Apologies to Elizabeth Bishop.
My student Hilary blogs, and on Sunday she linked to this interesting Jessica Zaylia piece on The Hymenization of Virginity. Treading on somewhat familiar ground, Zaylia offers all the right critiques of the language of “losing”. What is being lost, anyway?
What Zaylia doesn’t do is propose a counter-language. What else should we encourage folks to say? Those of us who are rightly eager to make the case that penis-in-vagina intercourse is only one form of sexual expression among many may want to downplay what our culture tells us ought to be the earth-shattering significance of a single act. As awkward as it may sound, asking someone how old they were when they first had intercourse — assuming that it’s an appropriate question in the particular context — is vastly preferable to “when did you lose it” or worse, “To whom did you lose it?”
Zaylia’s meditation on “loss” is incomplete. She rights:
Pairing the two word “losing” with “virginity” accomplishes two goals. First, we only lose what we consider valuable (e.g. “I lost the race,” “I lost my notebook,” or “I am lost.”). We also lose things we presume we ought to have kept (e.g. “I lost my temper,” or “I lost your phone number.”) Coupling “losing” with “virginity” implies that virginity is something of value that we ought to have kept.
True enough. But there’s a third sense of “losing” Zaylia misses. People on diets speak of “losing weight”, after all — and they almost never express regret about the “pounds they gave up.” When we talk of “losing fat” or “losing inches”, we talk about it with hope and optimism beforehand and pride afterwards. And of course, for many of us, “losing virgniity” was a loss eagerly anticipated!
Our stereotype is that only young men are eager to “lose” their virginity. We imagine, wrongly, that young women see their virginity as a prize to be guarded and, in the end, surrendered to someone particularly deserving; young men, our cultural assumes, long to “lose” the burden of still being a virgin to the first available and willing candidate. Though there are some grains of truth in that stereotype — a stereotype that does at least reveal two wildly varying attitudes towards “loss” — it misses the diverse reality of human sexual experience.
After eight years in youth ministry and nearly twice that many teaching gender studies, I’ve talked with hundreds and hundreds of teens about their attitudes towards sex. I’ve mentored young people before and after they became sexually active, and been privileged to be the one adult that many boys and girls felt that they could talk to at various stages. And I’ve known girls who were eager to lose what they thought of as a heavy weight, and I’ve known boys who were terrified of “ruining themselves.” One of the most common reasons the kids I’ve worked with have offered for having sex: “I just wanted to get it over with.” They aren’t saying it’s necessarily painful (though sometimes it is); what they want to “get over” is a threshold into adulthood. For many, what they wanted to “lose” was a sense of themselves as childlike. Youth leaders can caution, until the proverbial cows come home, that sexual experience has nothing to do with emotional maturity, that the loss of virginity isn’t a rocketbooster into adulthood, but it’s hard to counter such a pervasive cultural myth.
In the end, I’m not troubled by the language of losing, as long as we understand that some losses are to be welcomed as well as grieved. When we lose a fear of heights by learning to skydive, we overcome an obstacle. That’s a positive loss. When we lose our fear of speaking up, and become assertive in social situations, we have lost something we needed to lose. Loss can be redemptive and a marker of spiritual, physical, and psychological growth. Rather than trying to avoid using the language of loss to describe first sexual experiences, we can broaden our understanding of what it means to lose.
I’m not an etymologist. But if the word lose is related to the Latin luere, as some brief huntings on the ‘net suggest it is, then we have a powerful reminder of the full dimensions of “losing”. Luere can mean “to atone for”, to “lose”, but also to “loosen” and to “let flow.” If to lose is to loosen, then it’s a short jump that another way to think about losing is to connect it to new freedom. We all know Marx’s famous line about the workers of the world having nothing to lose but their chains, after all.
Sometimes, it’s “hurrah” for loss.
I rather like “becoming sexual” as an alternative to the various ways to frame loss. I think “becoming” is especially appropriate, as the first sexual experience is an initiation of sorts, as you suggest. Also, it opens the door to a wider conception of sexuality than vaginal intercourse.
I enjoyed, this, Hugo. What frustrates me is how our society looks at virginity as a thing to be given to, or all too often, taken by, someone else. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “I took her/his V-card.” Maybe I don’t have my virginity anymore , but I certainly don’t like thinking that someone else has it–especially if that someone else is abusive and no longer in my life.
I can see what you mean, but given the context, and the fact that for the majority of things, loss is bad, I’m still not happy with ‘losing’ as a good way of describing it. Loss is only ‘good’ if the thing you are losing is ‘bad’, and I don’t think that virginity per se is bad, either. It’s just a matter of progression. So whilst it would be cool to try and temper the ‘losing virginity= bad’ streak of things, I quite like the idea of using alternative phrases.
I saw someone write ‘making your sexual debut’ as an alternative, which I thought was interesting.
Somethign that encapsulates the fact that you’re not really ‘losing’ anything, but ‘gaining’ experience. Maybe ‘first time I gained sexual experience’? ‘Started my sexual journey’?
So I guess ‘the first time I had sex’ is pretty to the point,
I like ‘becoming sexual’, but I think people are sexual long before they have any sexual contact with another person, and I can’t quite include masturbation in any sort of ‘losin virginity’ category, with the lack of other people and all. The whole thing is not just about being sexual, but about being sexual with another person for the first time. Tho some of the ones I suggested have the same implication. I guess what matters is not the semantics, but rather, the idea of a ‘first time’ as something positive. :)
But I agree the emphasis should NOT be on PIV sex.
Is virginity something one “has,” even? Is is a possession? A quality? I’m not sure I see the usefulness of virginity as a concept, if indeed we are trying to move beyond PIV as the definition of sex.
I’m sort of with JW here; “virginity” isn’t a really a possession. It’s “virginity” and “purity” are the only words in the english language where you lose the absence of something.
I also hate the word “lose” beacause it sounds so passive. I didn’t “misplace” my virginity, it didn’t float off into the ether- I wanted to be sexually active, so I sought out a willing partner and knocked knees. I think the passiveness is one of the more irritating parts of the word.
I guess I do see becoming sexually experienced as moving towards another stage of one’s development, of “losing” a childlike ignorance. We speak, after all, of “losing one’s inhibitions” — and that’s a sense in which the language of losing is less passive and more active. Or, to keep going, we talk about escaping someone who’s chasing us — we say “we lost them”. There’s a dimension to the word that I think needs to be explored.
But I’d be happy with less emphasis on PIV intercourse.
Oh, it’s an acronym now is it?
Yes, and a handy one. I am still uncomfortable with the use of “loss” in any positive sense, though; if something was undesired, I would get rid of, toss, scrap it, etc. And I would be more interested in what I was gaining instead, anyhow, when I cut whatever it was loose.
But I am even more uncomfortable with the idea of a human being treated as a piece of bubble wrap, of having some part of their anatomy damaged just to make it fit someone else’s. Bad enough how they fetishize said anatomy in some other cultures just to destroy it, but here in “liberated” America they just leave the young girls vulnerable to injury; even the people who are okay with their daughters doing the PIV thing before marriage, and tell them all about how to avoid pregnancy and STD’s, still leave out how to make sure it won’t hurt. And I can’t see how anyone who really cared about their daughters, nieces, students, etc. would neglect this, would fail them so.
I am actually neutral on this one. When I lost my virginity, it was a huge deal for me because I also rid myself of the fundamentalist Christian mindset prior to the act itself; loosing my virginity before marriage was a manifestation of my newfound idenitification with feminism, and the idea that my worth is not based on how well I adhere to their definition of sexual purity. I do not view myself as tainted or tarnished in any way. I am actually extremely thankful I became sexually experienced when I did. I also am glad that I waited as long as I did with this guy, because he was truly my first love. He doesn’t “have” my virginity, but I do believe that I gave him something special. I still believe that our sexuality is a gift from God, although I no longer put virginity on a pedestal.
…even the people who are okay with their daughters doing the PIV thing before marriage, and tell them all about how to avoid pregnancy and STD’s, still leave out how to make sure it won’t hurt. And I can’t see how anyone who really cared about their daughters, nieces, students, etc. would neglect this, would fail them so.
Right. Which is why good comprehensive sex education does include exactly that. I’ve always made sure it gets included when I’ve done it, though often that particular topic is dealt with in women-only settings.
I’ve contemplated this notion of “losing my virginity” quite a bit over the past several years. In the traditional PIV sense, I “lost” my virginity after my sophomore year in college. The experience was quite unmemorable, the person I was with didn’t even know what he was “taking” from me. What was so surprising about the whole experience how much of a nonevent it was; as others have commented, I was just glad it was over and I could move on with my life.
As I’ve gotten older (and a bit wiser, I hope) I’ve come to regard this first experience with PIV intercourse less as a sentinel event and more as simply one point along a continuum. I’d had sexually experiences prior to that one and have continued to grow and develop since. To place so much importance on one solitary act is to minimize all the other steps along the path of sexual development and identity. I think of all the stories I hear about teens engaging in anal and/or oral intercourse because “it’s not REAL sex”. The level of intimacy and emotional/physical risk associated with these activities is no less than PIV, yet they are somehow more accepted. Even as adults, I think society struggles to put sexuality in a box. An “affair” is often definied by PIV intercourse, other forms of intimacy (including emotional affairs) are somehow more forgivable.
I like Leslie’s concept about sexual experience as a continuum. There wasn’t one night when I “lost” my virginity, since I only sleep with women and the cultural framing does hold that virginity is lost via PIV intercourse. I made a transition from being someone who hasn’t yet had sex with someone else to someone who is sexually active over a pretty long period of time — about two years, really. And I’m still learning about sex, going to new places with it; I hope that this will be true five, ten, twenty years from.
That framing — of a spectrum we all travel — is useful for a few reasons. It takes the emphasis off any one specific act; it allows people to locate themselves on it no matter what stage of sexual experience they are at presently (so that people are “pre-sexual” before they’ve done certain things); and, perhaps most importantly, it takes away the binary framing — so that everyone is still learning and growing, no matter how much sex they’ve had. It’s a much better reflection of reality, I think, for people of all genders and orientations.
This should read:
(so that people are not* “pre-sexual” before they’ve done certain things)
I wish I had Andrea Dworkin’s book Intercourse in front of me right now, because what she says about virginity in her chapter on Joan of Arc is so apt. If I remember correctly, she talks about virginity as being about something other, or at least in addition to, a vagina that has not been entered by a penis, as a state that a woman might choose to move in and out of at any time in her life simply by choosing to be, or not to be, sexually active. (I may not have that precisely right; it’s been a long time since I read the book.) And she talks about the historical shift from that idea of virginity to the idea that losing one’s virginity–and Dworkin was talking about women, not men–is about becoming a woman, becoming an adult, that somehow without the experience of having been fucked one cannot be, fully, a woman. I wish I could remember more of her actual argument, because it goes very precisely to the question of the language of loss when it is applied to virginity. Anyway, I just wanted to note that what Dworkin wrote is worth looking at in this context.
Richard,
I haven’t read Andrea’s book, however what you say here, “And she talks about the historical shift from that idea of virginity to the idea that losing one’s virginity–and Dworkin was talking about women, not men–is about becoming a woman, becoming an adult, that somehow without the experience of having been fucked one cannot be, fully, a woman,” strikes a chord with me. In fact, I’d say the strong message I heard as a teenager is that to be a woman one has to experiece being fucked by a man. Screwing women was also the measurement of what it took to be a man. I think if many of my girlfriends were truthful about their experiences they would say the same. I don’t attach much sentimentality to the experience, because although it was quite personal it was neither romantic, intimate or positive. The language of loss could apply if one hears the message that their worth is viewed in terms of their fuckability factor and that is what it means to be a woman as a measurement of their usefulness to males.
As a guy who (not unhappily) still “has his V-card,” I hold that the phrase with the stigma in our society is not “lose one’s virginity,” but rather “virgin” itself. Rather than simply meaning someone who hasn’t partaken of sex, the word is now loaded with the baggage of being naïve and sheltered. The film THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN seemed to use the word as an instant punchline; we don’t know anything else about the movie yet, but “it must be hilarious, right? I mean, can you imagine? Being THAT OLD and STILL being a virgin?!” In the movie’s poster, the protagonist appears dressed as a nine-year-old, with an ethereal glow about him, suggesting that he has never even HEARD of the word “sex.” Those who put sex at the center of their lives simply cannot process the idea that there are others who’ve never tried it out.
“For many, what they wanted to ‘lose’ was a sense of themselves as childlike.”
How very sad.
“I still believe that our sexuality is a gift from God, although I no longer put virginity on a pedestal.”
Perhaps the answer is to put neither virginity nor sex on a pedestal.
bmmg, the fact that men who are not sexually active are looked down on doesn’t mean a thing about “virginity” and the mixed messages women get.
Yes, Mythago, once again we see that what sexually inactive males face is just the other side of the coin from what sexually active females face. Not mutually exclusive at all. Just as my comments on the “chivalry” thread, my pointing out one doesn’t negate the other.
Well, as I understand it, it’s usually something to be “loosed” rather than “lost” in a lot of Latin love poetry…”de eia virginea reserassem vincula” (Carmina Burana, Circa mea pectora) comes to mind. I like that a bit better, especially for women — chastity is a chain or a necklace, to be loosened or worn as one sees fit, and it shouldn’t become a shackle…
Hello. It has been interesting to have sparked so much conversation. Indeed, I do not think we disagree as much as you think we do. If you read my article to which you cite, you will find that it is precisely because - what we refer to as “losing virginity” should be a good and positive thing - that I call for a more positive sexual linguistics.
I truly enjoyed your piece, and, as I said, I agree with it whole-heartedly, even if I do not agree that our views conflict.
Best regards,
Jessie Zaylia
p.s. I do propose a counter-language. I suggest we should speak of our first sexual encounters (if we want to even do such a thing) in terms of when we first “asserted our sexuality” and not when we first “lost our virginity.”