thoughts on virginity

by Chi

So you finally lost your virginity. “Welcome to the club,” they tell you. Now, when you’re at a party where people are making out in the corners, or at the bus stop under a huge billboard featuring a woman with smoky eyes and pouting lips, or at the cinema to see the latest rom-com, you scope out the people around you, most of whom are probably also in The Club. You wear your sore vagina like a badge of honour or like club stripes, because you are one of them now. But apart from that vague discomfort down below, nothing’s really changed. The boundaries of your world are the same as they’ve always been. You’re still a weird-looking kid with too many pimples and small tits. You start to wonder, what did I actually lose? The integrity of my hymen? But wait – you can tear that by doing something as simple as playing sports. You did a lot of sports in high school. Gymnastics, cycling, touch footy. What does that leave – your innocence, your purity?

I’ve had a long-standing problem with the concept of ‘virginity’ – it’s divisive, ill-defined and fosters low self-esteem and judgment from one’s peers, no matter which way you spin it. “How permanent virginity feels, and then how inconsequential,” writes Lena Dunham in her memoir. This is what most people figure out when it finally happens. And when it finally happened for me? “Oh.” As Internet-based feminists and provocateurs Petra Collins and Karley Sciortino (alias Slutever) said on their sex podcast that one time I listened to it over my dinner, feeling sinful whenever my parents walked past – “oh.” That’s what ‘losing it’ was like. “Oh. That’s it?” If I hadn’t been raised in a culture that exalts sex (penetrative sex, mind you, between a monogamous man and woman, missionary position, soft focus lighting, everything in slow motion) as a hugely momentous occasion, the experience would have simply been another nameless milestone – like getting my first period, or flying for the first time, or going to my first sleepover. Why does getting laid merit a whole new label for who we are as a person?

“You’re a virgin who can’t drive,” snarls Tai in the movie Clueless, delivering the ultimate insult – emphasis on the virgin. With movies like Clueless, Drew Barrymore’s Never Been Kissed and the self-explanatory 40-Year-Old Virgin, and even that vapid TV show Beauty and the Geek – where sexual inexperience is synonymous with loserdom – no wonder virginity is still such a pervasive myth, and one that teenagers hungrily buy into as a label that will define them. I remember, in high school, keeping track of who had done what and with whom, asking each other “how far have they gone?” How far – with oral sex as second prize at best, a slutty thing to do at worst; intercourse sealing the deal; anal being pretty much unmentionable; and we were neither experienced nor mature enough to consider any other acts of intimacy. Teenaged me certainly wasn’t immune to the myth of virginity. You’d be hard pressed to find a teenager who doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time stressing about sex, especially when it’s so tied to their self-worth.

Maybe having sex fulfils an intrinsic desire to be desired. Maybe it makes you feel like you are worthy of being touched in a really intimate way, and your horrible, pasty (or hairy, or freckly, or flabby) nakedness did not send your partner screaming into the woods, blinded. Maybe that’s why people are sensitive about being a virgin – because they consider their level of sexual activity directly proportional to their attractiveness, loveable-ness and worth as a person. Did I personally need that sort of validation? Possibly – but not in the form of sex, as I found out. All the insecurities I used to have kind of melted away when he did little things like hold my hand. The first time he put his arm around me made me feel warm and fuzzy in a way that the first time we did it, didn’t (although it is still a memory that makes me feel happy and hence won’t be thrown out when my brain does its annual spring-clean and deletes everything I learnt at uni). Unlike walking or eating or peeing or sleeping, sex isn’t just a behaviour. It’s a language, says psychotherapist and relationship counsellor Esther Perel in her TED talk. It’s a place you go, a space you inhabit with yourself or with another person. The more experience you have, the more colourful and diverse and fulfilling this space becomes.

So what is it that you ‘lose’ by having sex for the first time? If anything at all, that something, I think, would have to be idealism. “Mourn for the idealism of inexperience,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review of The Virgin Suicides. “Mourn for the passing of everyone you knew and everyone you were in the last summer before sex. “ That, at least, is something precious – the beautiful idea of it, the legend of sex, manifested in nights spent wishing and wondering and fantasising, eating icecream and hugging your pillow in the blue light of some cheesy Ryan Gosling drama. In real life, says Ebert, sex attaches “plumbing, fluids, gropings, fumblings and pain.” Somehow, the movies leave out the laughing and cringing and needing to pee halfway through. But I’m glad they happen, because there’s something to be said for the awkwardness of a first time (and the many other times after that because, as we know, our bodies don’t always do what we want them to do).

For many, intercourse is exalted as a ‘true’ act of sex because it’s the method of procreation. Two humans coming together for a few minutes and a whole new human being created out of that mess is admittedly pretty miraculous. But nowadays, most people have sex for pleasure rather than procreation. We all know, thanks to Coach Carr, that if you get pregnant, you will die. And needless to say, sex between gays and lesbians is no less valid than hetero sex. When it comes to the bond that you form with someone through rubbing dangly bits with them, which I suppose is the main reason why people prefer to ‘lose it’ to someone they’re in a serious relationship with, I feel like my ‘bond’ with my partner came more from everything we did surrounding the having of sex, rather than the actual having it itself. Some might have had a different experience to me, and that is precisely the point. People have wildly differing views on the concepts of sex and purity.

The view of penetrative sex as the real deal, whereas other kinds of sex are just ‘bases’ on the way to a ‘home run’, is a construct that is far from universal. In some cultures, oral sex is seen as even more intimate than vaginal sex. For the French, la pipe is just as important as intercourse, something saved for further down the track or saved for someone you actually like. In other cultures, non-baby-making sex acts are seen as dirty and shameful – even degrading, as it involves a certain give and take as opposed to the mutual experience of ‘actual’ sex. But the fact that they’re not seen as ‘actual sex’ creates a loophole for horny teenagers who choose to be abstinent outside of marriage yet have no problem at all satisfying their rabid hormonal urges in other ways (in the backseat of a car … at the local lookout …).

Whatever your opinion of oral sex, it’s one partner completely devoting themselves to the other, which I don’t think is sinful or invalid at all (not to mention, it’s a pretty in-your-face way of getting intimate, so to speak). You know what is sinful? The way our culture treats sex. We’re constantly surrounded by pornography, lewd and heteronormative advertising and disturbing headlines (“grab them by the pussy”). Little wonder that young people absorb this toxic culture and associate sex and sexuality with negativity.

Sex carries with it a degree of responsibility, sure – physically and emotionally – and requires a great deal of maturity. That’s why sex laws and sex education are a thing. But, exercised responsibly, I would argue that sex is quite a pure and innocent act (and also literally good exercise). I think you lose your innocence slowly, not all at once with the undoing of a zipper and the ripping of a condom packet. I think that there are many ways in which young people can lose their innocence, and the idea that having sex is the foremost way you can destroy your sanctity is frankly ridiculous. You lose a little bit of your innocence when you see someone on the street yelling racist slurs at a stranger. You lose a little bit of your innocence when you lie for the first time. When your friend ditches you for the cool kids at school. Or when you hear about the latest shooting in the U.S. and you feel so extremely tired. When you realise that your parents don’t really know everything at all. And adults are just children in adult suits. So how can you assert, as you stand at the altar, having experienced just a fraction of the disillusionment the world has to offer, that you’re as pure as the white of your wedding gown? Just because you and your spouse-to-be haven’t yet touched special parts? How can giving and receiving pleasure be considered the antithesis of innocence?

The Blue Lagoon, a 1980 romantic adventure film which I love in spite of its hokiness, is about two teenagers marooned on a tropical island who spend their days swimming and eating fruit. The two are completely removed from society as they grow up – two suntanned kids as pure as pure can be: Brooke Shields with her wide green eyes and Christopher Atkins with those angelic blond curls. Beautiful and virile as they are, they explore their blooming sexuality and eventually discover intercourse. And no, Brooke Shields did not wake up the next day in a nest of soiled sheets and a world of regrets (OK, she did step on a stonefish and almost die, but that’s beside the point). They simply continued frolicking in their tropical paradise. Like most of us do, after making the 'irreversible' decision to ‘give it away’.

I remember reading that the ancient Egyptians had no word for virginity because sex was a natural, un-stigmatised part of life. Without cultural notions of morality surrounding sex, especially for females, there is no need for a concept like virginity. We are born and die sexual creatures and whether or not we are having sex at any point in time does not affect our intrinsic value as human beings. So, walk like an Egyptian – straight into the bedroom where you can do (or not do) whatever the hell you want.