The Virginity Project

Sunday service…..

This story speaks for itself. Its owner wrote me last summer to tell me about her search for love and companionship, a search that her family thought she shouldn’t make due to her sexuality. Luckily, Sadie* is a pioneer. I don’t suppose there are too many daughters of Christian Evangelist preachers who are prepared to go against the grain and stake the claim over the life they instinctively feel they should have.

 Which brings me to my next point. Lately this blog seems to have morphed into a one-woman mission to insist on the most basic of human rights. I can’t help it. Instinct should triumph over dogma. Marriage or not, gay or not, whatever or not, we cannot deny ourselves the most basic of needs. A sex life has to begin somewhere and that usually begins with the loss of virginity. Read on…

 Sadie. Born 1973. Lost virginity aged 35.

 ‘Hi Kate

I'm back again....finally with the rest of the story.

First of all a poem was what started some of this for me. It was the thought: ‘If I died today, what would I have most regretted I didn't do?’ And for me it started with kissing. I didn't want to die having never kissed someone. And then it progressed to ‘I don’t want to die having never been loved physically like that’.

As you know from my earlier story, I had no interest in sex with men because I'm gay. For years I wasn't able to seek out relationships with women because of my religious beliefs and because I kept trying to heal myself i.e. not like girls.

About two years ago I asked my counselor if he thought I was healthy in general and he said ‘yes’. I had been in counseling for years and I suddenly decided I was wasting my life trying to fix something that wasn't fixable. I finally started to accept myself and my love of women as something that just was.

The result of this is that I started dating for the first time in my life. I went out on dates or ‘friendship outings’ as I like to call them because a lot of these were just ‘get to know you’ events. I got to know myself a bit as well. I developed more confidence that someone would actually want to date me.

To skip ahead, a couple of months ago I met someone who I wanted much more than just a friendship date with. I was looking for someone who had a lot of the same religious things in common as me. We are both Christians, I can go to church and hold her hand, God and gratefulness is important to us both. Both of us would only like to be intimate in a committed relationship so soon we were dating.

I am still stunned that I lost my virginity. You asked ‘how does a lesbian lose her virginity?’ I think it's the first time you are fully naked and physical with someone. I asked my girlfriend and she said it's both oral sex and any type of penetration.

My strongest thoughts afterwards were: The church/Christians have totally lied to me. The church has made sex sound like crack. Something so powerful that you will be addicted. Something that is evil and then magically becomes good the moment a priest says something over you like ‘your married’. That is all a lie and I think it does a disservice to tell people or even hint at these things.

Sex and intimacy was sweet and playful. It was lovely. We were gentle and fun with each other. We talked a ton about it before. We talked about the areas of our bodies we felt insecure about. We talked about what we wanted and hoped for. What we had heard. And then we also talked during and after just checking in on how emotions and all were doing. It was really helpful and healing for me to talk like this. And she was so sweet. We are well matched sexually because we both have similar wants.

People told me I'd be scared, I wasn't. People told me they shook. I didn't. I had thought through this decision so much that I think when the time came I was just fully ready. I learned that I am an Aries lover. This is something I totally didn't know about myself until this. I thought all that stuff was junk. She said she was surprised I was a virgin because I didn't act like it. But I think the reason why is found in a poem by E.E. Cummings that says ‘the body has an intelligence of it's own.’ I did not need to train it. It knew what to do.

Our relationship is still going great. I do not feel any different. I do not feel guilt. I do get in some way why it was a great thing for me to have sex in a committed relationship. I think when I was younger I would have had some self-judgment due to the religious voices I'd heard through growing up. But here's the thing. Those same religious voices won't let me get married because I'm gay. So the best I can do right now in seeking to live the life I want is by keeping sex in a committed monogamous relationship.

I know I'm a rare breed. I was a virgin until just before my thirty-fifth birthday in order to figure this out. The decision to have a more spacious and wholistic understanding of sex than the church’s literal and confining view took me a long time.

The church has made being anti-sex it's own God. The church, especially the evangelical church in America judges the body as evil. It may not say this outright but it does come through. I think I've heard more about the evils of sexual temptation than any other topic. But in the end, sex for me was nothing to do with temptation. It was a choice to live instead of kill everything in me that was embodied.

Besides this, I have told three very open and accepting friends and it will stop there. But in needing to tell someone about all my years of working towards this and all the crap I had to figure out for myself, I wanted to tell my story somewhere. If I ever told my story in a Christian community I would be soundly renounced. I get that. But you know that just keeps the fear and lies about sex in play. 

One more thought. I am so glad I didn't force myself to date, marry and have sex with a man. I know another girl who did that. She has to drink alcohol to have sex with her husband. She stayed a virgin until she was married. And now she is basically stuck. I definitely am glad I didn't do the same as her just to ‘look good’ for the church.

 *Name changed to protect identity. Part one of ‘Sadie’s’ story was published on September 10 last year.

I can't get No....duh nuh nerr....SATISFACTION

Judging by some of the stories I get sent, virginity is not a place that most of us want to go. A recent contributor summed it up thus: ‘most people view virgins as pathetic losers who should just make more of an effort.’

No mincing of words there then. But he has a point. Time and culture have dictated virginity to be a place of shame, disempowerment even, despite the fact that our definition of virginity loss precludes any number of sexy things that we might have done that don’t involve putting a penis into a vagina. As one of my interviewees once said, ‘I certainly didn’t feel like I had ‘lost’ anything, I’d had so much cunnilingus, I had lost my innocence long ago’. I rest my case.

Virginity loss is a nebulous issue, but in the end it doesn’t really matter what I think or how we define it, it is still the bogeyman of modern culture. Who wants to be a dried up old virgin when you can be, well, Jordon?

Which got me wondering if virginity really is all that bad? And do we all have such a negative outlook? There must be someone out there who could turn this thing on its head?

I found her.

‘Virginity is extremely alluring’.

Come again?

Its author continues: ‘its mysterious allure is not rooted in an image of innocence and purity, but rather in the notion of strength. It takes a strong woman to be abstinent, and that’s the sort of woman I want to be’.

Now, I can’t speak for the guys, and something tells me that these words are unlikely ever to be uttered from the lips of a man, but whatever way you look at it, this is still an interesting statement. Who would say such a thing?

Janie Fredell is who, a student at Harvard University and contributor to a series of articles by Randall Patterson for The New York Times. Janie is a Catholic girl who had never found the need to join the abstinence movement, mostly because she came from a place where ‘literally everyone’ wore chastity rings - but Harvard was the opposite end of the scale.

‘The hook-up culture is so absolutely all-encompassing’, she says. ‘It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!’ She decided to take a stance and took up the reins at ‘True Love Revolution’, Harvard’s very own answer to ‘The Silver Ring Thing’. I should be shot down for such a lazy comparison, so, to re-dress the balance, here is their homepage mission statement to read for yourself:

‘TRL is a new non-sectarian, student run organization at Harvard College dedicated to the promotion of pre-marital abstinence. We strive to present another option to our peers regarding sex-related issues, endorsing ideas of abstinence and chastity as a positive alternative for ethical and health reasons’.

OK, so far, so…abstinent. It’s not my cup of tea but each to their own and here’s the bit that interests me:

‘It’s extremely countercultural for a woman to assert control over her own body’, says Fredell. ‘It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism’, she explains, ‘teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences – sex like a man. I am an unconventional feminist’.

This is a pretty big statement and we could spend all day picking it apart. Believe me, I have just spent twenty minutes trying to do so in a nutshell. We all have our points of view. I’ll just say this. I admire her stance. In this day and age, it’s not easy to stand up and say ‘I don’t have sex and that’s my choice’. ‘Feminist notions’ aside, it is still her right as a human being and as a woman to do as she pleases.

But is self-inflicted fundamentalism really healthy? After all, whether we like it or not, human bodies are hard wired for procreation. Even if we were deaf and blind with no sense of smell, we would still have the hormones and as such, the urge to mate. Should we be holding ourselves back?

Just a thought.

The point I am trying to get to is this: does virginity have to be the last word in hell or can it be something better, a position of power even?

I don’t know about power but medieval woman might have argued for something even more intoxicating: freedom.

Back in the day, you were either married or waiting to get married. These were the roles that were allocated to women. There was none of this ‘you can be anything you like’ malarkey. You got married and fulfilled your duty as a wife, a mother and a housekeeper. Nobody expected any more, or less of you.

You can see why the convent held a certain allure.

Virginity equaled opportunity for the medieval nun. Yes, they were married to god and a life of devotion, but above and beyond that, relatively speaking, nuns got to call the shots. They spent their time with like-minded people. Nobody expected them to change nappies, tend children and have sex with their parent’s choice of marriage partner. More than that, they were educated. This might not sound like a big deal but back in the dark ages, women’s education was not top of the list of priorities. As Hanne Blank writes in her book ‘Virgin, The Untouched History’…

‘Years of singing or listening to a relatively limited collection of familiar texts whilst looking at the books would eventually result in women figuring out how to match what they heard to what they saw’. She continues, ‘to the nuns, it was a miracle bestowed upon the deserving, pure-hearted virgin by god: when the gift of literacy bloomed in the mind of Hedwig von Regensburg, the entire choir of sisters saw her heart shine through her body and habit “like the sun through glass”.

Powerful stuff. Just throw Elizabeth 1st into the mix, a woman who knew that relinquishing her virginity for marriage could cost her her freedom and the future of her country, and we see that virginity packed quite the heady punch in those days. But all to an obvious cost – our sex lives.

Times are different now. We live in the era of ‘having it all’. We have the freedom, the education and the sex life. But it still comes at a price. Because this will all be cold comfort to my lonely friend, the ‘pathetic loser who should just make more of an effort’. And I am right back where I began.

I feel for men. I really do. You could argue that women’s freedom has been to the detriment of men. Because whilst women may have the opportunity to have ‘sex like a man’, the sad fact is, that depending on which way you look at it, this now means that she can choose not to have sex with you.

Women hold the cards. A fact that I wish I could shout from the rooftops to teenage girls who still think that they need to lose virginity in order to gain acceptance/to be a ‘real’ woman – insert whatever your particular insecurity is here. But they don’t, and nor do men. Because that’s what this post is really all about. That times may change, as does our perception of virginity loss, but the pay off is that we suffer in equal measures. It’s not just women who are sweating about virginity. Men are too!

Fear-less and fancy free..

When Donnie first sent me the story in the previous post, I wrote back…

‘Wow. That is one big story and you tell it so well. It illustrates so beautifully what a powerful experience the loss of virginity can be, coming as it often does at a time in our lives when we are so 'in the moment', everything is new, we have nothing to hold back from because we don't understand the concept of holding back, holding back from what?’

As I read this, an image from a television program I once saw springs to mind. The presenter made his point by setting a sweet chubby baby down on a glass floor. Beneath the floor was a big fat nothing. Infinity. Space. Nada. Was the baby fazed? Of course not. Why would he be? Fear is a learned response. The millions of adults who have purchased ‘Feel The Fear And Do it Anyway’ will testify to this.

Beyond ‘innocence’, people have often found it difficult to articulate what it is that they think they are losing when we talk about ‘virginity loss’. But perhaps ‘loss’ is the metaphor for something more profound. Maybe it is the fearlessness that we miss the most.

When we fall for the first time, we often fall hard. To compound the dullness of the thud, some of us, well, Donnie, managed to time this with his first sexual experience. True to form, he finds the right words to describe this bittersweet collection of feelings…

‘Thanks. You're exactly right about us not holding back. I think that's what people REALLY miss when they talk about the loss of innocence. It's not the innocence they miss at all - I certainly don't - it's the willingness to throw oneself entirely into something with no regard for the consequences.

That's the most beautiful element of youth. And it's that feeling, the loss of it - that is really what we lose. That's the idea I think is so beautifully captured in the Eden myth. I remember in the months after she and I fell apart, I read ‘Paradise Lost’ for the first time and I was blown away by how brilliantly Milton captures just that feeling. Adam and Eve are in the full flush of youth, absolutely unafraid and perfectly in sync. But after the fall:

‘They sate them down to weep, nor onely Teares
Raind at thir Eyes, but high Winds worse within
Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate,
Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore
Thir inward State of Mind, calme Region once
And full of Peace, now tost and turbulent:
For Understanding rul'd not, and the Will
Heard not her lore, both in subjection now
To sensual Appetite, who from beneathe
Usurping over sovran Reason claimd
Superior sway.’

Yikes! If you needed a reason to regress, there it is.

The Virginity Project takes a trip....

Water Lillies is one of those French films that normally I would hate, and truth be told, if you held a gun to my head and asked me to pick between that and ‘Echo Park LA’, another film that features virginity ‘loss’, I would choose Echo Park or ‘Quinceanera’ as it was originally known. But that’s just me and there’s a reason for it. I like happy. I like bright and I like warm weather. Whilst elements of Echo Park LA are harsh, the story is told against the rich vibrant background of Latino life in the Sunshine state – California – with a guaranteed 365 days of nice weather per year. Life might be hard but the temperature is hot and the ‘uncle’ of the film is the owner of one of the cutest little gardens I have ever seen.

Horticultural preferences asides, ‘Water Lillies’ is another kettle of fish altogether. You know those French films that are set in the geographical equivalent of Staines? Not even Staines but Staines in the sticks. Staines in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and nowhere to go and the director never lets you forget this for even a moment or tries to dress this town up to be anything other than what it is. This is the filmic version of heroin chic. No frills, no spills, just real life with all the glamour of a bare bulb swinging back and forth across a sparsely decorated bedroom.

I’m just trying to flag up some of the internal prejudices that this rookie film reviewer has to wrestle with when she steps into the cinema and frankly I don’t suppose I shall be spending much of my life reviewing films for anyone other than myself with that attitude but I will say this: ‘Water Lilies’ is a terrific film.

This is a film that takes you back to a time when stuff mattered. I don’t mean the stuff that you think about now: houses, mortgages, jobs and money, I mean the important stuff. Desire, boys, girls and hormones. Do you remember when the four walls that surrounded your bedroom felt like the universe? Do you remember the first time you felt like you might die if the feelings you felt were not reciprocated? This film does. It takes us slap bang into the world of three very different young women as they explore their first forays into the world of physical love.

There are no holds barred here, literally and figuratively. The director pulls no punches when she illustrates how the foxier of the three goes about the technical loss of her virginity - I don’t want to ruin this scene for you, you’ll have to see it. These are young urban women with nothing to hold them back from pursuing their teenage desires, unlike the protagonist of my other new favorite film, ‘Echo Park LA’ – a bit of a misnomer actually as it came out in 2006.

Magdalena has no such luck. She is on the eve of her ‘Quinceanera’. This is the traditional Mexican celebration that informs the world of a girl’s impending woman hood. Virginal women hood. ‘Quinceanera’ means fifteen and as such, all fifteen-year old Mexican girls are supposed to be ‘pure’. This is a problem for Magdalena because she is pregnant.

Here we arrive at a theme that these two films share. One of the modern absurdities of our time is the misinformed belief that an inconsequential piece of skin is a reliable indication of virginity. Every sane person knows that a hymen can be broken in so many ways, none of which involve sexual intercourse.

For our French sisters, this tiny piece of skin represents nothing more than a physical barrier, something to be removed quite literally, again - I won’t tell you how - and, most importantly, in order to save face. No one wants to be a big prissy virgin. But for Magdalena, the presence of this anatomical detail is a saving grace. She might be pregnant but she didn’t have sex - at least not the penetrative kind.

And yes, in case you are wondering, it is possible to get up the duff this way. My friend’s thirteen-year old daughter is living proof of this fact. Hello? Fingers can fit into all sorts of places and sperm can swim!! Luckily for Magdalena, this oversight has been noted by the local doctor, luckily for us, not before our hapless heroine is dispatched to live with the other black sheep of her family, her gay cousin. Here the film finds its heart between the tender interplay of these characters and their protector, the lovely garden owning great uncle.

Neither film takes a moral stance on any of this activity; it merely observes the characters as they struggle to take their first sexual steps whilst being judged against the activities of their peers – Water Lillies, and the social mores of their elders – Echo Park LA.

Water Lillies may lack the surface sunshine of ‘Echo Park’ but it has a very warm core - topped off by some truly beautiful performances. OK, I know these girls are professional actors but this is some serious subject material and they carry it off superbly. Ditto Echo Park, which strays into documentary territory at times, so visceral are the emotions expressed by these actors.

Both films echo what I reach to achieve on this blog – the gravity and the humor of some very serious situations. For some people, the loss of virginity is literally life threatening. For others the consequences may not be so drastic, at least not to the naked eye.

Echo Park LA is available here.
Water Lillies is out on 14 March in the UK. Take a look...

Tori

I probably should save this post for Valentines Day, but heck, I can’t wait.

On the surface of things, this might appear to be a story about religion and how it affects the choices that people make. But I disagree. This is a story about love and how it affects the choices that people make.

Tori may be a Christian - or a vegetarian - or possibly even a two headed, purple-spotted alien, but it makes no difference. This is a woman who knows that she wants something - she isn’t sure what that something is but she is prepared to wait until she finds it.

I may not be religious in the traditional sense but even I had to say, ‘Tori, I believe that God would think you were a nutcase if you had passed up this chance’.

Love doesn’t come along every day. Grab it while you can.

The background…

‘You, my love, are no longer a virgin’, he says to me, his eyes wavering from my face to the bloody finger he has pulled out of me. I must look worried, because he smiles. In the medieval sense, that is.

For some reason I feel bereft. I can't understand it. The hymen has no inherent value. I didn't even know where it was, or if I still had one. But now it's gone and I can't get it back. I feel exposed. I curl onto my side and hide in sleep. His arms are still around me when I wake.

Last month I had sex for the first time. We had sex for the first time together. And the second and the third and then I lost count. I can be a little single-minded when I discover a New Thing. Fortunately, G seems to find this both adorable and flattering, so everyone is happy.

The terminology surrounding virginity is flawed. We talk about losing virginity, or giving it away. G prefers sharing, which I have to say is a much better term, but it still doesn't quite express what I am feeling. I have not lost anything, or given anything away. I am in no way less. If I lost anything, it was at that point, weeks ago, when my hymen broke courtesy of ‘outercourse’. I was overwhelmed, and inexplicably shaken up and I came home and wrote the little word sketch above. Something I had never been aware of was gone. But that loss did not mean I was no longer a virgin. It was merely a step, a stage in the journey.

G and I fell head over heels for each other. I met him four months ago and in a stroke of rather embarrassing irony, I noticed him at first only because he was with his very striking girlfriend. For some time, I remembered him only as the-guy-who's-dating-Striking-Girl. He came along to an extra-curricular group I'm in, and he and Striking Girlfriend started hanging out. G and I must have had a few conversations, nothing memorable, but during which we found out two facts which have since become a very interesting factor in our relationship: he is a vocal, steadfast and often angry atheist, and I a committed, though respectably left-wing Christian.

At some point I found out that Striking Girlfriend had gone away for a few weeks and G was feeling deprived of social interaction. I decided, out of the goodness of my heart, that we should take him under our wing and provide him with social interaction while she was away.

Weeks went past in a blur of late-night conversations. I found that I could talk to G candidly about my faith, which is very unusual. I don't talk about faith - theology, yes, but not the more personal side of it. Have you ever met someone and almost instantly known them? Fallen into them? The kind of instant connection that powers the chick flick industry? He walked into my life and I instantly trusted him.

The point when I realised that I couldn't think of anything that I would not be able to talk about with G was the point I realised that I could have sex with him. I found myself on the telephone to him at some weird hour of the night, telling him the story I had wanted to tell you when I last wrote. I mentioned then that abstinence education did nothing to prepare me for that confusing state of being, when your body and mind both want someone desperately, and yet both are overloaded with new sensations and desperately want out.

That was where I had ended up with my last partner - a state of total confusion. I thought that writing to you might help, but I was unable to put in words what was bothering me. Anyway, here I was talking to G, and it all came spilling out. This is the kind of person I want to sleep with announced my brain. Which was a little scary, given that he was still technically taken at the time and I was doing a great job of convincing myself I wasn't interested in him anyway.

Things kind of cart wheeled out of control; I realised I was interested in him about five minutes before a bunch of friends ambushed me and pointed out that I was glowing in his presence. For reasons that aren't any of my business, and which I take on trust were not directly related to me, G and Striking Girlfriend broke up.

Much angst ensued as he sorted out various things in his life. Somewhere in there, a friend of mine, prone to thinking she knows everything about everyone - and sadly she often does - announced that if I dated G, I would end up sleeping with him. I remember laughing, because at that point it didn't look like we'd get the chance to get that far. But the idea itself didn't bother me; I simply accepted it as true.

My partner before G was the first time I had experienced real desire and it had scared me. I didn't know what I was feeling, or how to deal with it. That particular relationship tailed off, which was all for the better, but I remained confused. I had caught a sideways glimpse of the vast unexplored territory within, and I didn't know what to do about it. The door didn't fit back quite as well as it had.

It was at this point that I first wrote to you. It helped, a great deal, because I was able to pin down a few basic principles. But what I really wanted to say, to someone – anyone - was that I was scared. The idea that I might have sex, the feeling of having to make sexual choices, was suddenly in my life, and no one, not my family nor my friends nor my church, was giving any classes on making those decisions, at least not to nineteen year olds who are, for all intents and purposes, adults. It wasn't until I met G, and found myself able to be completely open with him, that I found someone to say that to.

‘You get to make the decisions’, he maintains. This could be just typical male abrogation of responsibility, but I prefer to think he's being Gentlemanly. We took things as I was ready for them. There was that first kiss, which slid into making out, which slid into sleeping - actually sleeping - together. One of the nicest things you can do with another person is simply to curl up in one another's arms without any question of sex. People look at me funny (or used to), when I'd say that I wasn't having sex, and meanwhile I had my boyfriends stay over without batting an eyelid. But for my part, I've always known I couldn't have sex with someone without knowing that I trusted them enough to sleep by their side.

Next I learnt to recognise the expression on G's face that goes with a particularly delicious thought. At first, he was reluctant to tell me about them, assuming - reasonably enough - that it would squick me out to hear that he'd started daydreaming about how I might taste or some such. I expected me to be squicked out by these things. Instead, I found myself amused by his embarrassment and neutral about the mental images produced.

Then they would sneak up on me a few days later and part of my brain would go ‘hmmm... that could be fun.’ Once I'd noticed that this was a recurring pattern, I explained to G. that it was his duty to contribute to my store of mental images, since I lacked the experience or the sexual imagination to come up with many for myself. This duty he took upon himself without complaint, with the result that everything we've done so far, I've had plenty of time to think and talk about in advance. And we still have a store of these mental images to explore when we get the chance.

....to be continued – tomorrow....

Don't take the cherry off my cupcake...

Being British, one does feel the need to spout off about the weather from time to time. Therefore, I am sure you will be pleased to know that it is THE most stupidly gorgeous day here in London. The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the birds really are singing in St James Square.

The cupcake of my day has just been iced with a bacon sandwich and cup of earl grey tea. Could life get any better?

Maybe.

Here is technical virgin.com.

If you’re American, you will have seen this. If not, hold onto to your horses.

The star of this clip was fired from her job as a kid’s TV presenter when this went live.

Happy Monday...

Revel in the delightful world of Big Bear Ron as he ponders some interesting questions about virginity.
I feel very honoured today because the man himself has made this bespoke video for 'The Virginity Project'.

In it, he asks some pertinent questions.

Chloe, take note!

Is virginity a treasure....or a liability?
Is it something to lose...or grow out of?
Could it be a badge of courage..or a badge of fear?

As Big Bear says, one can be virgin to so many things. Apples, turnips, ( or Yahoo messenger in my case).

All the way from Atlanta, Georgia, here is Big Bear Ron as he talks us through a few firsts of his own....

Define the first time....

I am searching for some answers.

When we talk about the loss of virginity, what do we really mean?
Is there one definitive definition?
Are we united in the belief that the first act of penetrative sex marks the loss of virginity? Or could one person's virginity loss be another one's near miss?
And how might this work for gay people? Because not all gay men have penetrative sex. And not all gay women have dildo's.

As Hanne Blank points out in her fabulous book, 'Virgin - The Untouched History', (sorry, no links, Typepad tools are sadly absent in the back of beyond), the lesbian student who famously sold her virginity on eBay to the highest bidder was in a committed sexual relationship at the time. Which gives the indication, that despite the fact that she was 'having sex', it was clearly not of the type that leads to the loss of virginity - at least in the minds of the men that were bidding for hers.

This leads me to think that virginity need not be a physical process. Could there be an emotional leap to make as well? What do you, citizens of the twenty-first century think? How would you define the loss of your virginity?

Could you pin it down to one moment...or perhaps several?

I would love to hear from you.

Please comment or email me at katemonroe@yahoo.com

Even better than the real thing baby....

‘You still haven’t convinced me that the traditional definition of penetration isn’t the correct one’.

My eyes flicked to the last line of this morning’s email from John, my regular religious commentator. Funny, I thought, I hadn’t realized that I was trying to convince anyone about the traditional definition of virginity loss. But perhaps subconsciously, I am. Because as I go about my virginity related travels, I feel less and less inclined to commit to one definition.

Of course, I understand the general concept. I come from a generation of young people who leapt straight to the main course without worrying about the starters, or courtship as it was known in the days of my grandparents. A dictionary confirms it:

'Virgin noun 1 a person, esp a woman, who has never had sexual intercourse. 2 (the Virgin) RC Church a name for Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ – adj 1 never having had sexual intercourse; chaste. 2 in its original state; never having been used. (13c: from Latin virgo maiden)'

Hmmm, well as long as we are in agreement about what ‘sexual intercourse’ involves then we have an answer. My Mac dictionary decrees it thus:

‘Sexual Intercourse - an act carried out for reproduction or pleasure involving penetration, especially one in which a man inserts his erect penis into a woman’s vagina.’

‘Especially’. I like that. They are not quite committing themselves to the idea of virginity loss being exclusively heterosexual, but almost. This is partly my issue. The further I travel, i.e. the more people I interview, the more I see that virginity loss is a personal matter.

This feels particularly compelling at the moment, because I met a woman on last week’s course who had never 'had sex’. Tiny, dark and tearful, she sat and talked us through the barriers that had stopped her from ‘joining the human race’. Family expectations, religion, a huge commitment to her professional life, herself. Age forty-three, this is about to change. And as she tiptoes toward this experience, I feel impelled to tell her that virginity loss can be anything you want it to be.

If we choose to let go of definitions, we can experience millions of first times every day, You’ll never forget the first time you kiss someone you really want to kiss. Or the first time you come. And the first time you lie in the company of someone you can truly be yourself with. Some of us arse around for years before we get to that point. Losing your virginity can be a process as much as anything. We don’t stop having first times. In fact, I would argue, the ones we have as we get older are the better for it.

Enjoy it all I say, and don’t forget to make it up as you go along.