The Virginity Gift
by Beverly Fisher, Slut at Large and Woman of Easy Virtue

WI lost my virginity when I was 15 years old, during the 80s Sexual Revolution, a time of lipstick lesbians and “Johnny Are You Queer?”

It was a short, sweaty encounter in the bottom bunk of my friend Ben’s bunk bed, with Ben’s best friend. The memory is a haze of tangled sheets, sharp pain, his silky black hair, fumblefingers and condoms. I can’t remember his penis, just the sensation of it, that burning, impossible fullness.

I thought I was probably the last virgin on earth, except for my best friend, Ann. And I later found out she had lost hers a year before, and never told me.

Virginity is a fascinating thing. Most view virginity as a precious commodity, but often we don’t realize that until many years after we’ve tossed it away. I spent mine like a pocket full of change in an arcade – utterly willingly, totally haphazardly, and as fast as possible. You never realize the value of what you’re carrying around in your pants.

You never forget losing your virginity. It’s a profound moment in our lives, a point that changes us forever afterward.

You only get virginity once, no do-overs. And yet the actual meaning of virginity, what comprises “losing it” is a fluid thing, changing with time, social mores, gender, and sexual orientation. The manner in which we frame virginity, how we understand and view its value, meaning, and purpose, is utterly subjective. Why is virginity so important to us? Why do we prize it so highly? The loss of innocence has many meanings, many contexts. Why are sex and innocence so closely intertwined? For that matter, why are sex and sin so enmeshed? Further, why is virginity prized chiefly in women, and not men? Many Christian groups advocate virginity in both sexes until marriage, but in society as a whole, male virgins are disparaged, particularly by other men.

Sign of the times

The times, the social world, the era, affect the concept of virginity more than anything else.

In the Victorian era, if an unmarried woman even allowed herself to be fondled – let alone actually have intercourse – she was considered “ruined.” No man of breeding would want her, if he couldn’t be the first to have her. Ruined women were often sent to convents, or off to live with relatives in the country, where they remained spinsters.

The first Sexual Revolution took place in the 20s. Skirts went up, hair was cut short, illicit liquor flowed, and New York’s Greenwich Village and Harlem were the center of incredible sexual freedoms that had never existed before in this country. Eleanor Roosevelt secretly visited her lesbian lover in the Village. But with the Great Depression came great suppression, and the moral pendulum swung back the other way. Still, a door had been opened that could never quite be closed.

In the 60s and 70s, the “Sexual Revolution” involved people openly having sex outside of marriage, without fear of social repercussions and damnation (though still vulnerable to Biblical Hell). According to a 2001 study by Laura Carpenter in the Journal of Sex Research, it was during this time that more and more young people, and especially young women, “came to approve of and engage in premarital sexual intercourse with partners whom they did not expect to marry.” Certainly, people in earlier decades had sex outside of marriage, but it was conducted in a clandestine manner. In the cotton wool, Eisenhower-grey decade of the 50s, Shame was in high fashion. My mother was wrapped up in that Beach-Blanket-Bingo, Annette Funicello, poodle-skirt innocence. But she wasn’t a virgin when she finally married.

Yet even throughout the Sexual Revolution of the 70s, men were in charge. Women “allowed” men to pick them up in bars; men still were the ones to ask women out, not the other way around. If a girl wanted a date for Saturday night, she sat by the phone and hoped someone would call.

In the 80s, suddenly women were in charge. It was okay for a woman to pick up a man; women talked openly about their needs and desire for sex, both with men and women. Josie Cotton wrote “Johnny Are You Queer?” about a woman who was trying like hell to get her man into bed, and concerned at his lack of interest. Carpenter notes, “By the 1980s, some young women even adopted frames more typical of men, perceiving virginity as an embarrassment or unwanted constraint, a stance which may have grown more prevalent during the 1990s.” Classes and workshops about the vagina and the clitoris abounded, and countless women lay on mats and held mirrors up to their bodies, viewing their genitals for the first time. Owning their genitals for the first time. The female orgasm and Graffenberg’s spot were hot topics. For me, it was simply not cool to be a virgin.

The ultimate high

I definitely received mixed messages, from a societal standpoint, about losing my virginity. On the one hand, the message was that virginity is some precious commodity that can only be given away once. My virginity was a gift, to be given to someone special, someone I loved. Not necessarily my husband on my wedding night, but definitely in the context of a love relationship.

My mother told me to wait to have sex until I was really in love. This was a colossal mistake on her part. When you’re 15, you really think you’re in love. Of course, I really didn’t know what real love was, but I was sure that what I was feeling was it.

On the other hand, I had the sense that I should “get it over with,” that losing my virginity was part of the process of growing up – and growing up, as quickly as possible, was very important. People even used the word derisively: “Gawd, you’re such a virgin.” Plus, with the female sexual revolution going on, there was this sense that sex was fun, exciting, felt really good, and was just generally a great thing. One friend carefully explained to me that sex hurt the first ten times you did it, but after that it was terrific.

So I was in a hurry to lose my virginity to someone I loved. I wanted to get it over with, but wanted it to be with someone special. And I wanted to do it ten times, so the fun could start.

I saw losing my virginity as a means to an end. The goal? Being an adult. Peer acceptance. Bonding with my true love. I think overall, though, I was craving the sheer physical pleasure. I wanted orgasms, with someone other than myself (I had found masturbation years earlier, to my delight). When I discovered “making out,” it was like a whole new world of pleasure and excitement opened up for me. This was better than alcohol or pot (which some of my friends were using, and I had tried, with lackluster results). This was the ultimate high, and I pursued it with a serious and committed passion.

Defining my terms

Looking back on it, I am fascinated by the way I framed the whole idea of virginity, the context in which I viewed the concept itself. What, in fact, defines virginity? Having sex? But how do we define “having sex?” And this whole notion of virginity as stigmatizing vs. precious intrigued me, especially in the way it relates to gender differences.

By Victorian standards, I lost my virginity, or was “ruined,” when I was 10 years old. I was molested by an uncle (which makes me a statistic with regard to escorts, but that’s another rant). He only touched me outside of my clothes. As such, I never considered that this event was “losing my virginity,” because I did not have intercourse – and intercourse, penetration by a man, was how I defined losing virginity. Still, it was my first sexual experience, it is a powerful memory, and a pivotal moment in my life.

Among the participants in Carpenter’s study, “there was little agreement about nonconsensual sex experiences. Just under half of the respondents believed that rape would constitute virginity loss.” About a third of the respondents felt that a person absolutely couldn’t lose their virginity as a result of rape. The remaining participants fell somewhere in the middle, arguing that while a person might not physically be a virgin, they still were a virgin on some kind of mental or emotional level.

Defining virginity as sexual intercourse, I not only didn’t believe anything that happened with my uncle affected my status as a virgin, I also didn’t believe anything short of full penetration counted either. Making out was more fun to me than anything I could imagine doing. I loved it. I loved kissing, I loved the thrill of the process. It was delightful to feel a hand stroking my ribcage, knowing that he wanted to touch my breast but not sure if I’d allow it – and knowing all the time I was going to allow it, but still letting him proceed at his own cautious, tentative pace. It was delicious, the anticipation of that first touch on the swell of my breast, a thumb caressing my nipple, his breath hot and fast as we kissed. I loved moving through the “bases,” first base, kissing, second base, touching my breasts, third base, getting into my by-then damp panties. And the feel of a finger sliding inside me was like nothing I’d ever experienced before, a level of breathlessly ecstatic expectation that drove me higher than I’d ever been. This whole process, just getting to third base, could take a couple of long, euphoric hours. I’d get whisker burns from kissing for hours straight.

At some point – I can’t remember how or when – it was brought to my attention that this prolonged necking and heavy petting was downright cruel for my male partner. I was going to third base too; rubbing my hand on that hard bulge in his pants, slipping my fingers beneath the waistband to stroke that impossibly silky skin (how could something be so hard and so soft all at once?), marveling at the wetness at the tip, rubbing my fingers in it. I didn’t know the exquisite torture I was putting them through, not at first. I also left these encounters with a deep ache, a yawning need, a nameless hunger. But I enjoyed that feeling, somehow. It left me in a pink cloud of sexual delight, thinking of nothing else for hours afterward. In short, it prolonged the high.

But my male friends seemed to need something more, a completion. I began giving hand jobs and discovering the joys of oral sex, much to the pleasure of my partners, and the horror of my girlfriends. “You put IT in your mouth? Ewwww!” I learned a valuable lesson that is part of my sexual success today: that lots of women don’t like giving blow jobs; that men love them; and that I love to give them. Men are always so “in control” in bed. During fellatio is the one time they writhe and wiggle and moan like girls. Very, very sexy.

But I still considered myself a virgin. “Everything but” was my attitude. I was surprised that not everyone agrees with me. In Carpenter’s study, fully a quarter of the participants “believed that a woman or man who engaged in oral sex with an opposite-sex partner would lose her or his virginity.” Over half believed that anal intercourse could constitute virginity loss (an act I’m not particularly fond of, though have some experience with).

In researching this topic, I spent some time reading a Christian message board on the Internet. There was a huge debate over virginity in general, and I found the whole thing fascinating, from a non-Christian viewpoint. There were quite a few who argued that heavy petting and oral sex constituted virginity loss. One even suggested that just wanting to lose your virginity was enough to make you a non-virgin in the eyes of the Lord.

And then there’s the whole question of sexual orientation. I believe that I have lost my virginity not once, but twice. Maybe more. The first was with Todd in that bunk bed when I was 15; the second was a same-sex experience with a friend from school when I was 17. There was no penetration with a penis, as had been my previous definition, but it was my first experience with a woman. Donna was blond and tall and sturdily built, with large soft breasts and sweet lips. I tasted her everywhere, and felt that wonderful thrill I got with men. I didn’t achieve orgasm, though I think she did, when I was licking her. Afterward, we just held each other for a while. Like my first experience with a man, it was a pivotal moment for me, unforgettable in every detail. Twenty years later, I can still see her face when I close my eyes.

Despite prevalent anti-gay sentiment in the U.S., the majority of Carpenter’s study respondents felt that it was possible to lose one’s virginity with someone of the same sex. “Another 10 percent believed that men could lose their virginity with same-sex partners, but that women could not.” A third felt that oral sex and anal sex were still sex, no matter the gender of the partner. If this is the case, I don’t know how many times I’ve lost my virginity. I’ve lost count of the losses, as it were.

But then, I also frame virginity as something fluid, something you can lose more than once. Most people believe there’s only once, and that’s that. I suppose I also view virginity as any new experience; in other words, the first time I slept with someone in exchange for money, or something of value, constituted yet another loss of virginity for me. A loss of innocence.

Boys vs. girls

I did one of my Slut Surveys on virginity (which is to say, I conducted a study one can only call profoundly unscientific and irrevocably suspect), interviewing men and women about how they lost their virginity, how they felt about it, and the way they framed, or viewed, the experience.

Carpenter’s study defines the various ways of framing virginity loss as either a gift, a stigma, or as a process, a rite of passage. Most people view virginity loss as some combination of the three frames of reference, to varying degrees, as in my own case. My study participants tended to follow Carpenter’s study pretty closely. Women were much more likely to view virginity as a gift; men as a stigma. Half of the women saw losing one’s virginity as a process; 60 percent of the men did.

What was interesting about my Slut Survey is that the majority of the women had regrets about the way in which they lost their virginity. Despite the majority viewing it as a gift, the majority did not feel they gave that gift wisely. One woman wrote “I wish I had waited. It was pure lust and hormones raging out of control, and the unknown, that drove me.” Another wrote that she saw her virginity as a precious commodity, and that afterwards she “felt incredibly guilty” and “was totally miserable.” Many of my Slut friends found that losing their virginity turned them off to sex, ruined it for them. They didn’t really discover pleasure in sex until much later in their lives. One woman even reported that for her, sex was simply a means to an end, a way of making boys happy and keeping them around – but not a source of pleasure for her at all.

Some of the men had regrets too. Again, most viewed the experience as a necessary process and a way to rid themselves of stigma. One man, “Steve” wrote of losing his virginity to the local “easy” girl, who, as he wrote, “in return for servicing you, she was rewarded by being ignored whenever you saw her in the high school hallways. As for dating her publicly, well, she wasn’t a “nice girl” and that was that.” He adds, “I certainly wish I had more positive memories of the event, untainted with guilt. But I thought then, and still do, that circumstances are less important than the event itself. Like birth and death, it is a watershed moment, a signpost in the passage of life.”

I have felt the “easy girl” stigma. I still do today, especially working as an escort. Despite the changes we’ve made, as a society, in our moral judgments, there is still a strong stigma for women regarding sexual freedom. The old stigma for men, disparaging male virgins, is changing. Virginity in men is gaining wider acceptance today. The moral pendulum is swinging back towards the puritanical side, spurred on by fears of STDs, and an increase in religious fervor.

According to some studies I’ve read, teenagers, both male and female, are choosing virginity more and more. I think this is a good thing. As teenagers, our bodies tell us they are ready to have sex, but our minds and emotions have not developed sufficiently to handle the consequences of our actions. Teenagers don’t think rationally, they follow impulses spurred on by overwrought emotions and hormones. And they do stupid things. I know I did.

Yet I have no regrets about the way I lost my virginity. It was practically anonymous, not the deep love experience I had envisioned. It was a means to an end. I was in love with one boy, and wanted to lose my virginity to him, but we tried and his penis was simply enormous. Colossal. To date one of the largest I’ve ever seen, and that’s seriously saying something. It wasn’t going to work. My friends explained to me that it would work if I got used to sex first. So I set out to lose my virginity as quickly as possible, so that I could have sex with this boy I thought I loved. I was a goofy, silly girl, with very confused notions about love, romance, and sex. So I gave my gift away to a boy I’d just met, who probably to this day doesn’t know what he received.

Receiving the gift

Today I appreciate the gift of virginity, of innocence, in a way I wasn’t fully capable of then. Working as a call-girl in California, I had, on separate occasions, the distinct honor of deflowering three gentlemen. The first two situations were identical: the man was from India, and as part of his upbringing and religious beliefs, had remained a virgin – saving himself for marriage. Both had arranged marriages, planned since they were very small. The time had come for them to wed, and they sought to lose their virginity and gain some experience with women, that they might better please their new wives in the bedroom.

I planned these experiences in painstaking detail. I made sure my home was scrupulously clean, with fresh fluffy towels in the bathroom, and soft music playing on the stereo. I had wine on hand, and the room was lit by over 50 candles. I took my time. Based on my own experience, and conversations with others, I was painfully aware of how powerful the memory of your first sexual experience is. It is, as Steve put it, a watershed moment. You are a different person afterward. So I was hyper-aware that I was about to become part of a man’s deepest, strongest personal memories. I was going to be a part of his history.

And I would not only be part of this man’s life forever, but, unbeknownst to her, his wife’s as well. The experience I would share with this man would carry over into the bedroom with his wife. What I did, how I behaved, my reactions, what I taught him, everything I said and did would become his starting point for his sex life with a woman I would never see or know. I felt the weight of this responsibility heavily, and endeavored to make the experience as special, magical, and romantic as I possibly could.

I taught that not all women will like being touched the way that I do. We are different, and thus have different ways of approaching sex. I emphasized gentleness. The importance of asking questions, of finding out just what pleases your partner. Above all, the importance of listening to the woman, whether she is speaking, moaning, or simply moving. Every one of her reactions are lessons in how to please her, how to teach her the art of pleasing.

I am filled with gratitude that I as able to be present, to be a part, of the virginity experiences of others. Losing my own virginity was something done with little thought and less care. But to be able to give an experience to others that I might wish to have, that has truly been a gift. Indeed, somehow it has even made me come to appreciate my own experience more.

And so I lost my virginity again, and again, and again, as I treasured these gifts I was given. They are part of my personal history, too. My process of growing up. And somehow, in the receiving, I was able to shed a little of that “bad girl” stigma, and gain a new kind of innocence and wonder.

 

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