Losing your virginity—an important milestone in every life. A long awaited clumsy night of what goes where and desperately trying to live up to the romantic comedies that paint sex as a heavenly experience. Though both men and women generally have the same experience of an awkward–and far from glamorous–“first time,” the aftermath between genders is rather different. Men are offered congratulations, while the news of a woman losing her virginity is quite a difficult pill for society to swallow. I have noticed that often women are classified, and nearly divided into two teams: virgins and non-virgins. We are prudes or we are sluts, inevitably doomed to one group or another. However, neither team ever seems to win; sex a game with lose-lose odds.
When I was in high school, people compared women losing their virginity to being a “licked cupcake”—once one person had a taste, no one else at the party would want you. Unfortunately, this disgustingly sexist, double standard metaphor led me to live in constant fear of losing my virginity, of being a defiled pastry in the world of dating. Sure, I should have raised a big middle finger to those who told me I would be any lesser after having sex; but, I was naïve, young, and under the control of my conservative, small town.
Why are women who are virgins and women who are not, any different? It’s as if the life of female sexuality is an oppressive dodge ball team—pick your team, virgin or non-virgin. And if you fall into team non-virgin, you have no other choice but to wear the uniform of low cut shirts and scandalous skirts. Why do we feel the need to categorize women and give them a different set of expectations and a different place in our hearts, just because of their sexual encounters? Why do we not look at sexual experience with the same eyes as any other life experience? Men don’t deem women “undateable” because they’ve been skydiving, or visited Paris, or broken a bone, so why do men write-off women who have had sex?
Let us pretend that we all agree with these highly oppressive standards, that virgin women are classy, worthy of respect, diamonds in the rough, while non-virgin, unmarried, women are promiscuous, uneducated, and trashy. With this in mind, what happens to the women who have been raped, unjustly robbed off their innocence and high virginity status, are they a part of this group of “licked cupcakes?” Or on the flipside, do these virgin women, that stand on their pedestals of purity, still deserve their title if they are handing out hand-jobs like candy? Is it penetration alone that triggers the transformation from innocent to tainted? With the stigma with a loss of virginity, I have found in my own personal experience, that girls often avoid intercourse at all costs, yet have no problem with sliding into “third base” time and time again. I am not suggesting that we tar and feather these virgins that use these “sexual loopholes.” They are simply conforming to a system in which they are forced to be a part of.
I firmly believe that all women, in some way, hand-jobs or not, submit to the power of this virginity classification system. I am no exception. In my high school career, I found that I often prided myself on my abstinence, as if being a virgin was some sort of accomplishment. And sadly, it worked. I was the virgin, the one who had no idea what made a great blow job, the one whose boobs were still left untouched, and boys loved it. Yet, they didn’t want to leave me that way. These men, or rather boys, wanted to conquer the uncharted territory. But, all it took was one explorer on this uncharted territory to completely tarnish a woman’s reputation.
So with all this in mind, losing my virginity came at a much greater loss than I ever expected. After my virginity-taker had left my life, I panicked. I feared that I would owe every man, from now on, an explanation as to why I was no longer a shiny, new virgin, but rather a used product at the bottom of the shelf. My self-confidence plummeted and I wished that I was the innocent girl I once was.
But then I realized, it was as if people believed a man’s penis was a magic wand and with one single wave–or thrust–a woman’s respectability could disappear. We all seem to be under a spell that leads us to believe that defining a woman by a solitary experience in her life is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And I am not going to allow such nonsense in my life. I was confident in my choice to have sex. I am confident in the person I am today and no penis can get in the way of that. I am a woman with goals, aspirations, talents, friends, and family; sex is such a small part of me and who I am, and I refuse to let it be any more than the bedroom activity that it is. Sure, I lost my virginity that night, but that is the only thing I lost.