more than her friend. As time passed, however, she began to feel troubled about other aspects of her experience. In particular, she said:

[J]ust knowing that . . . it wasn’t really a real relationship — it was a good friendship, I guess you would say. . . . And then some of the other, the reasons why. . . . The [nonvirgin] girls in my house, and wanting not to be a virgin anymore. And I kind of felt bad about losing that desire, actually to be a virgin. And I thought that maybe that was kind of a wrong reason to lose my virginity. Just wanting not to be one.

By the time of our interview, Karen felt she had come to terms with these discomfiting feelings. She was also happy that, in her current rela- tionship, she had made choices about sex that were more consistent with

her beliefs. She’d begun dating Dean a few months after her affair with Chip faded, and this time, Karen said, it was “for real.” Dean was differ- ent from the other men at her school, she explained, and they shared sim- ilar beliefs about sex as well as similar sexual histories:

[H]e’s only been with one other person, too. So it’s really, really cool. Like, I was really excited when I found that out. . . . [We’re] on the same level. And he’s had, you know, his first was in a really serious relation- ship, so. He’s kind of the serious relationship type [laughs]. Which is nice. Like, I’m ready for that now.

Karen and Dean waited to have vaginal sex until they had been dating, and in love, for nearly a year. Although she forswore any desire to go back and do things differently, Karen admitted: “If I had been a virgin, going into this relationship . . . I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Because it’s just something, like, that happened really naturally and was great.” In fact, she confided, she hoped that she and Dean would be engaged by the time they graduated. Karen was unusual among gifters in linking mar- riage and sex so closely, probably as a result of her religious faith and the conservative sexual culture of her Texas upbringing. Surveys show that sexual attitudes are markedly more traditional in the South than in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, in part because many more southerners are conservative Christians.
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Public-school systems in the South are also more likely to teach abstinence-focused sex education curricula.
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Karen’s story highlights the importance of social context in shaping young Americans’ sexual careers. When she was surrounded by friends and peers who shared her view of virginity as a gift, Karen found it easy to behave as she believed. But in an atmosphere where few people felt as she did, she began questioning her convictions and, eventually, set them aside long enough to have sex with Chip. In some ways, Karen rued her decision—for instance, she knew she’d lost the opportunity to strengthen her relationship with Dean by giving him her virginity—but for the most part, she expressed satisfaction with the choices she’d made. That she
her- self
decided to diverge from the ideal “script” for giving the gift of vir- ginity is crucial to understanding her relative satisfaction — as will be made apparent by comparing Karen’s experience to that of a young woman whose
partner
refused to reciprocate her gift.

“I Think I Thought It Would Make Me Maybe Feel Love for Him That I Knew I Didn’t Have”

Like everyone in this group, Julie Pavlicko had longed to bestow her vir- ginity on a loving partner who would cherish her all the more for her gift. She had trusted that, by being prudent and picky, she could guarantee that her virginity would go to a special and appreciative recipient. But Julie’s carefully selected boyfriend decided not to acknowledge, much less return, her gift. For Julie, virginity loss was nothing short of devastating. With long, elaborately styled blond hair and heavily made-up green eyes, Julie looked younger than her 25 years. We met at her apartment in suburban Philadelphia, near the retirement home where she’d worked as a counselor for almost 3 years. Julie had grown up in a semirural area about an hour away. Her father and mother had worked on the assembly lines of several small manufacturing plants until their recent retirement.

She was single—“but looking!”—and had no children.

For as long as she could remember, Julie had believed that losing her virginity with someone would be a way of saying, “I really love this per- son, I want to give this part of myself to him.” She had often heard that women felt a special connection to the man who “took” their virginity and that a husband or boyfriend who received a woman’s virginity would love her, and she would love him, even more than before. In Julie’s eyes, virginity loss was much more than a physical act. “When you are giving to someone like that, it’s not just your body, it’s, you know, your mind, your heart,” she said.

Julie’s family had attended twice-weekly services at an independent fundamentalist church when she was growing up, and she and her sister had gone to church schools until ninth grade. Although she still believed in God and many teachings from her parents’ church, by the time I spoke with her Julie no longer belonged to that or any other congregation. She had no doubt that her religious upbringing “really shaped the way that I thought about sex.” Church lessons about sex tended toward the implicit, she said:

I can’t remember, specifically, anybody ever sitting down and saying, “Okay, you can’t have sex because God says it’s wrong.” . . . Nobody ever came out and specifically said that, but they kind of danced around the subject. “You shouldn’t date guys,” you know. “Every date is a po- tential mate” [laughs]. . . . You weren’t allowed, you weren’t supposed

to be holding hands, you weren’t supposed to go over to [each other’s] house.

These messages, typical of conservative Protestant guidance on sexuality in the 1990s, made a deep impression on Julie, as they did on many of the conservative Christians I interviewed. In fact, of the ten I spoke with, six interpreted virginity as a gift—although many of them, like Julie, rejected the strictest elements of church teachings on sexuality.
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Julie’s parents conveyed their beliefs about sexuality in even less ex- plicit ways. Julie explained:

I knew . . . they wanted me to be a virgin until I got married. You know

. . . it just wasn’t accepted in our culture, in our church, whatever. And I’m sure they thought, you know, “She’s our little girl.” . . . They never talked about [sex] to me, and I think a lot of it was because they didn’t want me to know anything about it. Like if some, like, steamy scene came on TV, “Oh, gotta change that,” you know [laughs]. It was really, like, kind of looked down upon.

As a teenager, Julie felt able to talk about sex more openly with her friends, though they all kept personal details to a minimum. Her church friends harbored more conservative opinions about virginity than her friends from public high school, but both groups of young women talked about “when you should lose your virginity, who you should lose it to, why you should do it.” Television, movies, and magazines offered an- other source of information about sex, one which tended to depict women and men’s virginity in starkly different lights. Julie said:

There’s a couple of movies that I can recall for, you know, hormonal lit- tle 16-year-old boys. . . . And most of those were, like, comedies. It was looked upon like, “Oh, it’s really funny,” and, you know, “He’s just out of control!” But when they have the shows with the women [such as
Beverly Hills 90210
], it’s very serious. You know, it’s not like, “Oh, this is really funny, that she’s losing her virginity.”

Such gendered standards had hardly seemed unique to media images; in fact, they’d been taken for granted by everyone Julie knew. “I think people, I think society puts a much higher value on a woman’s virginity,” she said. “And for a guy it’s just, you know, something to get over. Have

a real good time and keep going on down that road.” It was also taken for granted (never questioned, in fact) that virginity loss could only take place between a man and a woman.

By the time they were 14 or 15, Julie and many of her friends had de- cided that it would be okay to give your virginity to someone you loved but probably wouldn’t marry. As Julie put it:

If you get to be 25, 26 years old and you meet this man that you really love and you’re still a virgin, and you want him to be the one, I think that’s great. . . . If you can wait that long and eventually get married and, you know, on the wedding night, that’s incredible! But if you’re like, 15, 16 years old, and you’re with this guy, and you think that you

. . . really love him, and then you go ahead and sleep with him, I think that can be good, too.

Julie and her friends’ willingness to bend the ideal of virgin marriage with which they’d grown up, despite their conservative religious beliefs, suggests how thoroughly the sexual liberalization of the 1970s and 1980s permeated American society.

Julie started dating when she entered high school. She did little more than kiss her first boyfriend, partly because she was young, nervous, and inexperienced, and partly because she wasn’t in love with him. She re- called their encounters as involving

mostly just kissing, petting . . . not anything below the waist. He was a lot older than I was, he was [17] and I was, like, 14. . . . And I was really nervous about it because . . . he was really, other than . . . the little guy that I held hands with in kindergarten, you know, it was really the first guy that I really had any kind of, like, romantic type feelings for.

Julie met her second boyfriend, Scott, when they were both 15. The captain of his high school’s junior varsity basketball team, Scott was handsome and popular, if also self-centered and “very, very conceited.” At the time, Julie thought she “really loved him,” but “also knew that it wasn’t going to last forever.”

Scott wanted to have sex shortly after they started dating, but Julie told him she was a virgin and not ready to go all the way. He claimed that he’d had sex with previous girlfriends, but Julie later discovered that that was a lie. “He had told me that he had been with one person before that,” she