The Virginity Project

Parklife...

Once in a while one has an experience that pulls one out of oneself, out of the thinking, walking, talking brains that we hold onto for most of the day and into an altered state, another reality, a scenario that allows us lose ourselves and truly exist in that moment. In typical Aries fashion, I find that skiing very fast usually hits this spot, but sadly, snow is not in abundance at this time of year. Heat, however, is….and with heat came something rather special last night….the return of Blur to the London stage. And not just any old stage but to the green heart around which we exist, we walk, and we talk, London’s very own Hyde Park.

I’d been looking forward to this event for a while in a casual sort of ‘I do intellectually remember that every time I see Blur I buzz for three days afterwards but I can’t quite reclaim that feeling when I think about it now’ sort of way.  You may recall that I recently mentioned that I hadn’t left this city for ten months. It’s a bit like falling out of love when you’re sick of the sight of your own city. I was so incredibly, mind-crushingly, bored crapless of every single thing I looked at that even if London had turned into a musical theme park with free food on every street corner served by naked men giving away free designer clothes and mini breaks to hot European destinations I still might have been a teensy bit bored of my surroundings. A couple of trips to the countryside have helped but Blur have refreshed the parts that other lagers haven’t been able to reach and I’ll tell you why.

I do like a band that push the musical envelope, a band that dare to be different, a band who are prepared to take the chance every time they bring out a new record to forget what they wrote about last time around. As I stood and watched Blur take the stage last night and knock out song after song after song after song, each and every single one of them somewhat different to the last, I felt some kind of internal epiphany about life and that if one really wants to do something different in any department, one must be prepared to take a chance and try something new.

Who would have thought it? I certainly didn’t when at twenty two years old I went to work for Blur. It was 1990 and they had just released their first album, the singularly named ‘Blur’. They were different, they looked good and they understood the value of a catchy tune. But never in a million years did I think that twenty years later I would be standing watching them in Hyde Park. I knew that I loved the barely contained mayhem that I witnessed every time I saw them live. I once took a ‘non believer’ to see Blur at Roselands in New York. It was, she said at the end of the night, one of the best live performances she had seen in her life. But I still didn’t think that a band that refused to toe the musical line would be that successful. I was wrong!

Long after I moved on to other jobs and new episodes, I always kept going back to Blur. Long after Oasis momentarily moved our collective earths with ‘Rock n Roll Star’ and ‘Supersonic’- and then just kept churning out revised versions of the above with a slightly different haircut - Blur kept taking us to new places. To tender hurt places with ‘13’, to the States with Song 2, to hot political places with ‘Think Tank’ and with a million other experimental strands along the way…..Popscene, The Universal, Beetlebum, This is a low, Parklife, Oily Water, Coffee and TV, Boys and Girls, it goes on. It is testament to Blur that their fans are prepared to take these trips with them.

Life appears to be a series of spurts, of explosions, of deaths, of fallow periods when the earth seems to become dry and nothing really appears to be happening, but unbeknownst to us, silence does not necessarily mean that nothing is happening. I am getting a bit oblique now but it occurred to me last night that Blur have had many incarnations: they have been Indie pop boys, good old British geezers, they have po’goed, they have disco mirror ball’ed, they have Country House’d, they have loved each other, beaten the crap out of each other, drunk and imbibed far too much of all sorts of things and then they have got over it. They have even given the whole thing up and done something else. They have let the ground lie fallow ….and here they are again. And we’re still here with them.

Of course the fact that we thought they might never come back does make it all the sweeter but with a back catalogue like this, this is so much more than just a sentimental trip down memory lane. This is a revival of something that was great the first time round and just got even better. Damon Albarn looked like he couldn’t quite believe it as he sang the words to The Universal and the crowd sang them back to him. It really, really, really could happen. And it has.

And me? I stepped back out into the night alone having shaken off my companions earlier on in the evening. Irritatingly, I have a life long fear of crowds. Stick me in a hot sweaty venue up front and I’m fine. As long as I can see the door, everything is alright. But put me in a field of 55, 000 people and I start to lose the plot. Halfway through the set I’d had to move back through the crowd and find some space to breathe. My chest felt totally clear now and the sheer joy of the music, the night time and the fact that I was wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and a skimpy dress in my own city felt great. We are not accustomed to such heat here in the UK.

I decided to do the London thing and walk home; I wanted to breathe my city in, to fall in love with it again, and to listen to the other languages that you hear if you take the time to listen. We might be fighting a war on terror in some places but there is no such commotion going on here in the Edgware Road. Just the sweet scent of barbequed chicken, the smoke rising up from the hubbly bubblys, the promise of exotic destinations, no naked men handing out free designer clothes and holidays but one lives in hope. Then I headed on down towards home, towards the Westway and I hummed ‘For Tomorrow’ to myself.

The first cut is the deepest....

Whew, the Virginity Project has been swept away lately by absorbing ‘educational’ courses, more work than you can shake a stick at and my first trip out of London, tragically, for almost ten months. One does have a nasty habit of staying put and then wondering why one is so sick of the sight of one’s own surroundings. That is all, thankfully, to change soon as a trip to the motherland – Greece – is in the offing.

All the while, small things sustain me and they are often to be found in books. Two have amused me lately. The first was ‘Diplomatic Baggage’ by Brigid Keenan. I bought this book for my mother because it is a first person account of a diplomat’s life, as told from the view of the wife, or the ‘trailing spouse’ as she was known in days gone by. My father was a diplomat so my mother knows only too well how it feels to be a trailing spouse. In her case, trailing with three small children in a highly complicated country: Beirut, in the 1960’s - a hotbed of diplomatic activity if ever there were one.

When I gave my mother the book, she said ‘Oh I read that ages ago dear’. And I realised that I had actually bought it for myself.  I shan’t go into one here as its not the point of my post but if you are looking for a decent, heartfelt and highly original book – and you are probably a woman, after all today’s post is rather woman-centric – you could do a lot worse than to read this very smart book.

Brigid has lived a life that is so very different to the rather stationary, well, at least in geographical terms, life that I live right now, that it takes the word ‘peripatetic’ to a new extreme. Can you imagine moving, not just home, but country, every two years for the rest of your working life? Dropping into entirely different cultures, customs, social circles, climates and geographies, whilst ‘trailing’ your children, your pets, your furniture, your pretty much everything from one place to the next?

The beauty of this book is the humour with which she observes these changes and the vast array of characters that come into their lives, frequently in the form of ‘help’, or servants as we might have called them way back when and the nebulous, ever changing landscapes in which they find themselves in. Humour, as ever, saves the day and our author possesses this quality in bucket loads.

I was thrilled to discover, upon finishing the book (which I was gutted about by the way), that Brigid Keenan and I are two ‘acquaintances’ away from being friends. That is to say that my boss’s partner and Brigid occasionally work together. Whether or not she might like to be my friend is quite another matter.

But if you think that ‘Diplomatic Baggage’ sounds like a woman’s book, wait until you hear about this one. To be perfectly honest, I only ordered this book because it is based upon a similar concept to my own. Take one universal truth, one experience that a vast tract of the population is likely to have experienced and then get people to compare stories. In this case, a woman’s first experience of her monthly period.

Eeek, I thought, do I really want to go there? Could it be that interesting? Is one story not much the same as another? Apparently not and frankly, I should have known better. Having worked my way through myriad different virginity loss experiences, I think it is safe to say that no two people have exactly the same take on either of these potentially life changing experiences.

Besides anything else, these accounts are not only about our first time experiences but the acknowledgment of the passage of time and how much our lives have changed over the last eighty years. Here are stories from the present day and from a time when some young women had absolutely no idea what a period was and subsequently suspected, occasionally for months on end that they may just be bleeding to death.

There are also stories from other countries. There is one from a young Polish woman, fleeing persecution from the Nazi’s on a train in 1942, the border crossing strip search tragically timed to arrive at just the same moment as her first period. And the shocking realisation that the economic disparities in our lives are huge. Many young African women still stay at home when they get their periods because they cannot afford simple sanitary protection. That is one lost week of education, every week, for the entire duration of your school years.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are comedy moments aplenty and truckloads of familiar observations…the memory of those curious boxes of wrapped paper objects in all different shapes, sizes and formats that were kept under the sink in the bathroom. ‘It’s like living in the house with a spy’, my own mother was heard to exclaim when I had checked out the contents of these boxes one too many times.

And then there is the remembrance of all that yearning and the longing for that moment to arrive, because much as it really doesn’t make sense to look forward to bleeding once a month, there is still the overriding urge to belong. To have joined the club, to have become an adult, much like the many voices we have listened to who have said the exact same thing about virginity loss.

These are landmark moments that punctuate our lives. These are events that divide our lives into ‘before’ and ‘after’ stages. These are the instances that make us feel like we have stepped through a door into a new stage of our lives and they are important to acknowledge.

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, the eighteen year old author of this book has made a great job of gathering stories from literally every nook and cranny you can possibly imagine. She takes us on a journey, through the lives of other women, through history and most importantly, through ourselves. I thought a lot as I read this book, in much the same way that I hope people will one day think when my own book is published. I went on a very poignant little trip down memory lane whilst I read this book and you can’t say fairer than that. Period.

 

I remember my first trip to the States like it was yesterday. I was so excited that I spent weeks beforehand having feverish dreams about forgetting the most basic of items. Items, it seemed that were critical components to the enjoyment of my trip – contact lenses, shoes, guide books. It was alarming to find out just how much truck I placed on the most innocent of accoutrements but I was absolutely gagging to go to America and I wanted everything to be perfect.

As a British person, one feels like one has been to America before one has even arrived. Films have taught us all we know and it was gratifying to find a cop, sitting on a stool, eating a doughnut in a diner on my first day. Familiar visual clichés are everywhere you look and pretty much nothing disappointed me on that first heady trip to New York. Except for one thing: the language. Nobody understood me.

Having arrived at JFK and taken a taxi into town with two other tourists, I was distraught to discover that our cab sharers, upon disembarkation, had taken my bag and left me with theirs by mistake. The horror! Lucky for me, my eagle-eyed cabbie – I will never hear a diss against a New York cabbie – knew exactly where to go and we were soon hoofing it back across town to retrieve my belongings. But I was nervous and as I tripped through the front door of the hotel, breathless, sweating and eager to reunite myself with my things, I poured out a torrent of what I took to be English but which the lady behind the counter clearly took to be something else.

‘Itookataxifromtheairportwithamanandwhenhegotoutofthetaxihetookmybagandlefthisbaginthecarandnow

IhavehisbagandweneedtoswapbagsbackandIthinkheisstayinghere’, I said. It made perfect sense to me.

‘I did not understand a word of what you just said’, barked back the reply.

Astonishment! I am talking English. You are talking English. What seems to be the problem here?

And that’s just it. We may speak the same language, we may even share habits, practices, religions, foodstuffs, we may ‘stand side by side in the war against terror’ and share mutual pride in your new president (notice that its not working the other way around right now), but just because we are on a vaguely similar political and cultural page, it does not always mean that we understand each other. And my next correspondent will prove this point even further. What the heck is a frat party? I do not understand this strange cultural practice. This is as bizarre to me as eating fish and chips and a deep fried Mars Bar is to you – which of course I do all the time.

Actually I am being facetious….I do have an idea about fraternity culture - after all, I am the one who has spent years watching cheesy American teen movies….The Breakfast Club, Porky’s, Dazed & Confused, I’ve seen ‘em all – but the idea of ‘fraternity’ culture is still alien to me. It is still a bizarre concept to try and grab hold of for a Brit like me. I mean come on…’the elephant’…what is that all about?

By the by, in case you were wondering, my Spanish speaking taxi driver and the Southern dwelling desk lady had no problems understanding each other. They got along famously. Mario Luna had spoken to said lady and found the man - and my bag - in question in no time. We were soon sitting back in his taxi-cab.

‘Aren’t you going to ask that man for some money?’ he said. ‘You’ve come all the way across town to give him his bag back and I think he should pay you something for your trouble’.

‘No’, I said, ‘I can’t be arsed’. Jetlag was kicking in and I just wanted to go ‘home’ to Prince and Elizabeth Street, my new Stateside abode for the next seven days.

I needn’t have worried. Before you could say, ‘I’m a limey half assed Brit who can’t speak the same language as a regular American’, Mario Luna was stepping back out of the hotel with $80 in his paw. $80!! I wish I could have heard that conversation. He handed it to me. I handed it back to him.

He then gave me a guided tour of New York and his phone number.

‘Call me’ he said, ‘if you ever need anything in New York’.

God bless America.

Stephen. Aged 20. Still a virgin.

‘Hey friend,

I’m a twenty-year-old male virgin in Los Angeles, California, USA.  I go to the University of Southern California and its known as a place with a lot of good-looking people - mostly the girls. We have a lot of fraternity and sorority life, which I am not sure exists in other countries.

Fraternities and sororities are all-male and all-female organizations, respectively, which people must ‘qualify’ to become members of.  You have to go through the ‘hazing’ process in order to ‘pledge’ successfully. Friends of mine who have gone through the entire process have had their keys, wallets, and cell phones confiscated during the process.  Similar to military entrance rituals, the fraternity and sorority practices try to break down each person to develop the group identity over their own personal identity. Since a lot of the things people need to do to join are quite demeaning, like streaking, cross-dressing, cleaning up after other members, and so forth, the process weeds out those who are nonconformists or who are not totally committed to being a member of the group above all else. 

There have been some atrocious things done in the hazing process.  One fraternity was suspended from the school for several years after they made pledges do ‘the elephant,’ where the guys stand in a single file line, naked, and grab the penis of the person in front of them, and either run or jump up and down.  This is done in public view on the side of a street.

The point is that being in a fraternity or sorority is a great way to meet girls (or guys), because the social life is wholly arranged and my not being in a fraternity divorces me from much social life.  

I was still a virgin when I left high school, when many of my friends had had sex before my first kiss at age sixteen.  During my freshman year, in the fall, I had a fling with someone and she performed oral sex on me.  When I decided that I wanted to date her, things soured. 

Since November 2006, I haven’t kissed anyone.  I’ve been on a couple dates but I find it hard to date people. I could never admit that I am a virgin to most of my male friends.  A lot of them really look up to me.  I have good social skills and can strike up a conversation with almost anyone. I have been in leadership roles in sports, student government, and so forth.  I have been in a rock band that played on Sunset Strip.  I was so afraid of telling anyone that I am a virgin because I would just think that they would view me as somehow less than them.  

But, in December, I told one of my better male friends that I was a virgin.  He said being a virgin was nothing to be ashamed of.  It took me a great deal of courage to even say that, but I am glad I did.  It means a lot to know that I am not the only one, and that there is nothing wrong with being in my situation. I told a female friend I was a virgin a little after New Year’s. She said that it was pretty good that I was a virgin as well.  She said it was desirable in girls’ eyes.

I wrote most of this email back in December, and it has been saved in my draft’s folder since then.  I just thought I would let you know about how your website has helped me.  Most things are not as big of a deal once one mentions them.  I think losing virginity is probably one of those.

But I figure that I can't go out with people if I don't at least ask them.  In basketball terms, you can't score if you don't shoot. You're going to miss, but so what.  If I at least try to reach them, there is at least a chance that things will work out.

When I think about having sex, at least at times, it seems like such a big deal.  But it’s not like I will change drastically once I have sex.  I will still look good and have a good personality sex or not.  But at least it won’t make me so nervous when approaching women for the first time.’  

Fresh off the press..

The Sun Newspaper is looking for three women to tell their virginity loss stories for the Women’s pages. If you meet the criteria below and are happy to be identified, get in touch with Laura. You will be handsomely paid for your effort. Here is the brief:

‘My request: I am looking for 3 women - max age 35 now - who are happy to tell me about the experiences of losing their virginity at different ages between 20 - 35 for our women's pages. (i.e. you can have lost it at 25 and be 35 now, but not have lost it at 35 and be 50 now).

I am looking for a mixture of different experiences - good, bad, funny and ugly tales are all of interest - but you must have been at least in your twenties when it happened. I am especially keen to find someone who waited until their later 20's/30's (perhaps because you wanted to wait for 'the one' or didn't believe in sex before commitment) and someone who was older than all her friends when she lost her virginity because she didn't like her body and wasn't confident naked. I also need to find someone who had a bad experience the first time.

All case studies must be happy to be named, to travel to London for a photo shoot to accompany the piece and should not have had their story published elsewhere at any time.

I can offer a fee of £250 and travel expenses to London for the photo shoot.

Please email me urgently at laura.stott@the-sun.co.uk if you are interested in taking part.

(Deadline Monday 8th June - please do not email about this after this date.)’

And your point is....

Once again, theres a first time for a whole bunch of things. I found this out to my advantage on Tuesday night when I went Salsa dancing for the very first time. Could I feel like any more of a twat than I did for the first twenty minutes? Probably not. But at least I wasn’t the only one.

I have been putting this off for months and as the proud instigator of these shenanigans looked on - my talented dancing friend Lydia – I fumbled my way through the moves as twenty men and women facing each other in a trembling line attempted to put one foot in front of the other and make sweet music together…remind you of anything?

Learning something new is hard at any age but take it from me, it’s much more of a stretch when you’re older. Which is a good thing. It’s nice to keep challenging yourself. Learning to drive, learning to ski, learning to write…I have done all of these things to varying degrees of expertise in the last five years and I have loved all of them….but it was always an effort to get started. How awkward can you feel? Even now when I get into a car that’s not my own, everything feels like its in the wrong place. I feel nervous, tentative, a bit scared to touch anything in case I blow the whole thing up….remind you of anything else?

Actually I had no intention of comparing all sorts of daily activities and skills to the losing of virginity and the subsequent having of sex but the parallels are hard to ignore. We all feel tentative and scared when we step onto new territory, however far ahead we might feel like we have got in life. Every new partner we meet can make us feel like it’s the first time – and that’s a nice thing. Everyone is different. What works for one person might not work for another and the only way to find out is to develop a genuine sense of intimacy by learning how to communicate with each other.

No, what I really wanted to write about today was this. It occurred to me as I glanced around the room on Tuesday night that people dance for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes men come to clubs like this because they want to meet women – I encountered a few of those on Tuesday night. And sometimes women come to clubs like this for the very same reason. But that was not the overriding impression I got as the syncopated throng of arms and legs moved elegantly around the room in time to the music.

There was something really beautiful about what was happening in front of me in this grotty dive in Charing Cross Road as people from all walks of life gave in to the urge to dance with each other. Most of them don’t know each other from Adam but that didn’t seem to matter. You could see how much they needed to do this. Perhaps to escape the reality of daily life in all it’s boredom, routine and credit crunch related stress. But there was something more poetic to it than that. There seemed to be something deeply satisfying in this unique combination of music, mind and movement. This coming together of different personalities – and bodies – to create something quite unique.

And it can’t be repeated. As we left the building, two old dancing partners of Lydia’s arrived. The taller of the two insisted on a dance with my friend before we left. He was no looker but boy could that man dance. This sounds judgemental but I have to mention this because despite the fact that he was no Brad Pitt, there was no doubt in my mind that he could have piqued the interest of any woman in the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

‘It doesn’t matter how many times two people dance the same dance together’, said his friend, ‘they will never dance it the same way twice’.

And what they did do together was astonishing. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t choreographed but it was two people doing something very fluid and very intimate together that didn’t involve any sex. Its close, its hot and its sweaty - but it goes no further than that.

At least in the case of these two. I’m sure that many a dance on this dance floor has danced right off the floor and into the nearest bedroom but it doesn’t seem to be the point to me. And actually, when I come to think of it, I don’t really have a point today. Does everything have to have a point? Is it point-less if it doesn’t reach a conclusion? I hope not. Just like the dance itself, sometimes one just has to do something and enjoy the moment. It doesn’t need to go anywhere. You can do it just for the hell of it, or just because it feels good. The ending doesn’t really matter.

 

The love that dare not speak its name..

There’s a first time for everything. So goes the title at the top of this blog and I never realised at the time how true that was. When I started to blog, I intended to talk only about virginity loss but along the way, I realised that a. we might get bored and b. there are all sorts of first times. This has been a recurring theme ever since.

When you ask anyone about their first time, they can usually pinpoint the moment at which they lost their technical virginity….but ask them about the first time that they actually enjoyed having sex and that’s another story altogether. Occasionally these two momentous events conspire to collide with each other but not very often. Take it from me.

Except for today. Today’s storyteller lost his technical virginity when he was seventeen. But fast-forward a few years to his twenties when he had the experience that he considers to be his genuine loss of virginity. This was the first time he did what he felt he should be doing – having a relationship with a man.

This story is a departure for another reason. It is one of the stories from my book that never quite made it. I recorded this interview myself sitting across the kitchen table from Dave, one of many brave friends who agreed to be a guinea pig back at the start of this project. My interviewing skills weren’t all that but it didn’t matter because this story tells itself. It’s an absolute cracker for all sorts of reasons but for me, the magic lies in the last sentence and his very personal declaration about virginity loss: 

'I think it has affected me, I hadn’t actually consciously thought that before now, but it’s changed me. It has defined how I have sex.'

I shall leave you with that powerful thought. And as ever, if you'd like to make any comments on it, be my guest.

Dave Heart.  Born 1967. Lost virginity aged 18 and 21.

The first sexual encounter I had with a girl was on a train station and it’s a bit crude but it was the first time I’d actually tried to use my hands and I couldn’t find it!  She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ and then the train came, thank god.  It was a nightmare. Bracknell Train Station at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night.  Dark, raining and I’ve got my hand up this girl’s skirt and I didn’t want to do it, I just felt like I should do it.

I knew I was gay when I was fourteen years old because I used to masturbate over boys.  I never told anyone, I kept it all inside. I remember the first gay character on EastEnders. My mum was like, ‘That’s disgusting’. I remember sitting there thinking, oh my god, that’s me. My parents have totally accepted me as gay now but sex didn’t rear its head at all in my family.  No, it was a case of any sex on TV, any naked bodies, and my mum would be shouting, ‘Turn it over George. Turn it over!’ at my dad.

I used to have these secret fantasies in my head with blokes I was supposed to be friends with.  One in particular, Chris, was gorgeous in every way. Fantastic personality, fit body, we used to go to the gym together but he never knew how I felt. I used to sit and watch him through the smoky steam room air.  I’d have my girlfriend there with me but I didn’t exude any of the signs of being gay. It was such a weird situation.

No one had any idea that I was actually still a virgin either. The word was bandied about a lot, almost as an insult, ‘Oh so and so is a virgin’, especially if they were not very good looking. I never got called a virgin but I was one. I always had girlfriends and I always had the best looking girls as well.  The problem was with the girls themselves. They would want to have sex with me and I was the one that was always making the excuses, so I would just have to dump the girl and move onto the next one. It was just like a cycle and I kept on doing it.

The first time I had actual sex, I was eighteen years old.  I had joined the RAF and I was living off unit in a house with two other guys.  Her name was Mary and it was really difficult for me. It was a case of having lots to drink first and lots of kissing. I had the smallest room in the house but it was right next to the toilet so I could run in there, get everything working and then run back into the bedroom, jump on top of her, and try to find the right place to put it.  She later claimed that she was pregnant and had had an abortion. She only told me because I saw her crying at the RAF club. That really shocked me. I still went out with girls after that but only to be seen with someone on my arm, I didn’t actually physically have sex.

I didn’t have sex with a guy until I was twenty-one years old. I got sent to Norfolk RAF and as soon as I arrived I met a guy called Matthew. He was an RAF Steward and straight away I thought there was something between us. He was cute and we got on really well.

It was a new base and I’d gone from being in the same place for four years and feeling very secure to being somewhere where no one knew me. So in those first two months, we spent a lot of time hanging out together and I could feel that there was something there, some sort of electricity. It was amazing. But I didn’t speak to him about it because I had no idea if he was gay or not.

We’d made a few friends there and we used to go out together a lot.  One night there was a party in the RAF mess with all the crew and I remember thinking that I might actually be in love with this guy and he had no idea. Then at the party I saw him kissing a girl.

I was absolutely gutted. I was so upset. I made my excuses and left the party. I went back to the base and sat on my own in the TV room. I wanted to cry, I was so pissed off. Suddenly, after about twenty minutes, Matthew appeared and said to me, ‘Where did you go? What’s wrong?’

‘Oh nothing’, I replied, ‘I just wanted to go, I didn’t feel very good’.

He came over and sat next to me and we were just looking at each other and that’s it, we started kissing. It was risky, this was 1986 and it was still illegal to be gay in the armed forces. And we were doing it in the TV room, with the lights on, in an RAF block with windows and no curtains. Snogging as if our lives depended on it.

Then we went to his room and just snogged and clothes started coming off and I remember feeling the heat of another man’s body next to mine for the first time and it was perfect. And that’s when I first had sex with a guy. It wasn’t just doing a deed; it wasn’t just fumbling in the dark with someone you’ve never met before and forgetting about it. It was a build up of two months of tension and it was fantastic. It was a magical feeling. To actually see someone else’s parts, aroused, and feeling them next to you, on top of you. It was just really, really good.

I was in love with him. We had a really intense relationship, partly because we had to keep it quiet. It was a big secret and no one but us could know.  Eventually we decided to move off unit together. People just thought we were mates although I did start to think that they might have their suspicions. And then I got sent to the Falklands for four months, which was awful because we had only been together for a year and for the first time in my life, I was in love with someone and the feeling was being reciprocated.

I used to write to him and tell him how much I loved him and missed him and I can’t wait to, you know, get his cock in my face or whatever, and then one day, he read one of my letters, put it in his pocket and it fell out. It was picked up by an RAF policeman. He read it and because what we were doing was illegal, he went to his boss and reported it.

I had been in the Falklands for a couple of months and I got a phone call to go to the police office. In the back of my mind I just knew that they knew. I went in and sat down with an RAF policeman and he was very nice to me. He asked me how I was finding it in the Falklands and then he said, ‘I have to ask you a question now. We believe you are having a homosexual relationship with a Mr Matthew Knowles’. I remember hearing the words and the room spinning. And then I just thought what’s the point in denying it. There’s no point, so I just said, ‘Yes, I am’.

Our relationship did continue for a while after that but we broke up badly after a year and a half. I came home one day and he had gone. I did see him many years later. I was shopping in town and went into a gay bar for a drink and there he was. There was this guy, the man that I had lost my virginity to, we had changed our lives together. I went back to his hotel with him and it was so nice to see him and we had lots to talk about but I didn’t fancy him anymore, my first love as it were.

My attitude to sex now is that I don’t really like one-night stands. As a gay bloke, I don’t do saunas or get my cock out down at the park. Any important relationship that I have had, I have always liked somebody for ages before anything has ever actually happened. I think perhaps that first experience with Matthew has stayed with me because what I really yearn for is that feeling of electricity between two people. I want the build up of tension. I want to get into the package, you know, to have the box and then actually open it up and see what is inside. I think it has affected me, I hadn’t actually consciously thought that before now, but it’s changed me, it has defined how I have sex.

 

 

Teenage fanclub….

Lying in my bath the other day, reading a magazine and trying to ignore the knotty pinch of anxiety that had been bugging me for days, I was hit by a blinding realisation. It’s not just me that feels like this. Not that I don’t intellectually understand that, but knowing it and feeling it on a molecular level are two very different things.

The fact is that very single person has ‘stuff’. Every single person has a cross to bear of some sort. Something that gets to them, makes them feel that special kind of loneliness that only a very personal problem can….Is it normal to feel like this? Do other people feel the same way about X, Y and Z? Or am I the only person on the planet who feels this exact feeling right now?

That kind of thing.

As I lay there in the watery silence, working my mind over this problem, it struck me that the one thing that we all share – this exact sense of ennui, despair, bleakness, this one very certain expression of human kind - is also the same thing that can separate us. That at the moment that we often need to really share this sensation with another person, we can’t because we feel that what we are feeling is too odd, too leftfield, too stupid to countenance sharing with another human being.

You’d think that I would know that by now, particularly since I write this blog, but the very fact that I am writing this is proof enough that we all fall victim to this same cosmic trick, this bizarre feeling that can make us feel very separate to the rest of the pack. Which is a telling phrase in itself because we are not pack animals. We have a wonderful thing called consciousness. It is consciousness that really differentiates us from every other living species on the planet. Unfortunately consciousness is also capable of making us feel lonely and worried.

Am I offering a solution? Not really but I hope that the stories on this website do make a difference, however small. Because as we see virtually every other week, being a grown up is one thing, but being a teenager and potentially confronting your first sexual experience is a rich source of anxiety for many young people. We may live in the 21^st century but there are still so many things that people do not talk about. I continue to write this blog because the power of the shared experience cannot be underestimated. 

Actually I also began today’s post with the intention of linking to this story and talking about the H word….hindsight. I’m not one to give the Daily Mail a big up but this is a really neat idea. Get famous (older) people to write letters to their teenage selves and tell them what they know now…that they wish they had known then.

It’s tough being a teenager. We could all do with a sense of perspective when everything is new and scary. There aren’t any short cuts of course. No one can do your growing up for you. But if you are a teenager, you could do a lot worse than to read some of these stories and find out that generations before you have worried about just the same things as you. Whether this is a comfort to you is another matter.

So as a parting note, if anyone feels inspired to write a letter to their teenage self and send it in to be published on this blog, I would be thrilled to receive them. I think you might be surprised to hear what you have to say to yourself…go on, give it a try.

I shall probably be giving myself a stern warning about my over use of the italicization feature on my Mac book.

Contributions to katemonroe@yahoo.com

 

Don't be prophetic...

There is a whole bunch of stuff written in the media these days about ‘the law of attraction’. And I don’t necessarily mean the pheromones that attract one potential mate to another, but the experiences that we subconsciously bring into our lives - for better or for worse. We all have a conscious life. And we all have a subconscious life.

The self-help industry has spawned a million books on the subject. The premise is that if we focus fully on the positive, the great and the good with a bucket load of self-belief thrown into the picture, that we can achieve anything that we want. The catch is, that what we believe to be true, we often bring to fruition - whether it be our most fantastical fantasies or our own worst nightmares. Films have been made about this. One could attend any number of seminars on the matter and I, for one, concur. I think it’s also called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which all sprung to mind as I read today’s story’s. Asides from my obvious chagrin at the lack of punctuation - we will say no more on the matter – what strikes me about this story is how its owner manages to twist and turn the events listed below in her mind so that they end up becoming her actual reality. Her limited expectations for herself have tripped her up. She doesn’t believe that she can lose her virginity to a man who will tell her that he loves her – so she makes sure that she leaves him before he has a chance to say it.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not a criticism by the way. We have all done it. Heck, I only recognize the tendency because I have done it myself.

The difference at least for this young woman is that she is twenty years old but she recognizes this aspect of herself. In this respect she is five steps ahead of the game. Know thine enemy and all that. We frequently are our own worst enemies but having the foresight to acknowledge this is the first, and probably the most powerful step in the journey.

Aurelie. Aged 20

dear kate

i came across your blog about a year exactly when i was contemplating losing my virginity, but it became all the more relevant on april 13 last year when i actually had sex for the first time. mine is the usual story, one which im sure happens to many. what i would like to share however, was my thoughts on the experience, before, after and now. what i never expected was the length of time it would take for me to understand exactly what it meant to lose my virginity- i guess I never truly will know.

unlike my mother and grandmother before me, i did not lose my virginity to the man i was married to. And not to a boyfriend. but to a boy i had seen for 2 months. it was a purely sexual relationship. he was a decent guy, but our time together revolved around the amazingly magnetic spark that existed between us.

i had sex with him because i was naked in his bed, a little drunk, and he was the sexiest guy i had ever seen.  i thought i was in control of my sexual destiny, that making the decision to relinquish my virginity to this guy was somehow empowering. the sex was amazing but whilst i lay there in his dark room, with his body pulsating, i suddenly knew i would never be there again. i would never be in his room again, i would never kiss him again.

straight after i banished that thought. but true to form it happened as i had imagined. i felt so confused the next week, trying to make sense of it. it was as though some part of me was missing, that i had crossed over a bridge i could never get back from - yet i was aware that it was all a construction of the mind intermingling with my value system.

i had not devalued myself in making my decision but society’s expectations of how you should lose your virginity began to resonate.  i knew i didn't regret it, but i began to wonder if there was something wrong with me in sleeping with a guy who didn’t love me.

sure enough, i broke things off with nick, telling him i liked him and i couldn't just see him casually anymore.  he replied  as i knew he would, stating he didn’t want a girlfriend. at this point i walked away and haven’t spoken to him since, despite him attempting to get in contact with me many times. in this way, i followed my self destructive narrative- i lost my virginity to someone who wasn't my boyfriend, thus i was punished in it not resulting in a relationship and subsequently felt worthless for a long time.

it was only the other day that i realised i had punished myself for not having a fairytale version of this sacred event. it was clear that we both liked each other, but in my misinterpretation of what virginity loss meant, i acted rashly when he didn’t say the words i wanted to hear and I never gave him a  chance.  

i have an idea you can only truly own your sexuality after  losing your virginity. Losing it is like venturing into un-chartered territories where you are not quite sure what you will find. when you do arrive, it might not be what you expect, and so you instinctively use old and ingrained ideas to try and explain this new concept in a way your brain will understand. gradually, when you come to realise that virginity is an individual thing and sex is undoubtedly different to anything you've encountered before, you can create a new set of ideas about it. so i've finally been able to forgive myself for the decison i made to lose my virginity and thus let go of all expectations i never really knew i held. (aurelie, 20, Australia)

 

Honor thyself...

Today's account is a rather emblematic tale of conflict in a modern society. It is the story of a young woman who is torn between the sharp confines of her beliefs and her religion and the very real yearnings of her heart. We all want love, intimacy and union with that special somebody. Life is tough enough. We seek shelter and hope in our relationships. We seek a place to stop and express ourselves…which frequently, let's face it, involves sex. 

Because sex is a way of demonstrating how we feel, of reviving and of pleasuring ourselves. All pretty essential components of a healthy, happy life. Make no mistake then, that deciding to remain a virgin until the day you get married is a tall order in today's society. Throw religious confusion and a sense of duty into that pile and you've got yourself a real dilemma.

And I'm not trying to be flip when I say that today's story revealed a conflict of my very own. I set about 'correcting' this story with all the zeal of a person who believes that every single sentence ever written in the English language should begin with a capital letter. I mopped up those 'i's and corrected those 'the's' in a fit of grammatical self righteousness that left me exhausted on the floor, so tired was I from catching all those dropped capitals. I just cannot get with this trend to un-capitalize the crap out of everything. Until I had a little revelation of my own.

This story, in the rush to make it sound 'better', had gone and lost its power, its resonance and its poignancy. Instead of sounding like the voice of the person who had written it, it had begun to sound like me. 'Corrected' it may be, but homogenised it had become. The ticks and the nuances that add the flavour, the style and the feeling of the story had all gone. Times change, language changes and ultimately, the way that people communicate with each other has changed, and so, dear reader, I decided to get over myself and un-correct the so called corrected.

Ok, so I left in the full stops. Let me have some full stops. I like my full stops. But everything else remains the same. And it feels better. More importantly, it sounds like the human being that wrote it. I can hear her voice more clearly and that’s the most important thing.

Perhaps, in the spirit of modern communication, you might have something that you want to say to Honor? Can you offer her a solution, or some comfort for her dilemma? As a modern woman in the 21st century, I found it very hard to put my own feelings aside when I replied to her email. But then I am not religious so what do I know. I only have me to answer to, and that’s hard enough as it is. Imagine having to answer to god as well.

honor

from london UK

'virginity' is a very sensitive issue to me. i am twenty two and still a virgin. the reasons for this involve both religious and personal reasons. how i have kept it for so long in this time and age still shocks me but i have. the journey has no way been easy for me. i have been through so many boyfriends as well as heartache, because of my unwillingness to have sex. i do get involved in other sexual activities but just not penetrative sex. i have had so many moments where i have doubted myself and felt that it was fear holding me back, i have been brought to tears on this issue on several occasions (including this very moment).

i decided to keep my virginity because of my faith (religion). it does not encourage sex outside of or before marriage. other reasons for this is that i don't want to start having sex with one guy then break up with him and end up having sex for the wrong reasons like anger, just in the moment kinda thing or a drunken moment.  i have alwayz thought of my virginity as a gift, one i intend to give my future husband. my ex`s have all said to me i am in lala land if i think i would find someone who will wait and called me naive and scared. but i am 110% sure that i do not have fear of the sexual act. if i have any fear then its fear of having regrettable moments involving sex.

needless to say, the teary moments are what gets me. i have met guyz i have thought to be perfect for me but i fear the relationship ( if any) would be based on sex. i met a guy who for the first time since i started dating, gave me all the fairytale moments. he was my friend and more. and like a friend he was honest to me and told me he wouldn't be able to be with me without sex, he said he loved it too much. this caused so much confusion for me because i really liked him - all of him and he wasn't even my type which made my attraction to him stronger. he said i was perfect for him but he didn't know if he could wait and not cheat on me.

of course everyone told me that it was all bull but i was so into him that i didn't care and stuck with him, tellin him how much i adored him everyday. On valentine`s day this year i wrote him a poem. i could tell it touched something in him because he was more attentive to my feelings and all the sweet talk we used to do initially came back only much stronger. but i had to know he wanted to be with me so i kept my distance and gave him space to show he wants to be with me. i stopped callin him and eventually he called me after 2 weeks saying he has been trying to call me but i didn't get any missed calls, till today a couple months after and he hasn't contacted me and vice versa.

i miss him so much but i cant force him to be celibate because of me. till today i get moments where i just want to sit down on m my bed and cry my eyes out thinking if im making a mistake keeping my virginity. right now i want to call him but i fear that time has created to long a bridge for me to cross and i have already lost him as a friend and more.

i am tired of doing this over and over again but there is nothing i can do. my reasons for keepin my virginity still stand but my heart weakens every time i turn a guy down and its like every time that happens, he takes a piece of me and i am completely lost. my greatest fear is that pressure from today's society and my sexual urge for release will lead me to lose my virginity for a reason much worse that if i had choosen to have sex with one of my ex`s.

oh and i'm catholic by the way, very strict religion, especially on the issue of sex but apart from that my mum ( bless her soul) takes pride in knowing i'm a virgin, my younger sister isn't and told my mum and i could tell my mum was heartbroken about it and yes i know its my life and not hers but she wouldn't want the wrong thing for me and i take pride in the fact that i could keep myself this long. the idea of giving my hubby this precious gift of mine is still strong and possibly the strongest reason i have but i fear that i might lack experience to keep him home when the time comes.

actually i have two thoughts about my 'wedding night', i either want to shock the socks of him by giving him the greatest sex he ever had or giving him the gift idea. 'sigh', like i said, im in two minds about this.'

 

‘This heinous man….’

What to say about today’s story? Well, I knew it was going to be a good one when I clocked the author’s use of the word ‘heinous’. Heinous is such a great word. Not so great when it’s used in conjunction with a story about virginity loss but a great word nonetheless.

‘First of all, I want to say that your blog is absolutely hilarious. Secondly, I also have a relationship blog that includes the story of how I lost the trusty V card to a heinous, heinous man. It's actually quite humorous in the aftermath.’

‘C’ makes a pertinent point and one that has struck me a lot over the years of story collecting. Time really does teach us a thing or two about perspective. I am frequently asked if I have any funny stories and to be honest, I spent a while chasing my tail trying to find one. I wanted something so ridiculous, so slapstick, that you could barely have made it up if you had tried.

In time, I realized that number one, anything can be funny if it’s relayed in the correct manner and number two, time enables us to see the humour in pretty much any situation. Even if there was nothing to laugh about at the time.

This story isn’t a side splitter. This is a story with a gentle humour, one that has had time to come to fruition, like a nice pear or a bottle of wine. If you had asked the writer to tell you the same story the day after it had happened, it wouldn’t, as they say, have happened.

But today we can appreciate the comedic qualities of a heinous man. Of a man who couldn’t give a monkeys if we went home with our breasts hanging out. Or indeed a man who thinks that using a banana-flavored condom is an acceptable pastime.

I rest my case. Of course it also helps that today’s writer is a cracking story teller. That never hurt anyone either.

Read the story here…