On the face of things...

You can go whole weeks here at the virginity project and nothing really happens. No one loses their virginity and if they do, they don’t feel inclined to talk about it and generally speaking, everyone appears to be at one with the world. And then all hell breaks loose.  Which is an exaggeration but really, its not often that I get emailed a question that I’ve never been asked before:

‘Ms. Monro

Does a persons face change when they lose their virginity? 

Thanks

Karl’

Now, I don’t know if I have some weird kind of dyslexia but I completely misread this question the first time I looked at it. I thought that it had been written by a person with a looser grasp of English than myself who was asking if people, generally speaking, face change when they lose virginity…as in stare it in the face….

Duh. I am clearly a person who likes to make things more complicated than they are when actually this person was asking me a very simple question. Do people’s faces change when they lose virginity? i.e. do they look different?

What a ridiculous thing to ask, I thought. Of course they don’t. And then I began to cast my mind back to a more inchoate time in my life and it dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t such a crazy question after all. 

‘Can anyone tell that I have lost my virginity?’, I remember thinking that to myself as I sat on a Spanish beach aged 15. ‘Surely I must look different in some way?’

For reasons best known to myself at the time, I hadn’t told either of my best friends that I had ‘done the do’ the night before but I was utterly convinced that there was no need to because as far as I was concerned, it might just as well have been written all over my face in indelible ink.

Clearly it wasn’t because a couple of days later, they almost died of shock when Danielle the Slapper, a slightly older and more ‘experienced’ girl who spent her afternoons on the beach regaling us young’uns with explicit details of her nightly sexploits, popped this rather upfront question:

‘So which one out of you three is a virgin then?’ she asked as we were walking home one afternoon. ‘Not me’ chimed Claire and Tabitha. They both turned to me with expectant looks on their faces. Expectant as to how I was going to answer a question that we all knew the answer to. Or at least we thought we did. ‘No, I’m not either’, I answered as my two best friends did their best not to choke to death on their ice creams.

They had no idea. So clearly in my case, my face could be relied upon not to give the game away. But it did get me thinking about couple of incidences where people’s faces most definitely did give the game away.

A few years later, I went to college and completely wasted my time and everyone else’s doing an Art Foundation course. It wasn’t that it was a crap course; it was just that I was so obviously not cut out for the educational life. Anyway, there was a very nice and extremely spotty boy on my course called Ben. When I say that he was spotty, it wasn’t just the odd pimple, it was full on crater shaped, quite hard to look at without actually feeling a bit ill style acne. But he was a lovely man and he made some interesting ‘installations’ with chairs and string on the front lawn of our college campus.

But what was really amazing was this. A couple of months later, we went on a college ‘trip’ to Amsterdam and Ben, unbeknownst to us, got it on with Jane, another (female) person on our course. I have no idea whether Ben was a virgin before he met Jane but I suspect probably yes. What I do know for sure is this. When we returned from our trip and went straight into the Christmas holidays, by the time we all got back from the break, Ben’s face had completely changed. 

His spots had gone.

Was it the marathon sex sessions? I don’t know but I would like to think that losing his virginity had caused such a major hormonal shake up in Ben’s body that his acne had beat the hastiest retreat known to man. Either that or it was a Christmas miracle.

Fast-forward another decade and I was working in a restaurant with the two fabulous Baker sisters. Never let it be said that the Baker family were backward at coming forward. Pretty much everyone - from the postman to the restaurant regulars and most of the staff, knew that Danni and Gaby’s younger sister was still a virgin. Don’t ask me why, they were just one of those families for whom pretty much no subject at all was off limits. Mother and two daughters (who all worked together) discussed  the status of their younger sister’s virginity on a regular basis.

Eventually we all moved on and got other jobs so when I next saw the mother and asked the inevitable question, has Jennifer lost her virginity yet, I was amazed when her mother said yes, she has. But not only that, but that she had known with 110% certainty exactly when it had happened.

Despite the fact that Jennifer had a boyfriend whom she stayed with regularly and parents who were clearly itching for their daughter to lose her virginity, Jennifer had hung onto it. Until one morning when she walked into her house and her mother took one look at her and said ‘you’ve lost your virginity haven’t you’. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes, I have’, answered Jennifer.

How on earth did you know this? I asked. How could you tell?

‘She’s my baby’, she said. ‘She’s my youngest daughter and I knew that my baby was not my baby anymore. She looked different, she smelt different and I knew that something had changed.’

So there you go Karl. Apparently people’s faces can change when they lose virginity. There might be a physical reaction, as there was for Ben and Karl, the person who asked this question in the first place. He broke out into hives when he lost his virginity because he is a born again Christian so losing virginity was hardly on the top of his list of things to do before he got married. Stress can make your body do some funny stuff.

Or it may just be an almost imperceptible change. Its not a physical change, its not even an emotional change, its more to do with the umbilical chord like relationship that exists between a mother and her smallest baby, the one that deep down, we don’t really want to grow up…but invariably does.

But it probably wouldn’t happen in the way that I imagined it which was something akin to having a large neon sign attached to my head announcing to the world that I was now ‘A WOMAN’ – which, by the way, was far more exciting a concept to me than the fumbling excuse for sex that had accompanied this important change in my life.

Comments

[Natalie]

Interesting.......

I always thought the "loss of acne upon sexual intercourse" was a myth?

As far as parents just KNOWING, wouldn't that be an observation of how their child is now ACTING based on said child's feelings of having sex for the first time? (i.e. more confident, smiling, pleasant etc) versus the actual ACT of sex?

[The Virginity Project]

You are almost certainly right Natalie, I guess it just makes a better story!

www.virginityproject.typepad.com

[Crash]

Hi ya, err, this is a touch off topic, but I tripped over your blog on my way to somewhere else and stopped to have a gander - brilliant! I dunno how ya make a whole blog dedicated to virginity or it's eventual loss [or perhaps even, it's permanency] - but I'm glad ya did, you made my morning ... have an excellent day.