About My Virginity

When referring to virginity, I mostly use the word itself, but sometimes substitute derivatives of "purity" as a joke. In high school, my friends and I mostly used references to The Big V Club, with people being "in the club" or "out of the club." We also had a Big C Club for (mostly reluctantly) celibate people. These were just descriptive terms, we didn't have club activities or enforce membership or anything. We did have unofficial hand signs (V or C shaped fingers). Lately I also use derivatives of the word "nun"—nunnish, nunnery, etc. These sort of refer to this tiny bed I used to call my nun bed, and also to my roommate's two spayed nun-cats. I never really use the word "cherry" when referring to a virgin or to virginity, but my dad does (why do I know that?) and it comes up a lot in suggestive jokes on sitcoms and music videos.

In the beginning, I was not aware that I was a virgin or anything else. When I learned what the word meant, I thought it was risque because it referred to sex. I didn't think of myself as a virgin until it became apparent that people my age could have sex. This was in about seventh grade, when I was eleven or twelve. Virginity really wasn't an issue for me at this age, cause pretty much everybody was still expected to be pure. I had never even kissed anybody by then.

I started to get self-conscious about my virgin status once people I knew actually had opportunities to have sex. This was kind of a progression of my previous late-bloomer angst about being the last girl to get a bra and her period and kissed and whatever other pubescent milestones I could perceive.

My attitude towards my virginity was rather complicated. I didn't think that being a virgin was bad, but I didn't want to be one. I was frustrated because I wanted to have sex for the sake of sex, but I was also embarrassed that other people would realise that whether or not I was saving myself, I didn't have anybody to have sex with. So mainly I was upset about not having a proper chance to have sex, and other people knowing this. There were a few times that I probably could have had sex with a boy, but I didn't because I didn't want the boy. I count that as not having an opportunity. I was more focused on my lack of sirenly sex appeal than the lack of desirable bed partners, but both were sources of teen angst.

I wasn't upset about this all the time. Sometimes I was fine with people knowing I was a virgin. It was mainly context. I would be uncomfortable if I ever ended up in a conversation which referred to virginity or sex stories. It seemed dangerous, like somebody might figure me out or accuse me. If I thought that somebody might be judging me on my sexual status, then I was uncomfortable. If somebody mentioned the Big V Club or was just discussing ideas about virginity, I had no problem.

For the record, nobody ever actually made fun of me for being a virgin. I was just worried.

The only virgin-teasing incident I can think of at all involved two guys who locked their roommate Mike out of the apartment in his underwear, and demanded that he yell a password to be let back inside. The hint for guessing the password was "It rhymes with 'Mike's a sturgeon.'" In telling the story to me they made a point of clarifying that they didn't think there was anything wrong with being a virgin; they just knew Mike was embarrassed about it.

As a quick aside, I was also very familiar with virgins in the context of the Rocky Horror Show (virgins being people who have never seen it live), where virginity is given a much more fun treatment, based on the attitude that nobody will be a virgin by the end of the night. Oh, the debauchery. Anyway.

Currently, I am not a virgin (Rocky Horror or otherwise), but I know quite a few people my age (21) who are, both males and females. It seems to be less of an issue now than in high school, but that may be because I'm not worried about myself anymore. I've never known anyone who actually cared about whether someone else was a virgin or not. That is probably an important thing to know. Even the orthodox religious people I know only seem to care about the virginity of prospective spouses.

Occasionally I think that it would have been sweet to have saved myself all this time and have been all pure for my beloved, just for the cheesy romanticness of being all his. However, I am glad I had other sex because it was fun, what I wanted to do at the time, and good practise. Besides which I did actually care enough about each of my partners to go to bed with them.

All the statistics I've seen about the percentage of any age group who are sexually active and the average age for first sexual encounter are different. I have no idea what the latest ones are. I used to take consolation if I was in the majority, but that's irrelevant really.

Once I graduated high school, I got to be quite painfully ashamed of being a virgin, mainly because I did not like what I thought being virginal would make people think about me. I have always been like I am now, kind of a smut who thinks all kinds of people are foxy, who can appreciate how just about anything could be sensual and who spends a fair bit of time sitting around thinking up things that are sexy. I have always been quite attached to these elements of my person, and was very distressed that people might discredit them because I hadn't had sex with anybody. Yes, made me cry. In particular, I didn't know how to explain or proove that I was some kind of bisexual creature, without having any evidence in the form of girl sex.

All of this led to the intensely embarrassing and regrettable state of me getting in the habit of lying about my virginity. I thought it would be pretty gross to lie and say I just wasn't a virgin at all, so I developed this compromise that I had never had sex with a boy, BUT... I had "messed around" with girls, which later blossomed into the full "I had sex with a girl." Conveniently this simultaneously established my desire to have sex with girls. At the time I thought this story established me as a virgin who had an excuse, and as a virgin without any of the stigmas I thought people would attach to me if I'd never had sex at all (despite my not applying these to virgins I knew).

I had a very practical view of the lying, that it was an easy way of making people understand what I was like, that it did reflect honest desires and traits in myself. Also, it wasn't intended so much as a lie, but rather as a preview. I figured it wouldn't be shameful to say I had had sex with girls as long as I eventually did. This hinged on the girl sex not being attached to an age number, which I think I felt was possible since to me at the time, girl sex wasn't impacting my virginity (especially since it was imaginary, eh?), and virginity was the main thing that had an age attached to it. Girl sex was more of a yes or no quantity, maybe because nobody really asks "when was the first time you were gay?" but rather, usually "are you or aren't you?" or at least "how gay?" or "what kind?." Come to think of it, it would be cool if that was the popular attitude about sexuality in general; instead of "when did you lose your virginity and how many partners have you had?", folks could ask the more relevant "how much and what kind of sexual do you think you are?," since that is what the previous questions are trying to discover anyway.

Also, this wasn't a story that I voluntarily broadcast; it was my backup story for panicky situations in which I felt I was about to be evaluated or compared. It was somewhat encouraged by the universal reaction of the people who heard it: "Wow, aren't you sexier than I thought."

This could be used to indicate all kinds of negative things about my attitude towards my own sexuality and towards homosexuality in general ("not 'real' sex"?), but it was really only about definitions. It's hard to know intuitively whether oral sex between two girls counts as sex, and if so does oral sex between a girl and a boy, or between two boys count? I explained my professed situation as "I've never been with a boy but I've slept with girls" to avoid confusion (and also some accountability). I have worked out that most people now understand oral sex between two girls as sex. Whatever 🙂

This is a lot about what I "count" things as. I think the various descriptions of virgin and sex and sexuality and whatnot (and gender for that matter) are only as useful as how meaningful they are for a person. I used this vagueness for my own ends to make myself more presentable, employing the fuzziness of whether or not I was talking about my virginity or just some event. I avoided calling anything by any name until I worked out what I meant by each word, and what other people were likely to think I meant.

This led to me describing myself as a virgin (with an excuse) until I had sex with a boy, even though I'd previously professed to have had sex with girls. After I slept with a boy, I found that the girl sex had gained credibility as "real" sex. By this point I had decided that the girl sex was indeed sex, but mainly the issue was that having the boy sex gave me a solid back up argument that I really wasn't a virgin, relieving any need to evaluate sexual acts for legitimacy (ability to destroy virginity). All sex acts were then equal, except that one must have come first.

This made me rather more uncomfortable about the lying than before, since now it was a rather concrete lie regarding a number, the age at which I had lost my virginity. I haven't really sorted this out yet, as anybody who has been reading this site for awhile will have noticed, but for the record the real (as in not made up, not as in valid) first sex was when I was 18.

I don't like at all that the numbers hold any interest. I purposely don't ask people when they first had sex if such a topic comes up. I don't mind if they tell me, but I don't ask. It's my leftover nerd politics. Things like sex shouldn't be cred, so I try not to make them into any. Further, having been a late-bloomer in a number of physical puberty/sexuality kinds of areas, I don't like to put ages on things, cause for me that implies a scale, a schedule, a proper rate or range of time in which to do things, that I have often felt left out of. I wouldn't want to make anybody else feel like that.

I should mention that my first boy sex didn't hurt. I wasn't worried that it would, because my vagina had lots of practise, between masturbation and using various internal menstrual products. That's probably the main thing people reading this page wanted to know, besides my age statistics. Ha ha.

I didn't have any particular emotional or intellectual reaction the first time I had sex. If anything, I was somewhat relieved, not to have had sex, but to have credibility should anybody ever question my smuttiness. It didn't make me believe any differently about myself, but for whatever reason it made me more convinced that I could get other people to believe who I was. Gah.

All this and nobody ever once made any comment to suggest that I was inferior in any way for being a virgin. I think I extrapolated from comments made at previous moments to suggest that I definitely was inferior for not having bled yet, or had a boyfriend, or for having small breasts in grade 9 and whatever else. So... yes it was in my head, but I still blame the weird pressure pot that is junior/high school culture.

Also, I was thinking about it, and it seemed a little odd that people now will develop angst and shame about being "too old" to be a virgin, when being a virgin used to be expected and a status point. Then I got to thinking that before the sexual revolution or whatever, women just used to get ashamed of being "too old" to be unmarried, which amounted to exactly the same thing if you weren't supposed to have premarital sex. So really it has always been shameful to not be desired sexually, we've just taken the marriage part out of it. This annoys me no end, especially considering the piles of people I know who are perfectly desirable but single or celibate or virgins because of random situations. However, I don't know how to deal with this at all. Euh ... everybody please be nice to each other from now on and don't make anybody feel inferior unless they are doing something mean.

I know people can also end up with shame and guilt about having sex "too young" or any old time, but this has not been my experience at all. Everyone I've ever known who had any guilt in this area has offset it with pride in their desirability, prowess, conquest, naughtiness, precociousness, whatever.