**Trigger Warning**
I grew up in the 1980s in a Jewish-Unitarian household in the middle of Manhattan. To say that I was not immediately exposed to strict Christianity/Catholicism would be an understatement.
It wasn’t until I was in college that I actually met anyone who had been raised evangelical, or talked about saving their virginity for marriage in a non-ironic way. Now I know a number of women who were raised this way and are in various stages of shedding the shame that you’re taught should come with sex. My favorite one of these is a former roommate of mine, Christina, who was raised evangelical, baptized in a river and everything. By the time she hit college she had shed most of her christianity, but still had a steady boyfriend who she never seemed completely happy with. She put this guy through the ringer — breaking up with him, getting back together, feeling like she was missing something but couldn’t explain what.
Until I moved out of the apartment and a new girl, Laura, moved in.
Laura had just gotten out of a relationship with her long-term girlfriend, single for the first time in a while. They began hooking up and it was like someone had turned Christina’s lights on. All of the sudden so many things made sense. The boyfriends she kept breaking up with for no apparent reason. Her love of dressing up as a boy for Halloween over and over, every year. She’s no longer seeing Laura, but has had a series of wonderful girlfriends, and is very happily performing on the drag king circuit.
Below is the other side of many of these stories — mainly women I know who were in long relationships with boys who, for religious reasons, were reluctant to have sex for the first time. It’s interesting when we talk honestly about sex how the “boys always want it more, and pressure girls into losing their ‘virginity” dynamic disappears.
When I was a freshman in college I dated a senior named Scott. Scott was from Iowa. Scott was Catholic. Scott was certain that losing one’s virginity should not happen outside “the ties of wedlock.”
I was less certain.
Saying that I forced Scott to give up his religious ideals and sleep with me would be a bit of a stretch. However, after months of pressuring and nagging, Scott finally relented and we agreed to have sex. Like all other parts of our relationship, our sex was scheduled. It had to happen on a Saturday night so Scott could go to church the next morning. I realize now, eight years after the fact, that he was likely going to church that morning to confess what we’d done the night before. We also determined that the sex had to happen in Scott’s room, as I had a roommate.
On the night of “the deed” Scott and I sat awkwardly next to each other on the edge of his twin bed. Slowly, cautiously, Scott started kissing me. Undressing each other was a pathetic exchange of “I’m sorry” and “are you okay.” Finally, we were naked.
Scott paused. “I’m never actually, uh, put on a condom before.” he said.
He tried, he really did, but no matter what Scott did, he could not make that condom go on. “I think there are instructions in the box…” Scott retreived the instructions and spread them across the on top of the blue quilt his mother and sisters had knitted for him for his birthday. “Okay, I think I understand now.”
The actual sex lasted about 20 seconds and I didn’t feel a thing. Scott wasn’t able to sleep with me in his bed, so once we finished, I self-consciously got dressed and walked back to my dorm room. Alone.
We never had sex again. I spent the next few days writing impassioned e-mails to high school friends asking if I was fated to have horrible sex. Scott and I broke up about two weeks later. He married a girl from his hometown almost immediately after graduation. They now have enough children to make up a baseball team, and seem really happy. In an Iowa sort of way.