The Virginity Project

A hard day's night...

Your stories

Following yesterday’s post about the value of just messing around and leaving the serious stuff, aka penetrative sex, until later, I give you Christopher, a man who enjoyed the charms of 'outercourse’, as he terms it, for many years until the time came to lose his virginity.

In his own words, ‘this helped me set a standard of never going to intercourse with a girl if there wasn’t enough mutual arousal to produce an orgasm by ‘outercourse’.

Seems a sensible rule of thumb to me, and one that will ultimately lead to a far more satisfying ‘first’ experience.

By the by, a quick google of ‘outercourse’ reveals several new sexual practices I had no prior knowledge of until today. Or at least that there were names for them.

Christopher. Born 1942. Lost virginity aged 21

Having had my first “orgasm” under instruction from my peers, aged nine in a prep school dormitory in 1951, I had regular, both self helped and very occasionally, manual mutual masturbation with friends in my peer age group until I begun to ejaculate at about fifteen.

At no time were they abusive and they got less and less after about fifteen as girl friends appeared in my life, though as no girl friend knew about how to do it and I didn’t know what to do with girls, not much happened at first.

Age eighteen and about to go to university, I just about managed to get to first base inside the bra. I then discovered my father’s medical books and in particular, ‘Enduring Passion’ by Marie Stopes. I spent a further three years getting gradually closer through what one would call in those days a variety of ‘outercourse’ manoeuvre, and on one occasion I actually managed to get a finger into the vagina of my then girlfriend and promptly ejaculated on the spot.

She would never come out with me again. My final achievement pre-loosing my virginity was my learning how to cure my next girlfriend of dysmenorrhoea by giving her a clitorally induced orgasm through her clothes, though she never rewarded me with anything in return.

Finally, I came to medical school in London in 1963 age twenty-one, just as Beatle mania was taking off and after having spent a long vacation in the USA working in a holiday resort. I went on holiday with my first pack of 3 condoms bought in Soho on a stop over before taking the plane. They remained unused as the American girls were even more virginal than the Brits from Norfolk . However, they were a bit more into ‘outercourse’ manoeuvreing, though I didn’t manage any orgasm, either unilateral or mutual.

Back in London I found the girls more daring and nights out dancing to the Beatles music led to me getting closer, but still none would countenance anything inside their clothes until early the next year when I got my first flat and invited a ward Nurse to have a meal in a restaurant near by.

This was the first time I became aware of the power of chemistry and had an erection for most of the meal. It was undoubtedly mutual and she had no hesitation about coming back to my place though we didn’t have time for the coffee I had suggested.

At first I refused intercourse out of guilt that I was taking advantage of her but after she and I had a rapid simultaneous mutual orgasm through ‘outercourse’, we finally got undressed and went to bed and I was quickly aroused enough to use the first of the 3 pack of condoms that were all finished by the morning.

She wasn’t a virgin but she was multi-orgasmic and I learned to get a larger pack of condoms for when we were together. Having been initiated in the pre-pill era, to this day I have never understood why men and women today complain about the need to use condoms until you have established the relationship, provided one always produces adequate lubrication by ‘outercourse’ first

Although this first relationship didn’t last long as I was a bit of a workaholic and she had a large number of other interested men, it helped me set a standard of always never going to intercourse with a girl if there wasn’t enough mutual arousal to produce an orgasm by ‘outercourse’.

This was re-enforced by my one experience of “date-rape” when the girl in question came back to my flat and we even got into bed but I persisted although she had not come and had obviously changed her mind even though she wasn’t a virgin.

Even now, forty four years later and after thirty years of marriage, I always expect my wife to have one or more orgasms through ‘outercourse’ before penetration and pretend to be re-taking her ‘virginity’ each time by stretching her labia and vulva in such a way that I have to gently work my way in so increasing her arousal.

To this day, I thank my father for all the sex education he didn’t actually give me but I managed to get by reading the books in his library and particularly that by Marie Stopes when he was out of the house.

The Big E-asy?

Monday afternoon and I am just getting over yesterday’s lovely shock of 1. Seeing myself on page 3 (not that one), of a national newspaper and 2. Eighty degrees of heat on an April afternoon.

I don’t know which was more welcome.

Seriously, I was really chuffed to read Cosmo Landesman’s piece in yesterday’s Times. And reading it over just now brings to mind a question I have been asked so many times recently…

What is the big difference between virginity loss now and virginity loss then? What has changed? What is the big conclusion?

The truth is that I never set out to make a definitive conclusion. I simply want to document real stories. I want to present an antidote to the sex that we are served up on a daily basis. I don’t want to give you more of what we read in magazines or see on the Internet.

This is simply the sex that we are having – and have had in the past.

However, if you wrestled me to the ground and threatened me with a Chinese burn, I might concede the following point:

Lots of things have changed, all of which impact on our experience of sex. We have contraception. We can have sex purely for fun. We have lives that don’t necessitate marriage. We all have great swathes of education and information in comparison to previous generations.

But there is a large eleven-letter word for which we have not accounted.

Expectation.

If I had to place my finger, so to speak, on the single biggest difference between the stories of old and the stories of new, it is that older generations expected less. And depending on your age, you will have more or less affinity with that statement.

It is hard for young people today to imagine what life was like pre 1963 and the era in which Ian McEwan’s new novella, ‘On Chesil Beach’ is set.

Phillip Larkin summed it up succinctly:

‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatle’s first LP’

And it is true; this is the pivot on which a cataclysmic change swung – for the better. As Sandra Jones, an interviewee who lost her virginity in 1963 says, ‘that was when times really began to change. My sister actually lived with her boyfriend before she was married. Now she was only eighteen months younger than me. But that’s how quickly times were changing because there was no way Ian and I would have got away with living together a few years previously’.

Sandra and her partner may have muddled through, quite progressively as it happens, with a copy of The Karma Sutra and whispered advice from friends, but they did it without the crushing disappointment that many young people feel today as they begin their sexual lives.

I speak from experience on this matter. I alluded to my own experience on March 31st in a post entitled ‘The Original Slapper’. Cock a hoop I might have been at gaining the ‘badge’ I so wanted to wear, but I was also hugely under-whelmed by the experience. Didn’t bother trying it again for a good year in fact. And even then, I still wasn’t convinced. Things changed when I bothered to try and do it with someone I could actually hold an interesting conversation with.

Hindsight is such a great thing, I couldn’t have told you any of this at the time. But it all seems so crystal clear now. Modern life is great. Contraception and education have given us a freedom that our parents and grandparents could not imagine but it has also given us truck-loads of expectation.

It has given us a safe route to base one with no fiddling around and I argue that we need the fiddling around! We don’t stop to admire the view as much as we could. Why bother experimenting with a hundred ways to pleasure each other that don’t involve penetration when we can leap right off that diving board into the deep end the first time around.

No wonder we end up disappointed.

We need to go around the houses before we get to base one. We are so fixated on the reward, this idea of penetrative sex being the benchmark for virginity loss that we forget to enjoy ourselves. We still need the loss but it is ourselves that we need to lose, to the idea that sex does not need to have a beginning, a middle and an end - with a measurable conclusion.

We need to go with the flow - or take a chill pill as they said in the sixties.

Your own stories and opinions on this matter, are most welcome.
Comment or email: katemonroe@yahoo.com

All names will be changed to protect identity

I am all ears...

Are you a born again virgin? Do you have a comedy virginity story to tell? Or do you simply feel the urge to share a unique moment?*

I am always seeking new angles and new people to interview.

If you would like to send me a story for inclusion on this site, or if you would like to offer your story for a more in depth interview, I look forward to receiving your emails: katemonroe@yahoo.com

Go forth and share...

*All names will be changed to protect identity

Chocolate? Vanilla? Flake?

Life is odd.

You know how it is, your eyes alight upon a random word one day and all of a sudden that word is everywhere that you look. As you throw it’s vowels back and forth through your mind, it is simultaneously whispered from doorways and spoken on television sets and you begin to wonder if you have pinged a psychic text message into the universe, an esoteric call for entries perhaps?

And so it is with people.

No sooner did I write about my short but sweet excursion into the world of submission and domination, (Sub? Dom? Tea?) than one of the main players catapults unannounced back into my inbox.

Not just anyone either, but the leader of the gang. A certain Ms Whiplash* of the highest order. Because, I have it on good authority, she is a precious anomaly in the world of BDSM….

She is a ‘switch’.

For those that don’t know, and I didn’t, a switch is someone who can be both submissive and dominant.

By the by, I found it touching that some members of the audience of the talk I attended were concerned that I might have found some of the discussion, well…..disturbing.

Bless! The only thing I found disturbing was the amount of time given to a talk about the difference between people who like to spank and be spanked, and those who prefer one or the other. But that’s probably just my vanilla tinted specs speaking. In any case, I appreciate the concern. A kinder, more considerate bunch of people you could not hope to meet.

The upshot of this?

New interviews and fresh perspectives is what.

This Friday I will be interviewing Ms Whiplash about the loss of her virginity. She assures me that it is a very dull story. She and everyone before her. So many people say that.

And some of them are dull, it’s true.

But no matter what the experience, a good story lies in the telling, the detail and the perspective that we gain as we grow older. Ms Whiplash is a lady of a certain age, fifty, I would guess. So I cannot deny that I will be searching for the clues as she speaks. How does one make one’s way from virginity to the exalted throne of domination that she occupies? What happens on the journey?

Will I be able to get a glimpse of her future, as she talks to me about her past?

The adventure continues..

*All names changed to protect identity.

Thats entertainment...

Top music, strange haircuts, and er....another perspespective on virginity. God bless America!

A pint of Dubonnet and a packet of crisps..

As you may have gathered, I am a woman.

My perspective is female. I can only imagine at what may occupy a man’s head on a day-to-day basis. Pursuing this project has allowed me a glimpse at what that might look like.

My conclusion?

We are not as different as we think.

This story, emailed to me yesterday, is a good example.

John’s story blurs the divide between the genders for two reasons. One, because like a lot of men I have encountered over the past year, this one is able to speak candidly about how he experiences his intimate life and two, because his ‘first time’ experience is what we might traditionally label ‘female’.

It’s an unusual visual. Fifteen year old John, pinned to the ground between a duel carriage way and a car park by a voracious woman.

As he looks up to the stars, dew soaking the back of his shirt, he reminds himself to, ‘never forget this moment’.

I rest my case.

John Parker. Born 1985. Lost virginity aged 15

John: 'My first time was with a girl a year older than me called Sophie. At fifteen, I socialized in the evening with friends at the local skate park with some drinks we'd managed to buy under-age. This particular evening, our only success in buying alcohol was a litre of Crème de Menthe and some Dubonnet. Classy.

We drank in the park until 9pm when we made our weekly trip to the local YMCA, where they held a rock and metal night for under 18’s. A few weeks prior to this particular cold January night, Sophie had begun to hang around with my friends and I in the park; she was exciting and fun, being a full year older than us.

My sexual experience before this had been some uncomfortable fumbles, sometimes in the park, occasionally at parties with girls my own age. I say uncomfortable from the girls' point of view; I thought I had all the moves but looking back they probably felt quite bored by their encounters with me, perhaps even embarrassed.

The most noteworthy feature of these fumblings was that whilst I had tried my best to show the girls a good time, they never touched me sexually. They would hug and stroke but while I was fiddling with their bra-strap or loosening their jeans they would never return the favour. I was immensely frustrated and somewhat confused by their inaction.

Anyway back to the case in point. As my friends and I, accompanied by Sophie, walked to the nightclub, Sophie and I began to fall behind the others and hold hands. Soon, she stopped me and pushed me up against the fence of a car park and began kissing me. I was shocked. It had been clear to us both that we liked each other but I had never been with a girl quite like this.

Now, looking back, I can understand that it was sexual desire proper; something totally foreign to me at the time. Another thing totally foreign to me was when she put her hands down my trousers and began to masturbate me. A feeling of absolute shock took me, her ice cold hands coupled with the chill air and too much Dubonnet; I went limp in her hands.

I felt so stupid, the first time a girl touches my penis and I can't keep the pace. I began to wonder if all the other girls had known this would be the case if they ever touched me. She whispered in my ear that she wanted me. This was new ground for me, a girl actually showing sexual interest in me. Astonishing.

She tried to get me erect again but to no avail, so she took off her jumper and put my hand up her t-shirt and as far as I was concerned, the world had just been turned upside down.

I had just had more intimate intercourse with a girl in two minutes than I had done the whole of my pubescent life.

By now I was feeling massively embarrassed at my limpness and tried to draw a close to the proceedings, but Sophie took us back into the park, onto a small strip of grass between the dual carriage-way, train viaduct and car park. We kissed some more; she then announced that she wanted us to fuck. Again, more amazement on my part.

I concurred, my mind oblivious to the fact that the chill and Dubonnet had made me useless for this task. I spread my jumper on the ground and lay on it, the grass was wet with dew and soon my back was soaked, the laying down and the cheap drink making me dizzy and nauseous. Sophie stood on top of me, her legs either side and pulled down her tights then she presented me with a condom and I unbuttoned my jeans and put it on my semi-hard penis. She put me inside her and we began the motions.

I lay on my back staring at the clear stars above, telling myself never to forget this moment. It wasn’t romantic, pleasant or gratifying; it was embarrassing.

After a few minutes I came, she pretended like she was enjoying herself, but we both knew how under-whelming it was for both of us. I blame nervousness and the Dubonnet.

We composed ourselves and made our way to the nightclub. We didn’t hold hands or talk the whole way to the club, in fact once inside, I don’t think we saw each other again that evening. I told my friends of the experience the next day. Of course I lied and said how amazing it was and how good I had been.

Later, I found out she had a boyfriend of about twenty who would hit her sometimes. I didn’t feel sorry for her because I was consumed with paranoia about what he'd do to me if he ever found me'.

Kate: 'John, that is classic. Thank you so much. It’s a
fascinating account, brilliant detail, my mind is
spinning at the Dubonnet and crème de menthe
combo. I can't help wondering - how do you feel
about it now, looking back – do you regret it?
Or just chalk it down to experience?'

John: 'How I feel about it now is a strange topic. I guess I kind of regret it, but then not really, because then I'd have to regret who I was at the time. Young, naive, inexperienced, drunk on Dubonnet and Crème de Menthe; that bit I definitely regret.

I feel a bit sad that I lost my virginity in such a depraved atmosphere, but it taught me a lot about people and when to say ‘stop’, when things go too far. I don't want to just dismiss it to experience because it was a very important event for me at the time, and it still is now. Bits of it make me laugh, bits of it make me quite sad. Maybe my inexperience was taken advantage of, but I had my own agenda too. What a strangely therapeutic set of emails, I feel quite nostalgic and poignant now.'

Getting off on a technicality?

Thank you people, for sending me your very own virginity loss stories.

From time to time I will post one.

Today, Gordon tells his tale and its good to see that the apocalyptic AIDs advertising of the eighties served a duel purpose, asides from scaring the living bejesus out of us.

For Gordon, it provided the necessary smokescreen for his incumbent virginity.

The experience catches up with him eventually, one night in the slumbering grounds of the local mental hospital, the trees and grass for a backdrop, a big-hearted dairy counter girl the giver of the gift.

Gordon, you pose an interesting question at the end of your account. You are not the first man to ask this. Is it significant?

Or a mere technicality?

What do you think?

Gordon Chambers. Born 1968. Lost virginity aged 18.

It was the summer of '86. I was 18 and wondering how and when I would ever lose my virginity. I'd only had a couple of girlfriends but we didn't know how or what we were doing. We knew if we rubbed up against each other really fast we quite liked it. No doubt we would have liked it a whole lot more if we'd taken our clothes off!

My peers had all 'done it'. Or at least made convincing stories up about 'doing it'. When you're 15 and you laugh at a joke involving the words 'wet dream' but have no idea what a wet dream is, it's quite hard to make up a believable story about 'actual intercourse' because you knew just one well aimed question about your story and you'd be laughed out of town by your mates with your neon virgin sign still draggin’ behind you.

I had to pretend I was waiting for the right girl. Trying to take the moral high ground, trying to blame it on the AIDS advertising. And all the time stealing my dad’s porn mags and trying to make sense of the stories inside it. It all just sounded so brilliant and sexy and, well, complicated. My trouble was I didn't live next to a sexy divorcee and she never did catch me in the bath when she'd just popped round for sugar.

I was convinced I would be a virgin forever.

But that's when I got to know Rebecca. Known as the friendliest girl in Gateways. I was working there while at college. Me in the warehouse, Rebecca on Dairy. Boy was she friendly. And she seemed to like me...a lot. In fact she seemed to like Mike and Steve quite a lot too.

But on drunken Gateway nights out, it was my job to walk her home, (or at least half way home), where we would find a dark space under a tree, (near the church, which has always seemed a little wrong) and quite close to passing cars; then it was a kiss, a cuddle and a pants down blow job and always with me leaning against the same tree and thinking, well, it's turned out nice again. We never actually ‘went out’ and this seemed to suit us both. It was fair to say it was a pretty low rent relationship.

Another Friday night and another drunken walk home but somehow I forgo the post pub fondling and walked off feeling I had somehow done the right thing for once. Halfway home I had another idea. I raced after Rebecca and caught up with her just as she was to take the short cut through the grounds of the local mental hospital. I came up with a, 'can't let you walk home on your own’ story and we both knew what that meant in code.

So there we were. In amongst the over grown brambles of a large mental institution kissing and drunken cuddling and suddenly different things were starting to happen. It wasn't how it said it should be in my dad’s copy of 'Club' magazine. But somehow to me it didn't matter.

A drunken communion, a pleasant moment, a box ticked, there were plenty of, 'are you alrights?’ and ‘is this okay's'. But part of me could only think of one thing. If I can do this now, it's mine. Like my recently acquired driving licence, no one can take this off me.

Something changed in our relationship after that night. It was like there was nowhere else to go. We both got our T-shirts and decided to move on. Rebecca went to work in the chip shop. I always got the biggest portion of chips and we were always pleased to see each other.

But one thing has bothered me since that night twenty-one years ago, a question I have somehow never asked another man or woman in all that time. My question is - if you put it in but you don't come, are you still a virgin?

Funny what you still don't know at the age of 39 isn't it?

You can sometimes get what you want..

Shouldn’t do this but can’t resist.

Its Monday, I got over my three vodka-and sodas-induced hangover of last week, (age won’t make me less of a lightweight), and I can now take sober stock of my birthday present haul:

In no particular order but the first one is the best…

The soundtrack from ‘A Prairie Home Companion’. Deluxe version.

Large box of Duchy Original chocolate Truffles

A swimming lesson

Lady Chatterley’s lover

A pair of silver sandals from Primark, birthplace of the best sandals.

A box of baklava from Green lanes in north London

Jumbo bar of Lindt Hazelnut chocolate

DVDS – ‘The forty year old Virgin’, ‘Kids’ and ‘The Virgin Suicides’. Am sensing a theme here.

A Moleskin notebook

Heavy glass jar of organic white drinking chocolate. Sensing another theme here.

A pair of gold-hooped earrings

CD – Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series, listening as we speak.

No chaff whatsoever.

Lovely. Thank you.

Born in the USA

Charon QC has a Hollywood sign and I got one too.

Neat.

And ties in nicely with today’s post. A thoughtful stateside reader emailed this story into The Virginity Project and I like it very much. Call it a saucy Easter treat.

Or perhaps you might like to do as Charon suggests. He plans to ‘throw some Easter eggs into my garden upon my return from one of my usual evening venues and see if I have any idea where they are on Sunday morning?’

Parker*. Born 1970. Lost virginity aged 17

I lost my virginity in my childhood bedroom at the grand age of 17 a month before I was to graduate from high school. The year was 1987 and I was enthralled with sex and women and "doing it."

Losing your virginity was pretty much all we boys talked about during high school, always wondering when it was going to happen, with whom, and whether or not it would be satisfying.

My first was with my date for senior prom. Her name was Tiffany, a popular name for girls in the USA during the 1980s, and we even planned to “do it” on the big night - prom. Prom is a ballroom type dance for high school seniors where everyone wears tuxedos and fancy gowns and acts like the adults we're supposed to be turning into in a few months time.

Anyway, being horny teens, we couldn't contain our excitement for exploring each other's bodies. For several weeks, we'd fiddled around with oral sex and near intercourse. Tiffany had a special talent for teasing me by allowing my penis to glide up and down her vaginal lips, but never enter, for minutes at a time. It was a glorious feeling, and I could not help but wait for the actual sex to happen.

It did, several weeks before prom night, during an after school sex session. We finally consummated our relationship via a 3-minute, vigorously quick pumping session which made me feel ecstatic.

Afterward, in typical male fashion, I leapt from the bed, did 20 pull-ups on the doorway to my room and yelled aloud, “YESSSSSSSSSSS.”

Twenty years later and after fourteen more partners I've had sex with, I still remember that afternoon.

*All names changed to protect identity.

You can sometimes get what you want..

However the loss of our virginity pans out, most of us know for certain that it will at least happen. Some of us will choose the moment carefully, handpicking the right person for the job, for others still, and I have met these people, it may be a genuine act of love, a step taken hand in hand with a cherished loved one. Many of us will wriggle out of it quickly, yanking it off like an itchy old jumper.

Some people have to try a bit harder to get what they want.

I was hanging around at home one morning just before Christmas when my phone rang. ‘Go on line’, my friend Simon implored me. ‘Check Tuesday’s Guardian, there’s a brilliant story about a disabled man who loses his virginity to a prostitute’. As he is talking, I hear the post land on the mat downstairs.

I promise to check. My search for an interview with a less able-bodied person led me to charismatic Charlie Thomas but the prostitute angle is one I am still searching for. I go downstairs and pick the letters up from the mat.

I get really dull mail on a regular basis, so today is a surprise. A real letter with a friendly person’s handwriting on the front. I turn it over. It is from a friend who has scrawled a note on the back. ‘I saw this and thought of you’.

I open it and out drops the Guardian article about the disabled man who loses his virginity to a prostitute. Psychic friends? Or just that I have become ‘the virginity person?’

Either way, this is a story worth re-visiting. Nick Wallis is a regular twenty two year old man, with regular thoughts and regular needs. He differs only in that he spends his life in a wheelchair and that losing his virginity required him to go to slightly longer lengths than most of us. What a guy.