Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  I watched Christina watch the video, a look of amusement playing across her face. She was twenty, though looked and sounded several years younger, and a junior at a public university on the West Coast. The walls of the room in which we sat were painted a deep purple; Indian print bedspreads were tacked to the ceilings and covered the mattress. A plate with the remains of a vegetarian burrito lay on the floor by the door. If I didn’t know better, I could’ve sworn I’d time-tripped back to 1980. Just last week, Christina told me, the residents of the house had engaged in a spirited debate (one that brought up nostalgia for my own college days) over whether women should be free to walk around topless in the common areas. “It sparked this long conversation about how women’s breasts have been objectified and sexualized by the media,” she said, “and how in our house we should be able to express our bodies and be safe.” Naturally, the decision was ultimately determined by consensus.

  Earnestly naked girls in cooperative student housing may seem a long way from Pam Stenzel’s chastity rants, but Christina grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of the most conservative cities in America and home to so many fundamentalist Christian organizations that it has been dubbed the Evangelical Vatican. Christina herself was not raised in that tradition—she’s Catholic—but the “sex education” she received at her small parochial school was essentially identical, encapsulated by one word: don’t. Rather than a Health Class, human sexuality was covered in tenth-grade Theology. The curriculum consisted mostly of scary statistics about the inevitability of pregnancy and disease for those who engaged in premarital sex and of the perils of abortion. Students were directed to memorize Bible passages interpreted as condemning homosexuality and advocating chastity. Watching Stenzel’s videos in that class was an annual event, Christina recalled, a kind of rite of passage among her classmates, similar to the way watching gruesome films of incinerated accident victims once was for those who took Driver’s Ed. Stenzel, who is based about an hour away from Colorado Springs, even lectured in person at an assembly at Christina’s school. She was greeted with the anticipation and hoopla of a rock star. Even at the time, Christina said, she suspected Stenzel’s presentation was “biased,” and a little cheesy, but she didn’t necessarily consider it inaccurate. And she never questioned the value of remaining “pure” until marriage.

  On-screen, Stenzel was still talking: “Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” she warned. “It takes that long”—she snapped her fingers—“to throw it away. It takes a lot of integrity to wait.”

  There was more applause, and then the video ended. We were quiet for a moment. “Are you still planning to save yourself for marriage?” I asked Christina.

  She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s too late for that.”

  Cashing in the “V Card”

  Nearly two thirds of teenagers have intercourse at least once before college—the average age of virginity loss in this country, as I’ve said, is seventeen—and while most do so with a romantic partner, a sizable number of girls cash in what they call their V card with a friend or a guy they’ve only just met. Over half, both in national samples and among my own interviews, were drunk for the occasion. Most say they regret their experience and wish they’d waited—maybe not until marriage, but longer than they did.

  In some ways, I was surprised that the girls I talked to still considered first intercourse such a milestone. Most of them had already been sexually active for several years at that point, but again, that’s assuming you “count” oral sex (or anything other than intercourse) as “sexually active.” One could argue that in the modern world, “virginity” as a symbol of sexual initiation is an outdated, meaningless concept. It never had actual medical basis anyway (many girls have no hymen or have torn it through exercise, masturbation, or with a tampon), nor even a fully agreed-upon social meaning: in her book The Purity Myth, for instance, Jessica Valenti writes about the notion of “secondary virginity,” the idea that virginity can magically be reinstated even after intercourse if one subsequently commits to abstinence until marriage. While that allows purity advocates to embrace those who have “stumbled,” it also shows how arbitrary the definition of “virginity” can be. I’m not suggesting that first intercourse is psychologically or physically insignificant. Not at all. But why do girls in particular still elevate this single act (which, among other things, is rarely initially pleasurable for them) to a status beyond all others? Why do they imagine this one form of sexual expression will be transformational, the magic line between innocence and experience, naïveté and knowing? How does this notion of “virginity” as a special category shape their sexual experience? How is it affecting their sexual development, their self-understanding, their enjoyment of sex, their physical and emotional communication with a partner?

  On a mellow fall Sunday morning, I joined Christina again, this time with a group of her friends on the rooftop veranda of the co-op. The other girls listened wide-eyed as Christina talked about her background; they found her stories exotic and a little shocking. “It’s so surprising to me,” said Caitlin, pushing her purple Clark Kent glasses up the bridge of her pierced nose. “At my high school they gave out condoms for free. They handed out lube!”

  Even Annie, a freckled girl who attended an all-girls Catholic school in Orange County, California, considered her upbringing to be liberal compared to Christina’s. “In high school my teacher unwrapped a peppermint patty and put it on the floor,” Annie recalled. “Then she asked if we would eat it. Of course we were all, ‘Eww, no!’ And she said, ‘Exactly! Once you’re “open,” nobody will want you!’”

  The girls cracked up. “But, then,” Annie added, “my mom was kind of a hippie. So she would tell me to forget all that. She’d say, ‘It’s really important to test-drive a car before you buy it; you don’t just kick the wheels.’”

  When Brooke was in middle school, her mother gave her a pile of old-school sex-positive books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves. (“They all had these totally seventies covers,” she recalled. “It was hilarious!”) As for Caitlin, whose public high school passed out free condoms, when she was fifteen her mom took her to a “woman-friendly” sex store to buy a vibrator. “She said, ‘I think it’s really important that you get in touch with your own body and sexuality before you start having sex with someone else.’”

  Neither Caitlin nor Brooke ever imagined saving her virginity for marriage. Until meeting Christina, they’d never met anyone who’d even considered it. “I think my mother’s exact words were ‘Virginity is a patriarchal construct,’” Caitlin said, and laughed. She had intercourse for the first time at sixteen, with a boy whom she would date for the next three years. “I would have actually done it earlier, with a different guy, my sophomore year,” she said, “but he never initiated it. And I’m glad. Because I would have. Not because I wanted to have sex with him, but because I wanted to please him and I wanted to feel important. When I finally did have sex, it was only two months into my relationship, but I felt like I wanted to. It was really empowering to be absolutely sure of that decision and to realize that I hadn’t been ready before but now I definitely was.”

  Brooke’s first intercourse was younger still, at fifteen. She had imagined it would happen with a boy she cared about—she never used the word love—in the kind of romantic, gauzy setting you’d find in a vintage Summer’s Eve douche commercial: on the edge of a cliff with the Pacific Ocean crashing against the rocks below. “I was probably thinking more about what it would be like to remember it later than the act itself,” she admitted. “Like, how it would sound as a story.”

  It didn’t go quite that way: Neither Brooke nor her boyfriend of seven months had a car, for one thing, so there was no way to get to the beach. Plus, it was winter. Anyway, what if someone walked by and caught them? In the end, they lost their mutual virginity in a fairly mundane fashion: in his bunk bed during a weekend when his family was out of town. She brought the condoms, which she had spent
ages choosing at a nearby Walgreens, and the lube; she also, for reasons she can’t remember, brought over a batch of home-baked cookies. “The truth is, losing your virginity is about the least sexy sexual act there is,” she said. “It’s awkward, especially when losing it to another virgin. Putting on the condom is the opposite of smooth. Things don’t seem like they’re going to fit together. You don’t know how much of your weight to put on the other person. It’s a little sweaty. And it doesn’t feel good.” After a minute or so, they felt like they had “done it” enough to say they had (both to themselves and to their friends), so they just . . . stopped. “But, you know,” Brooke added, “it was a very positive experience for me. We bonded over the awkwardness, and that was fun. And even though the sex was lackluster, I felt totally comfortable with the situation and with him, and I’m grateful for that.” They slept together a few more times before breaking up; Brooke kept their first condom wrapper as a souvenir, inscribing it with the date she used it.

  Both Brooke and Caitlin were relieved to have lost their virginity when and how they did: too many of their friends, they said, were panicked about unloading “it” before college and, as a result, had made hasty choices that led to unpleasant experiences. College had loomed as a deadline for most of the girls I spoke with: being tagged as a prude freshman year seemed a greater threat to them than being labeled a slut. Better to get it over with, have sex with someone, rather than risk being seen as an “inexperienced freak” or, worse, as “too ugly to fuck.” In general, young people overestimate how many of their peers have had sex, how many times they’ve had sex, and how many partners they’ve had (not to mention whether any of that sex has felt good). One in four eighteen-year-olds hasn’t had intercourse. However, unless they’re religious, most don’t advertise their status—some even lie about it. Christina, who as a college freshman still expected to remain abstinent until marriage, felt she had to perpetually defend that choice, putting it out there right away when she met a guy at a party, to avoid any pressure or assumption. “But if you think it through,” said Brooke, “it’s ridiculous what happens. I mean, you’re seventeen, you’re graduating high school, and you’re so worried about going to college a virgin that you get drunk and have sex with some random guy. It’s not like that prepares you for anything. It’s not like it gives you all this experience or understanding of sex. People, myself included, talk like just doing the act changes you . . .”

  “Oh my God!” Annie broke in. She’d had intercourse the first time last year, at age nineteen, with her longtime boyfriend. “I thought it would be this whole new world after I had sex the first time! I had learned at school and at church that when you find the ‘right person’ and you’re really in love and you have sex, you will be transformed. Like, this veil would be lifted. But I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel like a new person. There were no birds chirping or bells ringing. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, maybe it wasn’t the right time after all, or maybe we didn’t do it right.’ I felt like I’d been sold a bill of goods.”

  In her book Virginity Lost, Laura Carpenter finds four ways young people relate to virginity, each, more or less, reflected in what these girls described to me. The first group believed virginity was like a gift: a precious expression of love, though one no longer connected to marriage. Like Annie, and to a degree like Brooke, “gifters” romanticized their first time—the person, the setting, the significance—wanting everything to be “perfect” and expecting sex to strengthen their relationships, deepen a partner’s commitment. If the experience wasn’t up to snuff, especially if they felt tricked or coerced into intercourse, they were devastated. Worse yet, the betrayal often left them feeling worthless, unable to assert themselves in future relationships. “Having given away her virginity to someone who clearly didn’t appreciate it,” Carpenter wrote of one such girl, “Julie felt diminished in value, so much so that she believed she was no longer special enough to refuse sex with less special men.” The risk for “gifters,” then, according to Carpenter, was that their experience, of virginity loss itself and beyond, was defined by their partners’ reactions.

  At the other end of the spectrum were those who treated virginity as a stigma, viewing it with mounting embarrassment and dismay as they neared high school graduation. They imagined first intercourse would be kind of like a reality show makeover, changing them instantly from duckling to swan, from child to adult. Relationships? Romance? Forget it. This group just wanted it out of the way. Although they tended to be more satisfied with the experience than those who saw virginity as a gift of love (largely because their expectations were so much lower), they were often disillusioned by how little actually changed for them in the aftermath.

  Nearly a third of Carpenter’s subjects, similar to Caitlin, saw virginity loss more as a process, a rite of passage: part of, but not the determining factor in, becoming an adult. They neither idealized virginity nor saw it as a burden; first intercourse was just a natural, inevitable step in growing up and exploring sexuality. They felt more in control of their choices than the other groups—especially over with whom they had sex and when. They also tended to have experimented extensively with at least one other partner before intercourse, and saw doing “everything but” as worthy in its own right. By contrast, those who considered virginity a gift saw “lesser” sex acts mostly as a way to measure their partners’ trust and commitment; those who saw virginity as a millstone considered anything short of intercourse to be a letdown, a consolation prize.

  Like most Americans today, the young people in these three groups did not expect to remain abstinent until marriage. At the same time, Carpenter found that a substantial minority of teens, which once would have included Christina, had gone resolutely the other way, becoming more committed to and more vocal about remaining chaste until their wedding night. For them, too, virginity was a “gift” to be shared with one true partner, but it was also something else: a way to honor God.

  Waiting for the Prince

  An attractive couple stepped out of a low-slung sports car at the entrance of the East Ridge Country Club in Shreveport, Louisiana. He dark-haired, in a tuxedo; she in what appeared to be a wedding dress: strapless, with a sparkling white bodice and yards of floor-length tulle. At second glance, though, I saw that something did not quite fit: there was a touch of gray at the man’s temples. The woman was not actually a woman at all: she was a fourteen-year-old girl. These were not newlyweds; they were father and daughter, here for the seventh annual, tristate, Ark-La-Tex Purity Ball. Inside, other couples, similarly dressed, milled around a table laden with candy: pink and orange jelly beans and gum balls. Most of them were white, though there was a smattering of African Americans and a few Latinos. One group of daughters and dads (or other male “mentors,” who were equally welcome) stood near curtains covered in twinkle lights. Some had already taken their seats at round tables decorated with candles and silk flowers. A few posed for commemorative photos of the evening, which, according to its online invitation, was “designed to equip and encourage young women seventh through twelfth grade to stay pure until marriage.” For one hundred dollars a couple (plus fifty dollars each for any additional daughters), it continued, “this event allows fathers an opportunity to pledge themselves to love and protect their daughters. It also helps young women begin to realize the truth: that they are infinitely valuable princesses who are ‘worth waiting for’” (emphasis in original).

  The world’s first Purity Ball was organized in 1998, in Colorado Springs, the town where Christina grew up, by a pastor named Randy Wilson. As the father of seven children, five of them girls, Wilson believed it was his duty to “protect” his daughters’ virginity. It’s unclear how many such events are held each year—for a while, reports placed the number at fourteen hundred internationally, but that turned out to be hype. More accurate figures are hard to come by, especially because the balls, like any community event, wax and wane based on local interest and organizers’ skills. Either
way, they are an outgrowth of a larger “True Love Waits” movement launched by the Southern Baptist Convention in the mid-1990s. The first year of the campaign, more than 100,000 young people joined, signing a pledge to remain abstinent until marriage. By 2004 more than 2.5 million had pledged—1 in 6 American girls. Another campaign, Silver Ring Thing, which was until 2005 partially funded by the U.S. government, has held more than 1,000 events, using Christian rock, hip-hop, and a high-energy, club-like atmosphere as a draw; more than 50 were scheduled in the first half of 2015.

  The ball I attended was somewhat unusual, in that although it focused on fathers and daughters, it was organized entirely by women. Its founder, Deb Brittan, was, when it began, a sexual health educator at a local Crisis Pregnancy Center, the kind of organization that steers women with unplanned pregnancies away from abortion and toward adoption or parenting. “My heart was and has always been that I want those baby girls to have the best sex,” she told me as the partygoers tucked into a dinner of baked chicken breast and potatoes. “Obviously, when you look at statistics, it becomes very evident that the healthiest choice and the only guarantee of not getting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming three times more likely to attempt suicide is to look at a commitment to abstinence until marriage.”

  I made a note to myself to check that suicide figure: it wasn’t wrong; it came from a 2003 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The link between sex and suicide, though, could hardly be called causal. Girls, for instance, are also more likely than boys to be bullied and stigmatized for sexual activity, which in itself puts them at risk of depression and suicide. So it may be the shaming of sexually active teens rather than sex itself that is the problem. It may also be that teens who are already depressed are more likely to engage in and subsequently regret sexual activity. Or it may be that teens’ expectations of sex are media-driven and unrealistic; or that having first intercourse specifically while drunk puts a child at greater risk. Whatever the case, Brittan’s job was to go into local public and private schools and, like Pam Stenzel, give students her version of the facts of life. “Whatever they choose after that is up to them,” she told me. “But by the time I got done”—she winked and gave me a playful nudge with her elbow—“they couldn’t say no one told them.”