For all the fetishization of virginity among social conservatives — the pledges, the purity rings, the purity balls — there’s little recognition that this is something only young girls and young women are supposed to be concerned about. Nobody really gets excited about adult women keeping their virginity — possibly because social conservatives expect women to marry young.
But there are a significant number of adult women who are still virgins into their 20s and 30s, and not all of them are trying to hang onto their virginity. In fact, many of them would really, really like to lose it, but as they get older, they find that more and more, they’re viewed as freaks who have something wrong with them, who might get too attached or who might invest too much in the experience:
When Amanda was 26 years old she found herself in a familiar but awkward situation: She was still a virgin and the guy she had been dating for three months didn’t know it. She wasn’t ready to sleep with him yet, but she was close, real close. One night they were at his house, making out on the couch, when he asked her, “When’s the last time you had sex?” The question was blunt and unexpected. She didn’t know how to answer, and she didn’t really want to. “One year? Two years?” She didn’t respond. “Don’t tell me you’re a virgin?” he blurted as he abruptly pulled away. “No offense, but most people do that in high school,” he told her. He acted like a victim, she says four years later, telling her that none of his friends would ever sleep with a virgin, that he’d already slept with two and would never do it again. About a week later they went to the movies together, and afterward, he walked her to the car. She leaned in to kiss him and he backed away, “like I was some disgusting object.”
And the next time Amanda got into a similar situation with a guy, the same thing happened, albeit with less taking on the victim role. Instead, he said some understanding things and said he’d call her the next day — and then didn’t. Amanda finally lost her virginity at age 30, but only after deciding that she wasn’t going to disclose that she was a virgin. Even so, when she told him later, he said he’d suspected something like that.
(As a side note, am I the only one who’s a little creeped out that these guys asked her when she last had sex? That’s really damn nosy. I make it a policy never to ask a partner how many partners he’s had or how long it’s been since he had sex. It’s rude, and none of my business (unless there’s a current partner who’s being cheated on). In any event, people often volunteer that stuff.)
Some people may think Amanda is unique, maybe even a freak. But the fact is, there are a surprising number of women — smart, savvy and attractive women — who still haven’t lost their virginity into their 20s or 30s. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 7 percent of unmarried women between ages 25 and 29 have never had sex; neither have 5 percent between 30 and 34 and 4.3 percent between 35 and 39. It’s hard to say how many of these women are actually waiting until marriage, but it’s safe to assume that quite a few aren’t. This month Jane magazine is sponsoring a contest to get a 29-year-old virgin laid, a cheap publicity stunt that misses the bigger point: Why does a “funny, gorgeous” virgin need to place what is essentially an ad for sex at all? There was time when virginity was a prize, a treasure to be guarded and a badge of honor, but now, it seems that for the modern career woman virginity is nothing but a curse. What’s worse, the longer she waits the harder it is to find a guy — not just the right guy, but any guy — to do the honors. Which prompts the question, Has the sexual revolution ironically made it impossible for a mature woman to get laid for the first time?
I know plenty of women who were virgins all through college, including two of my college roommates and I. Technically, I wasn’t quite finished with college when I lost my virginity — I still had a few credits to finish up over the summer — but I felt like a freak nonetheless. And this was the case even though other women, much thinner and better looking and more socially skilled than I, were still virgins. My two college roommates — A. from freshman and sophomore year (she was three years older than I was), and L. from junior and senior year — both found boyfriends after college who weren’t freaked out by their superannuated virginity (I think neither one of them was older than 23) and did the deed with a certain amount of ceremony. And then breathed a sigh of relief that it was done with.
Me? I went to a graduation party in Boston about a month shy of my 22nd birthday and hooked up with a guy there. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin, though thanks to UConn’s showering its students with condoms and AIDS-prevention information, I made him go out to CVS and get some rather than just risk it. Had I not taken that opportunity, I would not have had another opportunity for another two years, and who knows if that would have worked out if I was giving out “I need deflowering” vibes.
The fact that the culture is hypersexualized winds up hurting virgins who are trying to lose their virginity long after their peers do. The fact that they’re still virgins confers a sort of outcast status on them and makes people wonder if there’s something wrong with them, or if they’re prudes or religious nuts.
The phenomenon of involuntary virgins, on the other hand, exists underground in liberal America, where sophisticated career women are supposed to have active sex lives and gyms offer pole dancing and stripping classes as a kind of aerobics. Where the proliferation of online dating fosters a culture of freewheeling, uncommitted hookups. Where anyone who isn’t doing it is too unhip to know better. “The culture is getting more and more permission to be sexual at any age,” says Shirley Zussman, a sex therapist in New York. “It’s almost a directive from the culture: movies, books, magazines, TV programs. Everybody is saying “Look, this is what’s going on. What about you?”
Often, of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the person other than shyness, or lack of time, or simply being treated like a pariah.
When she was just 23, Laura went to a New Year’s Eve party where a discussion about sex quickly turned into a contest: Who has slept with the most people? Who has slept with the oldest person? Who was the youngest when he or she first had sex? And so on. So Laura went to wash the dishes. “I remember thinking, ‘What an idiot. I’m washing dishes at a party because I don’t want to be involved in this conversation.'” But it was probably for the best. “I remember one of the guys saying, ‘Man, if I was 24 and a virgin I think I’d go crazy. I think I’d die.’ Then some other guy said, ‘You know the Unabomber was a virgin,” and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, they think I’m going to turn into a sociopath because I haven’t had sex at the age of 23.'”
Oh, and of course, there’s a distinction drawn between the hot, nubile 18-year-old virgin and … well, just read this loser’s opinion:
On the men’s lifestyle Web site AskMen.com, relationship correspondent Lawrence Mitchell wrote a column in 2002 called “Should You Date a Virgin?” which advises men to stay away from virgins unless they’re ready for a committed relationship. “When we think virgin, we either recoil or go wild,” he writes. “If you must date a virgin, keep in mind” that in his opinion, “as soon as you invade her space so to speak, her emotions will intensify. She will exact certain expectations on you, whether you know it or not.” He goes on, “An obese thirty-something career woman virgin, for example, is not on the same level as a naäve [sic] 18-year-old virgin with a strict background who has never dated before,” reinforcing the stereotype that there’s something physically or psychologically wrong with a woman who is 30-something and still a virgin.
Now, certainly, having been fat throughout high school and college and therefore never dating (I got my first kiss at 20, after I’d lost sufficient weight to have been considered human), I had an excuse or explanation of sorts for why I was a virgin. Nobody wanted me. That wasn’t the case with my roommate A, who was a thin, busty blonde with a vivacious personality — and who often came into the room crying because some guy she’d thought was her friend showed his true colors and got angry and hateful with her when she wouldn’t snap to and capitulate to his desire for her, regardless of whether she wanted him. And the one guy she did want was a toxic sonofabitch who played games with her and nearly raped her in a graveyard — though when he found out she was a virgin, there among the headstones, he desisted. And, fortunately, she snapped out of her attraction for him and he got kicked out of school the next semester.
Early experience, particularly dating in the teenage years, is crucial for forming adult romantic relationships. If you’ve missed out on those (like I have), you often have trouble forming relationships (like I do). And if you’ve managed to both miss out on dating and losing your virginity as you go into adulthood, it gets to be doubly difficult:
According to a 2001 study published in the Journal of Sex Research, most people in Western society assume that a people in their mid- to late 20s have already experienced dating and sexual experimentation, an exploration that, for the most part, started when they were teens. Involuntary virgins, on the other hand, may have missed that dating phase in high school (perhaps they were buried in their books) and probably missed it in college too, so once they enter the real world, one with more adults, they start to feel left behind, according to the study by Georgia State University associate professors of sociology Denise Donnelly and Elisabeth Burgess, who surveyed 34 male and female involuntary virgins. A woman who has never had sex can start to feel alienated, like a social pariah, and the last virgin on earth (at least among her peers). This feeling can turn into a barrier to meeting a lover, and the chance that she’ll ever have an intimate relationship starts to fade away.
That’s not to say that people who did go through these experiences have it all under control. Witness the number of failed marriages and the miserable relationships. Hell, look at the pressure to fake orgasms because communication is so difficult. One of the jokes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin was that, while Steve Carrell’s character had very little experience with women, the advice given to him by his more-experienced coworkers showed that they didn’t have any more mature or nuanced view of relationships or women than he did.
Today, women are supposed to give good head, be on top, take it from behind, experience orgasm for an hour; they’re even supposed to experiment with other women. That’s a lot to swallow, so to speak. Performance anxiety can set in, which may make a woman with little to no experience avoid the situation entirely, says Jonathan Berent, a social anxiety therapist who has seen a number of virgins in their 20s and 30s. “In their early 20s they can rationalize it: ‘It’ll happen soon.’ But when they get to their late 20s their caution light is on big time. They get down on themselves and they tend to obsess,” he says. “The deal with sex and intimacy is that people will do anything to avoid being noticeably nervous. And going into a sexual scenario, if you haven’t already had one, you’re going to be noticeably nervous.”
As with a lot of sexual issues, an ability to communicate what you want and a realistic sense of what to expect are key to getting through it. If you’re 30 and still a virgin, you’re very likely to be nervous about having sex. Even if you don’t tell your partner that, he or she is likely to pick up on your nerves. But if you do tell your partner it’s your first time, all of the social baggage that goes along with deflowering a virgin suddenly becomes the partner’s problem, too. Much of it is conjecture — will this person become so utterly attached to me that I’ll be obligated to stick around long after it’s no longer good for me? My god, I just wanted a roll in the hay! But there’s good reason to worry if you’re going to hurt the person, or if you’re going to get much out of it yourself.
But another thing we have to be careful to do, as feminists, is respect the right of people, especially women, to say no to sex if they, themselves, just don’t want to have sex. Part of being sex-positive should be respecting women who remain virgins for their own reasons, or who aren’t comfortable with casual sex. If we remove the stigma from being a virgin (just as we’re trying to do with sluts), it might make it easier for women (and men) who aren’t sexually experienced by taking away the performance pressure and making it safer for them to have sex when the time comes.
UPDATE: Shakes’ Sis has more. She thinks the piece is insulting and misses an opportunity to do a good analytic job because it ignores both men and those women who aren’t in any real hurry to lose their virginity.