Virginity Lost

An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

Laura Carpenter

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814772003
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Genderforschung

Nervous, inexperienced, confused. For most, losing your virginity is one of life's most significant moments, always to be remembered. Of course, experiences vary, but Laura Carpenter asks: Is there an ideal way to lose it? What would constitute a “positive” experience? What often compels the big step? And, further, what does “going all the way” really mean for young gays and lesbians?

In this first comprehensive study of virginity loss, Carpenter teases out the complexities of all things virgin by drawing on interviews with both young men and women who are straight, gay or bisexual. Virginity Lost offers a rare window into one of life's most intimate and significant sexual moments. The stories here are frank, poignant and fascinating as Carpenter presents an array of experiences that run the gamut from triumphant to devastating.

Importantly, Carpenter argues that one's experience of virginity loss can have a powerful impact on one's later sexual experiences. Especially at a time of increased debate about sexual abstinence versus safe sex education in public schools, this important volume will provide essential information about the sex lives of young people.

1

A Brief History of Virginity Loss

In the summer of 1999, not long after I’d conducted the last interview for this book, Universal Pictures released a movie about four high school boys determined to lose their virginity by the night of their senior prom. American Pie took box offices by storm, launching the careers of half a dozen young actors, and ultimately spawning two commercially successful (if increasingly vapid) sequels.¹ If anyone had doubted that young Americans saw virginity loss as a significant experience, here was confirmation that they did.

On the surface, American Pie resembles countless other teen sex comedies. Its plot centers on a group of male friends who feel stigmatized by their virginity and long to eradicate it with maximum haste and minimum embarrassment. Jim (Jason Biggs) scarcely seems to care whether he loses his virginity with a sexy exchange student, geeky marching-band flutist, or homemade apple pie.² Likewise mortified, Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) tries to disguise his virginity through a series of elaborate subterfuges before finally being initiated by his classmate Stifler’s stunning mother (Jennifer Coolidge), in an apparent homage to The Graduate. The young women in the movie, by contrast, hope to bestow their virginity on loving partners, in romantic surroundings. Vicky (Tara Reid) refuses to have sex with longtime boyfriend Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) until he can say that he loves her; and Heather (Mena Suvari) repeatedly rebuffs the attentions of star athlete Oz (Chris Klein) until he proves that he’s interested in her as a person.

Yet, the movie also features characters who defy gender norms. Jessica (Natasha Lyonne) respects her friend Vicky’s desire for a “special” virginity-loss encounter but makes a point of warning her that vaginal sex is seldom perfect the first time, effectively presenting virginity loss as a step in a learning process. In a truly revolutionary move for a teen comedy, Jessica also suggests that Vicky might be more inclined to have sex if she were having orgasms during foreplay, thereby arguing that women should make virginity loss contingent on sexual pleasure. Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) likewise flouts traditional feminine ideals. Having announced that she agreed to be Jim’s prom date because he was a “sure thing,” she brusquely deflowers him, then disappears.³ Nor do the film’s young men fully conform to traditional ideas about masculinity. Oz decides it is worth remaining a virgin if he can keep Heather’s trust and affection; and mutual virginity loss appears to enhance Kevin’s love for Vicky.⁴ Sherman (Chris Owen) frames virginity loss as a rite of passage; having spent the night with a girl, apparently having sex, he declares, “Say good-bye to Chuck Sherman the boy. I am now a man.”

The teenagers in American Pie take diverse approaches to virginity loss, even though they are all White, middle-class, and heterosexual. When I first saw the movie, having just interviewed 61 young Americans about virginity loss, I was struck by how much it reflected the patterns I saw in my research. The fictional youth interpreted virginity through the same metaphorical lenses as the women and men I interviewed, comparing virginity to a gift, a stigma, and a step in the process of growing up; and they exhibited a similar combination of conformity and resistance to traditional gender ideals. In depicting virginity loss as a site of competing and even contradictory beliefs, American Pie epitomized a phenomenon that captivated many lay and academic observers at the time. As sociologist Steven Seidman and others have noted, in the last decades of the twentieth century American sexual culture entered a period of unprecedented diversity.⁵

Yet, many of the meanings currently assigned to virginity have been in circulation in Western cultures for centuries.⁶ Indeed, as I researched the history of virginity loss, I saw how previous generations of Americans had also invoked the gift, stigma, and process/passage metaphors. In this chapter, I chart evolving understandings, definitions, and experiences of virginity loss from the time British colonists arrived in the “new world” until the present.⁷ Understanding the processes through which different approaches to virginity loss have emerged, come to prominence, and fallen out of favor will provide a useful backdrop against which we can unravel contemporary patterns and begin to consider what might transpire in the future. My account relies chiefly on secondary sources, although I also incorporate selected primary materials and draw representative illustrations from popular culture.

Before proceeding, some words of clarification are in order. The scientific study of sexuality is a relatively young discipline, launched in the 1880s by medical scholars and psychologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.⁸ Although the first surveys of sexual beliefs and practices in the United States were fielded in the 1890s, sex research remained relatively moribund until the 1920s and 1930s; even then, scholars seldom collected data from unmarried men and women. Research focusing on sexual life before marriage grew exponentially in the 1960s and 1970s, motivated initially by a narrow concern with the psychological adjustment of (mostly White) college students and, starting in the early 1970s, by mounting social anxiety about adolescent pregnancy and, from the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS. Marriage, birth, and other legal records can provide some “hard” data on sexual attitudes and conduct before the scientific era; however, for the most part, what we know about bygone periods comes from prescriptive literature (sermons and advice manuals), idealized texts (novels and songs), and personal documents (diaries and letters). These sources offer considerable insight into the sexual ideals of the past but only indirect evidence about actual human behavior. Contemporary studies indicate that most people’s sexual behavior conforms broadly to their beliefs—for example, teenagers who disapprove of premarital sex are less likely to engage in it—yet discrepancies are not uncommon.⁹ It is also important to note that the sexual patterns that prevail among marginalized social groups—racial/ethnic minorities, people who desire same-sex partners, the economically disadvantaged—often differ from patterns among dominant groups and are frequently absent from, or misrepresented in, the historical record and even scientific scholarship.¹⁰

The Roots of Colonial American Beliefs

In the United States, ideas about virginity loss are firmly rooted in the Christian tradition of venerating premarital virginity, which White colonists brought with them from Europe.¹¹ This tradition evolved from ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman beliefs and customs. While by no means uniform, these cultures all valued virginity in unmarried women and believed virgins of both genders to possess special powers, such as invulnerability to injury or death.¹² The English words virgin and virginity derive from the Latin “virago,” meaning “maiden,” and entered the English language in the 1200s, followed by the expressions to keep and to lose “virginity” around 1390. The oldest uses of the term virginity referred to “abstinence from or avoidance of all sexual relations” and “bodily chastity … esp[ecially] as adopted from religious motives.”¹³

Most early Christian theologians claimed that Adam and Eve were born virgins and that their first sexual encounter helped unleash sin into the world.¹⁴ Believers who wished to live a sinless life were accordingly encouraged to embrace virginity, preferably as a permanent state. For those souls who could “not control themselves,” Paul of Tarsus, perhaps the best-known proponent of lifelong virginity, advocated sexual activity within marriage over failed celibacy outside it in the famous phrase, “It is better to marry than to be consumed with passion.”¹⁵

All early Christians were encouraged to embrace sexual abstinence. Both genders were thought to experience sexual desire, but abstinence was understood in gender-specific ways. The term “virgin” customarily referred to women, whereas “chastity” was the favored expression for men, implying that sexual purity and abstinence were innate in women, but had to be cultivated by men.¹⁶ From about the twelfth century on, women’s physiology was believed to allow for a more complete virginity than men’s, insofar as “the female body [was] hollow and therefore capable both of containing the divine and being sealed to exclude all other influences.”¹⁷ More practically, since virginity precluded marriage, it appealed to women seeking independence from men and freedom from the dangers of childbirth. The popular thirteenth-century poem, “Hali Meidenhad,” describes virginity as “the one gift granted you from heaven; give it once away and you will never recover another in any way like it” and counsels women to reciprocate God’s largesse by “giv[ing] yourself to Him”—or, failing that, to a husband.¹⁸ In contrast, medical scholars warned men that, Christian teachings notwithstanding, sexual continence was injurious to their health.¹⁹ Ambivalence about men’s virginity—typified by Saint Augustine’s prayer, “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now”—has characterized Western thinking ever since.²⁰

When early Christians deigned to define virginity loss, they emphasized spiritual rather than physiological criteria. The spiritual state of chastity was typically held to be superior to, and more fragile than, the physical state of virginity.²¹ Ideally, chastity and virginity overlapped; but more than a few writers differentiated between people who remained spiritual virgins despite compromises to their physical integrity (e.g., through rape) and those who preserved their physical virginity but had been unchaste in thought or deed (e.g., through lustful fantasy or masturbation).²² That said, for most of European and U.S. history, rape was believed to result in virginity loss.²³ On the rare occasions medieval Europeans delineated physical criteria for virginity loss, they tended to argue that penile penetration would result in virginity loss whereas foreplay and masturbation would merely be “corrupting.”²⁴ Sexual acts between same-sex partners were viewed as sinful and unchaste but probably not as compromising virginity.²⁵

Virginity’s prestige suffered severely with the Protestant Reformation and rise of scientific secularism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁶ English Protestants tended to disdain religiously motivated celibacy as “reeking of Popish superstition” and to view sexual expression as normal and desirable for both genders, so long as it was intended for reproductive purposes within marriage.²⁷ Public concern with men’s virginity diminished further in this period, while the association between masculinity and sexual activity was reinvigorated. Authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson encouraged young women not to protect their virginity unduly (even as they applauded the virginity of their queen, Elizabeth).²⁸ In the first scene of All’s Well That Ends Well, for instance, the rakish Parolles scoffs at Helen’s lament that, prevented from marrying her true love, “I will die a virgin,” and boldly denounces virginity as

against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your mothers, which is a most infallible disobedience… . Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese … is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon.²⁹

By the eighteenth century, a subculture that not only accepted but actively celebrated sexual immoderation in men had developed among some secular elites.³⁰ The most (in)famous of these libertines, Casanova, recommended “humoring” women who refused to lose their virginity by engaging in mutual masturbation or fondling without penetration.³¹

Nonelite men apparently took the virginity of future wives fairly seriously, however, not least because they could ill afford to reject social conventions.³² Young women, too, continued to value and guard their virginity—until marriage, but not as an alternative to it. According to medievalist Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “[A]fter the English Reformation, virginity was generally viewed as a temporary stage through which a young girl passed on the way to chaste marriage. Virginity was a valuable commodity, but it had a very limited shelf-life.”³³ In short, the Enlightenment did not revolutionize beliefs about virginity, but rather brought secular reasons for valuing it to the forefront.

As the s...