No other experience has made me feel more base and vulgar than losing my virginity. I didn’t have any pretense about the act beforehand. My mother painted all sexuality as depravity, which could only be lessened by your connection to your partner. If it was with your spouse, it wasn’t (as) lascivious. Tolerable. If it was with a long-term partner, you were meant to feel shame, but people would (eventually) understand and forgive you. And the lowest of the low: with a stranger. Casual sex was something men did, almost like a pre-marital hunting ground. A field in which they could burn off excess energy. They were allowed their sexual blitz with the expectation they’d eventually settle with a virgin woman.
I had learned all these mores by middle school, and the most important edict: don’t get knocked up. My mother feared teenage pregnancy more than anything else. Thus, every boy, whether friend or queer or passing through, was a menace and treated as such. Pregnancy would not only be a blight on our name but an additional charge to her sizable domestic duties.
After learning I had a crush on a boy in my drama class, she pulled me into the laundry room, leaning against the door, and told me, “Let them touch your breasts, but never your chocha. If you need to give them something, fine. Give them that.” Here eyes were red—had she not slept? And she refused to move from the door.
“What about my butt? Can I give them that?”
Her hand rose. “What’s wrong with you?” she cried.
I didn’t even know anal sex existed yet. I meant it as an offering, the same way we offered our guests coffee and tea. A thing to palm, only. If we were negotiating body parts, why wasn’t this an acceptable alternative to pregnancy?
My face burned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“Just wait until you’re married. Please. Trust me. You’ll feel more… dignified.”
I wanted to ask her if she had waited with my father or the boyfriend she had left behind in Cuba—on their last day on the island, had he pressured her? Invited her over in the hopes of a departing gift? My mother had a way of ceding to men’s wishes, my father’s, brother’s. I wondered if, in this moment, in the stale and sweltering laundry room, there was a warning or a way for her to gauge what kind of woman I would be.
“Okay. I get it.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, let me out.”
“They’ll be convincing. Your own body will be convincing.” She stopped and looked down. There were dust bunnies and mottled hair strands by her feet. What was she remembering? What had been taken from her with a cunning tongue?
“It’s hot as balls in here,” I said. “Come on. I heard you.”
She tentatively turned the knob, then, with a sigh, opened the door fully.
~
I thought of my mother when I met Robert. He wasn’t a stranger if we spoke for several hours before doing anything else, I reasoned. If he eventually became my husband, then our timeline wouldn’t matter either. She was right about how convincing one’s body can be; how its wants can seem like truth—if it’s begging for this man, it must need him, no? I thought of these needs the way I thought of other bodily needs. Water. Food. If it’s asking, then I need to slake. Right?
It was humid and cramped. My lust lay heavy in my body. It sweltered, and I couldn’t pull myself from Robert’s mouth and hands. I didn’t know I could want, anything, this much. I was eighteen and smoldering. Clearly, my mother was wrong. She had never felt this deep, inner longing. I thought she was a liar or using fear to control me, or was unaware of the range of emotions the human body could conjure.
I knew I’d sleep with Robert after our first kiss.
~
There is no medically meaningful definition of virginity. It cannot be “proven” in any biologically salient way, despite claims about hymens and blood and “tightness”. There is no evolutionary advantage granted to virgins or nonvirgins. There is nothing physically that is altered or “lost” forever.
~
I met Robert at an improv show the summer after I finished high school. He was performing with a visiting troupe from Gainesville for the weekend. I wanted to be a comedian, and spent most weekends at theaters, notepads in hand, imagining a future adulthood at SNL or on MADTV. Robert was short with a large build, but with the facial sharpness of Italian sculptures. Angular jaw. Roman nose. Dark crop of hair that was beginning to curl, and hazel eyes that contrasted against his thick dark eyebrows. I knew I wanted to lose it to someone beautiful.
We spoke about comedy, Glenn Close, one day living in Chicago (the comedy training ground), and finally exchanged contact information. We made plans. He promised to borrow his Miami friend’s car to come visit me, to look at a physical map so that he’d know how to reach me by Sunday, and as I left the theater, I wondered how I’d be altered forever after our encounter.
~
According to Medieval bestiaries (compendia of mythical creatures), the only way to capture or have a unicorn is by using a virgin as bait. The animal comes out of hiding, lured by the maiden’s purity.
~
I told my mother I was seeing a friend visiting from out of town. Not a full lie, but she must have suspected something. I was a child—what people did I know “out of town”? Still, she nodded, perhaps exhausted by her own miseries. I was eighteen, maybe she felt done with the child-rearing, at least the value-instilling portion.
I rushed across the lawn to his car. “Drive, due, drive,” I said, afraid my mother would be watching through the jalousie slats from the living room, as she tended to do it. “Come on.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, accelerating down the block, nearly running a stop sign. “Shit.”
“It’s okay.”
“Just, it’s not my car, so I have to be careful with it, y’know.”
“Mhm.”
We went to A.D. Barnes Park, across from a Burger King and Quiznos. I was hungry, but I felt guilty asking him to spend any money on me. I didn’t deserve it. My father lorded money over my mother, bemoaning all the bills that fell at his feet, and so I learned never to be a financial burden to anyone. To not ask for something if I couldn’t contribute towards it. My stomach groaned, and a radiating headache spread across my temples, demanding caffeine. I had practice ignoring my body’s “inconvenient” needs.
“You good?” he asked, stretching by the car. The light turned his hazel eyes into a wash of honey. I loved him; already and immediately.
“Yeah. Let me just go to the fountain over there for a sec.”
“Sure.”
We walked the longest trail, passing under rows of large banyan trees. I heard the skittering of lizards in the underbrush, almost walking in tandem with us. Was this how my mother pictured it? Why did I want him so intensely?
I didn’t know I would lose my virginity here, in this place, and in this way, but a part of me must have accepted this reality because the night before, I had shaved my pubic area. Before Robert’s arrival, I perfumed and talcumed, prepared for this possibility. The night before, when I imagined us under a flame tree’s shade, I felt a current of electricity shoot through my arms. I loved him; as thought and theory.
As we continued our walk, I felt the chaffing, the nicked folds of skin near my inner thighs. If I lost my virginity like this, perhaps I was preventing a worse alternative. It could have been with a man I found ugly or a predator, or as an obligation—sexual encounters I had heard of from older female relatives. They talked about “giving it up” and being “browbeaten.” Sex as something traded for peace. All I wanted from my first time was enthusiasm and genuine want.
Roberto touched my hand, pressing his thumb into the veins in my wrist, and it was enough. At least I could always say I was eager my first time. Enthralled.
~
In worlds where virgins are sacrificed to appease the gods or to improve agricultural output or help a farm have a better yield, wouldn’t every maiden work fervently, thus, to have sex? Virginity was a liability; a danger that gets one thrown into the simmering heart of a volcano. Perhaps in these times, girls rushed, plotted, and schemed to lose their virginity as quickly as possible, slaking the very first pulses between their legs. Saving their lives by lying down.
~
I wanted to be the first one in my friend group to have sex, especially since my pals were such high achievers. Academically and musically gifted, so what I had (or thought I had) over them was sexual acumen. Praxis to their theories of life. It meant something to be desired, to have a body different from those around you. I’d hooked up (meaning: made out with some fondling) with boys before, kissed girls on dares, and had little trysts in school stairwells. One evening, I invited my best friend at the time to read my diary, to see what I had done with Daniel. She had won an award at the time, so I placed the journal on her lap. Strung across my bed like clothes to be worn the next day, I listened to her read my words aloud.
“Then Daniel pulled me onto his lap,” she read. “And he lifted my shirt. Kissed my neck, then with all his strength flipped me over.” She put down the journal and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was jealous—I hoped so—or if there was something she had recognized from the prose. “Wow,” her own words. “Did it feel good?”
“Absolutely. You’ll see, one day.”
I didn’t tell her that Daniel had stopped answering my calls and texts and ignored me entirely in our drama class, sitting on the opposite end of the black box theater. I didn’t understand the sudden distance. That’s how I could be loved, I supposed. In stages. It must have been my fault; a lack of ability to rapt men, or because I’d stopped him from going all the way. With my next lover, I’d be more generous. Give everything and be rewarded.
~
Tort of seduction, initially, found legal basis under the belief that a father lost the labor capacity of his daughter due to pregnancy. The father could/would sue for what he believed would be the economic equivalent of the woman’s work.
Eventually, the legal base shifted, and women were then able to sue men they believed had misrepresented themselves or the situation to gain consent. Thus, if the man pretended to be wealthy to sleep with a woman (one who, perhaps, needed to think about her financial future and could be swayed by displays of security), he could be legally liable.
This statue was tangentially related to the idea of Breach of Promise. In the Middle Ages, a man’s promise to marry a woman was legally binding, and if such a contract was broken, the remedy for the solution was referred to as a heart balm—the ability to sue for damages if a proposal was disrupted.
~
I resolved in my heart that Robert was good enough. It could be worse than a park with a theater boy. Although I didn’t consider whether this moment could have been (or deserved to be better either. At a clearing overlooking the jungle gym, Robert moved behind me and started kissing my neck. He grabbed my breast from behind and worked himself into me, kneading his body into mine until I shuddered in his arms.
~
Sometimes, I think there was a concerted effort by ‘90s and 2000s media to make young girls more sexually pliable; open to hook-up culture; encouraging (brow-beating, really) women into “giving a chance” to men they weren’t necessarily attracted to. The screenwriters, mostly men, may have written their fantasies into their work, imagining (and eventually creating) a world where women gave their bodies easily. Without the need for romance or gesture. And what did those ideas inculcate into the young girls watching those shows and movies?
When I watched my childhood idol Rory Gilmore lose her virginity so casually to a married man (Dean), I wondered several things. One, if Rory, a girl from a wealthy and educated family, is okay with sex in her childhood bedroom with little ceremony, what can I demand of my lovers? Two, perhaps there is nothing special to this act; and three, waiting for marriage could be a mistake in its own way—I could wait years for a man not worth waiting for. What Dean’s wife might have thought or felt.
~
I told him I was a virgin. He pulled away for a moment, pensive, wiping his mouth. His eyes looked lighter in that morning gauzy glow. Green. He nodded again, then finally asked what I wanted to do. He was so beautiful. Better him than someone whom I couldn’t bring myself to want. My past self seemed to recognize a future habit, a giving to quell others. Sex as duty.
We went to his backseat.
~
Hymenorrhaphy is a surgical procedure where the hymen is recreated to cause one to bleed during their next sexual encounter. It is not part of mainstream gynecology. Sometimes a prosthetic hymen is implanted. It is not taught, practiced, or regulated by any medical standards. After the procedure, bleeding after sex is still not guaranteed.
~
I was afraid to ask him for oral sex or anything that would have amplified my pleasure. It felt selfish and demanding, so I just observed how the act unfolded. His movements became quick, confident, impulses.. He pulled me into the backseat, undid his pants, and kissed my neck in a frenzy until I lay down. From that position, I could see the banyan tree leaves through the window. Light puzzled through their fragmented folds. The sun had a gauzy glow, and in the distance I heard the train. It wasn’t awful. I smelled the nature on our sweat. There were even little bits of leaves in Robert’s hair.
~
When I first heard the term “saving oneself,” I imagined life rafts and fire escapes. It had a feminist urgency—put yourself first, it implied. A counter to all the edicts about sacrifice and martyrdom. Save yourself. And not others. I hear it when my mother complains about her husband. Save yourself. I hear it when a student tells me how she’s rearranged her life for her boyfriend. Save yourself. I say it in the mirror, hoping for the strength to only need myself.
~
His sweat fell on my face. He apologized, and then I became more self-conscious because he was watching my reaction, staring at my face, when he should have closed his eyes. Did this mean he wanted it to feel good for me? I focused on the pleasure, a radiating bloom that I began to feel in my chest. Then he switched positions, and I suddenly felt nothing. The seatbelt stabbed into my shoulder blade, and his thrusting chafed my legs.
“I’m almost done,” he said.
“Okay.”
I didn’t orgasm, but I understood why people were obsessed with this act. I felt I had given Robert something. A gift. I watched him as he moved to his corner of the backseat, searching for his underwear.
“I should go,” he said, already dressed and pointing for me to do the same.
“Of course. Yeah, duh.”
~
Sexual initiation early in life is linked with several issues, according to a 2017 article, “The Sooner, the Worse?” In their study, they found that young women who had sexual contact early in life experienced prevalent economic instability, lower levels of education, social isolation, marital disruption, and medical consequences (i.e., STIs). I thought about my life with each problem I read, remembering the version of it that I experienced or wondering how it would present in some future I hoped would already be over.
~
We sat in the backseat for a bit. I looked at my underwear, curious to see if I had bled. And I had. I showed it to him, stretching the fabric along my palm. He didn’t say anything. He looked at a macaw that perched on a nearby sabal palm. Then I wanted to cry.
I looked out my window, searching for comfort in nature, a beautiful landscape, a palette in the sky—a signal that this moment was not as vulgar and basic as I suddenly felt. I wondered if this would be life? If I could expect any honor, especially from my loved ones. When I checked to see if he had noticed my crying, I realized I wasn’t special. He was crawling over the center console to drive back.
I held the underwear tightly, the only proof of what had happened; the blood already dried. A stain that would not wash out. I thought of my mother, her warnings, wondering where she had cried. And if there were trees around her that could comfort her, at least a bit.