Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (9 page)

Virginity Loss after HIV/AIDS

The “liberated” sexual culture of the late 1960s and 1970s had barely taken root when it met with a series of critical challenges. As early as the

mid-1970s, moral conservatives, led by the Christian right, mounted a se- ries of crusades intended to reverse the gains of second-wave feminist and gay-rights activism and the increasingly permissive tone of sexual culture overall.
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Focusing on what was widely perceived as an epidemic of ado- lescent pregnancy, moral conservatives helped secure the 1981 passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which required that federally funded sex education programs present maintaining virginity until mar- riage as a contraceptive option. When, in the late 1980s, HIV/AIDS was recognized as posing a threat to heterosexual adults and teens, social con- servatives redoubled their efforts to implement abstinence-focused sex education in public schools and launched a public service campaign ex- tending the popular antidrug slogan, “Just say no,” to premarital sex.

Calls for more restrictive sexual standards in the 1980s also came from a very different quarter: radical feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who sought to combat sexual violence against women by such means as prohibiting pornography and sex work.
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Op- posing their efforts were feminists like Ellen Willis and Carole Vance, who stressed the need to expand women’s sexual liberties, even if that meant accepting their right to engage in potentially harmful practices.
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In the divisive debate that ensued, many feminists felt compelled to choose between being either “for sexual pleasure” or “against sexual danger.” Such a context encourages women to frame virginity loss as purely liberating or entirely perilous. The tension between these positions rekindled in the 1990s, when young feminists fighting acquaintance rape were denounced by social critics like Katie Roiphe for embracing victim- hood and by observers like Wendy Shalit for inviting assault by aban- doning “feminine” modesty.
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By the end of the decade, self-described “third wave” feminists were advocating an intermediate position, decry- ing inequality in heterosexual relationships while insisting that hetero- sexual sex offered opportunities for pleasure and exploration.
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Such a position implies a more complicated vision of women’s virginity loss.

The same period saw similar tensions around same-sex sexuality. The 1990s and early 2000s were marked by unprecedented lesbigay visibility and political gains for lesbian, gay, and queer activists. Popular media fea- tured a growing number of gay and lesbian characters and themes, from kisses between women on
L.A. Law
(1991) and
Roseanne
(1994) to the Emmy-winning sitcom
Will and Grace
(1998 to present); Olympic diver Greg Louganis and New York Giants linebacker Roy Simmons publicly revealed themselves as gay in 1994 and 1992, respectively; and unprece-

dented numbers of openly gay people ran for U.S. Congress in 1998. Yet, moral conservatives continued to vilify same-sex sexuality. Anti-gay leg- islation proliferated at state and federal levels, Congress passed the De- fense of Marriage Act in 1996, and House conservatives proposed the Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 2002 and

2004.
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Nor did hate crimes against gays abate; the 1998 murder of Uni- versity of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was merely the most prominent. Expanded visibility and ongoing opposition together trans- formed the experiences of lesbigay teens of the post-HIV generation. In contrast with their older counterparts, they have come out at younger ages, increasingly identified as gay or bisexual before becoming sexually active, and embraced participation in public protests and Gay Pride marches as rites of passage.
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These trends appear to harbor potential for changing the ways young people, both lesbigay and straight, conceptual- ize and approach virginity loss, as we will soon see.

Overall, permissive and restrictive stances toward virginity coexisted uneasily in the 1990s and early 2000s. Moral conservative efforts curbed, but by and large did not reverse, the liberalizing tendencies of the late 1960s and 1970s. Although a majority of American teens continued to approve of sex before marriage and to engage in vaginal intercourse dur- ing high school, the average age at first sex leveled off around 1990 and rose slightly toward the end of the decade, especially among men.
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Yet even as men’s and women’s ages at virginity loss have converged, studies of the subjective aspects of early sexuality suggest several enduring dif- ferences. Most notably, young heterosexual women are more often dis- appointed by and/or feel a lack of control at virginity loss than young men; but some recent studies suggest that disappointment and “feminine” interpretations of virginity may be increasing among adolescent men.
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It is in this context of sexual diversity and tension that I set out to ex- amine in depth how young Americans define, interpret, and experience virginity loss at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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Defining Virginity Loss Today

When I asked people how they would define virginity loss to someone who had never heard of it—“Say, to a visitor from another planet”—the vast majority of the heterosexual women and men I interviewed gave replies like Lavinia Thompson’s.
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A 30-year-old African American para- legal, Lavinia answered simply, “[Virginity loss is] the first time having sex.” It became clear from her responses to subsequent questions that when Lavinia said “sex,” she meant vaginal intercourse. A few hetero- sexual people I spoke with remarked that beliefs about oral and anal sex vis-à-vis virginity were somewhat ambiguous; fewer still raised the possi- bility of virginity loss with same-sex partners.
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Heterosexuals who spon- taneously mentioned same-sex virginity loss typically had lesbigay friends who had brought the issue to their attention or had undergone profes- sional training emphasizing sensitivity to lesbigay concerns (e.g., as a psy- chotherapist).
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Charlotte Brandt, a 28-year-old White fund-raiser, de- scribed the evolution of her definition of virginity loss:

My first immediate reaction is, between heterosexual people. And it would be penetration, vaginal penetration, with a penis. . . . And I think that that was my definition of it . . . probably until I was in my early to mid-twenties. When, not only did I start having gay friends, but then I actually thought about them having sex. And so, you know, a female friend of mine who’s a lesbian, who’s never had sex with a man, is she a virgin? No, she’s not a virgin.

The fact that most heterosexual men and women assumed that virgin- ity loss constituted vaginal intercourse highlights the degree to which het- erosexuality is taken for granted in American society. This tendency serves to perpetuate the pattern poet/scholar Adrienne Rich calls “com- pulsory heterosexuality,” whereby sex between women and men is as-

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sumed to be the norm and anything else is discouraged, disparaged, and rendered virtually invisible (or worse).
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In contrast, although many of the lesbigay people in my study also began by glossing virginity loss as the first time a person had sex, they in- variably proceeded to question the very definition of “sex.” Twenty-one of the 22 gay and bisexual men and women I interviewed claimed that a person could lose her or his virginity through oral and/or anal sex as well as through vaginal intercourse. The single exception was Miranda Rivera, a 29-year-old Puerto Rican lesbian teacher. Miranda saw virgin- ity as irrelevant to sex between women and felt that women who have never had sex with men can take pride in having retained their virginity. She explained, “A woman loses nothing when she goes to bed with an- other woman. . . . But somehow there’s something lost, in terms of men, you know, like her honor.”
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Some lesbigay people saw oral and anal sex as resulting in virginity loss only between same-sex partners, but the majority favored applying the same standards to every possible pairing. As Seth Silber, a 19-year-old gay White college student, explained:

See, I define sex as, you know, not . . . just genital contact. But also not necessarily, you know, strict penis-vagina penetration. Um, I think of oral sex as sex, and I think of anal sex as sex, and I think of vaginal sex as sex. Those are kind of, like, the three things that I think of as sex.

Seth said he’d lost his virginity when he first exchanged oral sex with a girlfriend, at age 15, about a year before he came out (though he didn’t think of himself as losing his virginity at the time). Notably, the genera- tions differed, with lesbigay participants born between 1962 and 1972 being more likely to distinguish between acts with same- and other-sex partners than were their younger counterparts.

Whether or not they differentiated between the acts involved in same- and other-sex virginity loss, gay and bisexual men and women who of- fered same-sex inclusive definitions were effectively arguing that same- sex practices should be not just accepted, but accepted on the same terms as heterosexual practices. These sentiments contrast with those of previ- ous generations of lesbigay people, who by and large accepted the con- ventional equation of virginity loss with first vaginal sex and therefore ei- ther assessed their own status in terms of coitus or deemed virginity ir- relevant to their experiences (as did two of the oldest gay men I

interviewed).
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Choosing to expand the definition of virginity loss to en- compass same-sex activities appears to be a recent development, resulting from gay rights activists’ success in enhancing the visibility and accept- ability of lesbigay sexuality.

Activists’ successes have also been instrumental in enabling the current generation of lesbigay youth to recognize and express their sexual iden- tity at earlier ages, often without experimenting with heterosexual sex. Several of the youngest gay men in my study proudly spoke of challeng- ing traditional definitions of sex in public school health classes. Ettrick Anderson, a 19-year-old gay African American student, recalled that, in the Philadelphia-area middle school he attended:

My health teacher [and] I once had this huge argument during class be- cause she defined intercourse as “Male inserts A into female’s B,” and that was it. And I disagreed with that. And I asked her, “Well, you’re forgetting a bunch of people.” And she said, “No.” And she almost kicked me out of class.

Increasing awareness of and tolerance for lesbigay sexuality have also affected heterosexuals’ definitions of virginity loss. Although few straight men and women voluntarily mentioned same-sex virginity loss, when I asked for their opinions, three-fourths said they believed that both women and men could lose their virginity with same-sex partners.
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Peo- ple born between 1973 and 1980 were much more likely than those born between 1962 and 1972 to favor lesbigay-inclusive definitions of virgin- ity loss. Yet, in contrast to their lesbigay counterparts, the majority of het- erosexuals posited different standards for virginity loss with same- and other-sex partners. A typical response came from Meghan O’Brien, a 22- year-old White college senior:

I guess virginity has to be defined within each type of relationship, like woman-woman, man-man, heterosexual. I don’t know . . . I never really thought about it. Because it’s not as clear-cut and defined, I don’t. People haven’t really ever set terms on that type of thing. I guess I would say . . . if that is their form of sex, if that’s . . . their way of making love . . . I think probably no, they wouldn’t be a virgin.

That opinions on this point should differ by sexual identity is not sur- prising, given that heterosexual men and women typically lack the per-

sonal incentive for and intense commitment to promoting equality across sexual identity that characterizes so many lesbigay lives.

Defining Other Kinds of Genital Sex

Everyone I interviewed agreed that a woman or man would lose their vir- ginity the first time they engaged in vaginal sex, provided that they had not previously engaged in another type of genital sex. They also agreed that virginity loss had to involve at least some sort of genital contact be- tween two people. However, manual genital stimulation alone was not sufficient to constitute virginity loss in the eyes of even my most inclusive informants. Deborah Sherman, a 29-year-old White lesbian, explained that, although she would categorize intimate nongenital touching as “sex,” she favored less expansive criteria for virginity loss:

I want to be more open than that. I want to say, “Oh, you can hold hands,” or, “You can, you know, touch each other for a while and there goes virginity.” But I think, I think I’m going to go for the genital option there [laughs].

Nor did I speak with anyone who believed that a woman whose hymen had been broken without sexual contact would have lost her virginity.
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In defining virginity loss primarily in terms of physical acts rather than moral propriety, the men and women in my study were following a pat- tern that has prevailed since the early 1900s.