The 26-Year-Old Virgin
Female virginity. The mythology around it. The pressure placed on it
Female virginity. The mythology around it. The pressure placed on it. “Don’t have sex when you’re too young but don’t wait until you’re too old and make sure it happens with someone you love.” The expectation a woman will be forever changed once she has intercourse, and the lack of transparency as to why that might be.
I waited until I was 26 to have sex, and the deviance of that choice has haunted me for all my adult life: not because I cared, but because I could tell how much others did. I remember reading through a draft of my first play, Rinse, Repeat, with a producer some years ago. When he realized the 21-year-old lead character was a virgin, he said: “I wasn’t aware Rachel was that pathological.” I flushed with shame, not daring to tell him there was a 24-year-old virgin sitting in front of him, wondering: “How pathological does that make me?”
I know I do not have to defend my virginity, but I would still like to make a few things clear: I am not religious, and I do not believe in waiting until marriage to have sex. Some assumed I was waiting for ‘The One’, but when I did finally have sex, it was not with someone I was in love with. I am an opinionated feminist who started masturbating obsessively (and a little riskily) at age 15. So why did I wait so long: a liberal woman with open minded parents who was raised on Sex and the City and has a very high libido? That doesn’t make sense. Especially not to the men I grew to care about, who were so terrified when I was forced to reveal my virginity they couldn’t have escaped fast enough. Because that myth that a woman gets too attached to the man that deflowers her? It’s ingrained pretty fucking deep.
The first time I got fingered I was at my own house party with a cute guy I had met that night. I was drunk and high, but even in that state, the feeling of him jabbing his fingers inside of me? It fucking hurt. I didn’t feel I could say “What you’re doing is painful. Please stop”, so I moved away from his prodding fingers and started jerking him off. He didn’t wait long before pushing my head down. I resisted at first, but eventually acquiesced; willing to do anything to stop the pain from resuming. Giving a blow job wasn’t something I wanted to do: at the time maybe ever, but especially not with someone I had just met. Before I could wrap my head around what was happening, he came. I spat his sperm into the toilet and promptly brushed my teeth. He tried to get me to go back to the party with him, but I made an excuse, ushered him out of my room, and climbed into bed. When my friend came to let me know that this guy “really likes you and wants to hang out more”, I said I was tired, and burrowed deeper under the covers. Later, I devoured a pint of ice cream and shoved my fingers down my throat with a force akin to that of his earlier. Punishment, I suppose. For being a bad girl, for giving a blowjob to a stranger, for daring to feel uncomfortable about it, for rudely brushing my teeth in front of him and for not going downstairs, hanging out, and pretending I had a great time.
This pattern of men penetrating me without knowing what they were doing happened every time a finger came near my vagina. And I know what feels good. I can have 6 or 7 orgasms in 30 minutes without even trying. So why go through the pain? Looking back, it’s interesting I didn’t think speaking up was an option, but how often do we see examples of women telling men what to do in bed? We consume films and television where men take the lead, reinforcing the notion that our role as women is to be passive. And that passivity felt unnatural to me, like being stuck in a cage with bars that dig into your flesh. It felt safer to hide. I had many friends in college who ended up having sex “to get it over with”, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do.
Why do I think it’s best to have a sexual partner you’ve established trust with for your first time? Because it’s important to feel safe enough to say: “that hurts” or “let’s pause” or even “let’s stop altogether”. Growing up, it felt like an inevitability that losing my virginity would be a painful rite of passage. But I didn’t want to accept that. I knew my body well enough to realize that penetration did not feel good to me, which felt like a taboo thing to say. I thought I was broken, because sex on TV? It always made it seem like it’s only the first thrust that hurts and then it’s all groovy from there.
We are living through an unprecedented time, and I yearn for any form of entertainment that distracts from that more than ever before. So when I heard rave reviews for Netflix’s Unorthodox, I dove into Esty Shapiro’s story and fell in love instantly. It’s hard not to, when you have a world written, directed and nurtured by women, and centered by Shira Haas’ groundbreaking performance. But I was not expecting to go through what I experienced watching ‘Part 3’, which explores what the loss of virginity is like for both genders with a brutal honesty I have yet to witness onscreen. For that grueling hour I felt seen, understood, less alone, and so filled with rage I had to stuff my fist in my mouth to stop myself from screaming.
It seems we are finally aware of the desperate need for content written and directed by women. We still aren’t doing enough about it: women comprised 13% of directors working on the top 250 films in 2019, which is an all-time high. It is my belief that this lack of content made by women hurts us. Not just girls, but boys too. When you have content primarily made by men, that means sex onscreen is shown from the male point of view. But when you’re a teenager, you don’t realize that. You assume what you’re watching is the universal truth. Unorthodox showcases the difference between that male and female perspective perfectly: as the wife covers her scarlet face, overwhelmed by the agony she’s had to endure, her husband collapses next to her, thrilled, raving about how incredible that was. He’s discovered Nirvana, and is oblivious to the fact that his wife just went through a sexual trauma.
Most straight men are not familiar with what it means to be penetrated. Their suffering with regards to virginity comes in the form of embarrassment from orgasming too early. And that is typically what we see in films: sex for the first time is shown as clumsy (because for the guy, it usually is), but it doesn’t show the deep pain many women experience. The female character cringes at first, breathlessly sighs “I’m okay” and the act continues. I don’t doubt that many men experience a woman’s loss of virginity this way. We are conditioned to hide our feelings and put on a show not just by society, but by the very content we consume. We don’t tell men what’s really going on for us, so they have no idea what we’re experiencing, unless they ask. And even then it’s rare that we will feel safe enough to answer their question honestly. Who wants to be the outlier who doesn’t always enjoy or desire penetration?
I recently watched Waves, a film written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. When the characters Emily and Luke have sex for the first time, he enters her, asks if she’s okay, and she nods. He comes quickly, apologizes, and she reassures him. He then asks if she wants to go again, and she quickly agrees. This scene puzzled me: Emily was just penetrated for the first time. Would she want to immediately have sex again? Or would she want time to heal and recover? Maybe she doesn’t need that, not all women do. But as I watched this scene it sunk in that this is almost always how this moment plays out, and that is what I object to: its depiction as the norm for women by a man who does not know what it is to go through that. Teenage girls will internalize that scene and think they’re supposed to react the way Emily does.
When I was a teenager, I saw Revolutionary Road: Leonardo DiCaprio fucks Kate Winslet up against a wall, and within less than a minute, she’s already coming. The same thing happens between Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached. And Diane Lane and Oliver Martinez in Unfaithful… Not to mention the countless films where women require zero foreplay before being penetrated: The Notebook, Titanic, Pretty Women, Amelie… Which is interesting considering the largest study on the specifics of women’s pleasure found that only 18% of women find vaginal penetration alone sufficient for orgasm, with 66.6% of women stating their preferred form of being touched was directly on the clitoris. How often do we see that onscreen? Men fuck us, we ask them to fuck us harder, and we shriek with pleasure. So both men and women grow up thinking “that’s how it’s supposed to go”.
Consider the following: how often have you seen a girl going down on a guy as his eyes roll back in pleasure? Now what about its female equivalent? When Blue Valentine was released in 2010, the MPAA initially gave it an NC-17 rating, the box office kiss of death. Why was this film deemed more inappropriate than Boogie Nights, Eyes Wide Shut or Saw? Because it showed a man going down on a woman, something that was apparently too obscene for anyone under 17 to witness. This tells us how often this healthy, pleasurable act had been depicted in film. I was 16 in 2010. Every film I had consumed before then had shown sex as the following: blow jobs, hand jobs, fingering, and, with the highest amount of frequency, penetration. So why should girls expect to get head, and why should guys want to give it, when cinema dictated that, up until 10 years ago, it was vulgar to do so?
Growing up, I was obsessed with Sex and the City. I watched every episode at least six times, staying up until 5AM, eating cookie dough, crying as Mr. Big and Carrie broke up for the hundredth time. There is an episode where Carrie has sex with a guy who fucks like a “jackrabbit”. The next day she’s in so much pain she’s hunched over with a self-diagnosed “sex sprain” and can barely walk. And we’re supposed to find this funny. I had completely forgotten about that episode until I started writing this piece. I had forgotten so much of this show, how it shaped me. It was my bible in terms of what it meant to be a woman, and it wasn’t even made by women. Although I had forgotten, its message had sunk in: endure the pain and stay quiet.
The other day I watched Blue Velvet for the first time. There’s a scene where Isabella Rossellini’s character is violently raped, then begs Kyle MacLachlan’s character to fuck her. That scene distressed me: there is nothing more agonizing than the thought of being re-penetrated after having sex against one’s will. When I told my brother this moment upset me, he called me a “snowflake”. He could see my perspective, but there are sadly some women in the world who might react that way. “Not every woman is the same, Domenica”. My brother’s right: poll a hundred women about sex and they will have very different answers. But this film wasn’t made by a woman; it was made by David Lynch. I wonder how deeply he considered this sequence: what it was like for Rossellini’s character to have her vagina assaulted against her will. What it would take for her to be horny less than a minute later. Did he interview women about their experiences with rape? And after those interviews, did a sizeable enough amount say they would crave penetration after being attacked? Was he aware that scene’s message seems to be: “Rape? It’s not that big a deal. You’ll be ready to fuck again right after.”
This is an honest account of my first time: I’d been seeing the guy in question (let’s call him Eddy) for a couple months and this was our 5th date. Eddy liked to plan surprises for our dates, so I had no idea where we were supposed to be meeting, or what we would be doing. He waited until I was ready to leave to send me the address, which ended up being his apartment building. When I arrived, he assured me I would “love” the surprise he’d planned. Apparently, Eddy took a massage class at one point in his life, and was therefore “the best” at massages. This was my special treat: Eddy getting to touch my body without asking if that was something I wanted. But it felt ridiculous to point that out. What he was offering was nice. Right?
I went into Eddy’s room, lay on the bed, and took off my shoes and tights. He got out massage oil and indicated I should take my dress off. I did as I was told and lay there shivering. I kept my undergarments on, but his use of oil was so copious, I eventually had to remove my bra so it wouldn’t get destroyed. The massage immediately turned sexual. That nagging voice in the back of my head was getting louder, but I quickly shut her up: “he’s touching you in a way that feels good, you should want that”. At some point during this happy ending style massage it hit me that I would be having sex that night. It felt predetermined; out of my control. He took my underwear off and I didn’t stop him; it was about time anyways.
He had me turn over, went down on me, and I came. I was embarrassed this sexual massage I didn’t want had aroused me. And I was ashamed of my embarrassment, of feeling like a boundary had been crossed, considering it did feel good. I went down on Eddy as he deftly pulled out a condom from his bedside table. He didn’t ask if I wanted to have sex, he just pushed his way inside me. A moment that turned into minutes of effort. I explained away the difficulty he had entering me as: “It’s been a while and I’m really tight.” Eddy told me that was good; better than “If you’d just had sex yesterday and were really loose.” I’d spent a lot of time imagining what penetration would be like, afraid of the pain I would experience when something so big would be forced into something so small. I thought my fears were silly, misguided. And yet it hurt so much more than I had imagined. But it’s just the first thrust that’s painful. He’s inside now, it can only get better from here.
I didn’t tell Eddy I was a virgin. Why? Because the man I had cared about the most in my life ghosted me after he found out I hadn’t had sex. Years later, I wrote a film about that relationship that a friend I’d been hooking up with (let’s call him Rob) asked to read. I told him I felt nervous sharing it with him, but sent it anyways. A few weeks after Rob read the film we were in bed together. I felt ready to have sex that night: not because I loved Rob, but because I knew him well and trusted him. I even had a condom ready and waiting for the occasion. But now that Rob had read my autobiographical film, I could sense his terror that I was still a virgin. When I tried to reassure him by saying “That film was 3 years ago” he started thrusting multiple fingers inside of me, asking “Are you sure? Cause it doesn’t feel like that.” I suppressed the urge to scream, smiled and answered, “I’m sure” as he probed my body like it was a cadaver.
I suppose I lied to Rob and Eddy because I was tired of being abandoned. And even though I didn’t like Eddy that much, I couldn’t go through the trauma of being discarded like I was broken again. Plus, if I got it over with now, I’d be less of a liability for the next person I did care about. I’d been told by therapists in the past that it was okay not to disclose my virginity if I didn’t want to, that the guy wasn’t owed an explanation. I thought he would come soon. That the pain would stop. Just get through it and the pain will stop.
We went through 5 condoms. Because my body was smarter than my head; it rejected him. Spat him out repeatedly. I didn’t even realize what was happening. What that meant. When I went to pee halfway through and crimson blood filled the basin, I considered myself lucky Eddy hadn’t noticed blood on the condoms. After I came back, Eddy gave me an “acting challenge”: to pretend this was my last time having sex with the person I loved, and to let them know how good it felt. But I couldn’t pretend this felt good, I could barely pretend it wasn’t agonizing. We tried switching positions, and when we finally found one that felt okay, he abandoned it because the pace was too slow for him. Whenever Eddy’s penis would leave my body (to put on yet another condom), I would take the break as an opportunity to try to get him to come without reentering me. Give him a blow job, jerk him off, anything that would give my body the break it was screaming for. I hoped he’d notice these non-verbal cues, but at one point, on condom number 3 or 4, Eddy said he was “determined to make this work.” I felt ashamed this wasn’t “working”. I desperately wanted my body to conform. To be like everybody else. My knowledge of sex had always been: it’s over when the guy comes. It’s only the first thrust that hurts… so why does it feel like I’m being stabbed with a knife? When he finally asked me, after our sixth position switch, “Does this feel better?” the answer spewed out of me like blood: “No. And it’s not going to.” He replied: “Okay. I’m just gonna finish then.”
Then Eddy started fucking me hard. Like I’d seen in movies. This thing women cinematically beg for that felt like a nail being repeatedly hammered into me. I’d told him this wasn’t feeling good for me, but he used my body knowing it was causing me pain. And now, I really couldn’t hide that pain. I guess the grimace on my face during this fucking period was too much to bear, because Eddy eventually pulled out of me. I sucked him off, the scent of him mixed with coconut oil nauseating me, because I wanted this night to end without my vagina having to go through more. Eddy thrust his balls in my face, instructing that I suck them. He choked me multiple times without asking. When he finally did orgasm, he jerked himself off all over my chest. Said he’d been “wanting to do that for a while.” It was degrading, but I barely cared. How disgusting I felt, my breasts caked in his come, felt like complaining about a cut on your thigh when your arm has just been broken.
I immediately sought refuge in his bathroom, taking my dress with me. Cleaned myself up. Peed another river of blood into the toilet. It was so different to menstrual blood: when I wiped myself, the color of the blood, the way it came out… it was the way you bleed when you’ve been cut badly. I looked at myself in the mirror, the grease from the oil soaking my hair, my makeup smudged everywhere… As I fixed my face, I thought “Okay. You’ve had sex now.” I didn’t think what just happened was bad, because I had consented. I had never told Eddy to stop. He didn’t know how much agony I had been in. And it was over now. I could just move on.
When I left the bathroom, Eddy was on the sofa, ordering sushi on his phone. “We were in there for 3 hours.” I looked at the kitchen clock: 9:38. We had gone into his bedroom at 6:30. He asked me if I wanted anything: what I wanted was to leave, to never see him again. But I felt guilty for feeling that way. I ordered edamame, unable to stomach much more. He was watching a basketball game. He didn’t really talk to me, just put his hand on my naked thigh and let it stay there. The food arrived. I ate quickly, waited for him to finish, and promptly left. He kissed me sloppily at the door, which felt worse than the fucking. Because after that half hour of sitting there watching TV, the trauma of what had just happened had started to sink in. As I left, I remember Eddy warning me I would probably be sore the next day.
Only it wasn’t just the next day, it took a week to feel close to normal. To jog without pain. To touch my clitoris without being terrified of my own vagina. Five days for the bleeding to stop. Four until I caved and made an emergency appointment to see a gynecologist because standing, sitting, walking… it all hurt. I kept telling myself it was nothing. First times are supposed to be unpleasant. I couldn’t understand why my chest would suddenly be seized by debilitating anxiety in the middle of rehearsal. Why I would find myself in tears more than once a day. Why listening to my male director talk about my character having sex made me want to scream. It wasn’t until I saw the gynecologist that I understood: my vagina was bruised black and blue inside. I had a vaginal tear that would require I apply two different prescription medications daily to heal. I couldn’t ride a bike for another week, or have sex for at least a month. I wonder when it was my vagina tore. Early on? Or later? How long was my open wound being repeatedly, brutally reinjured. I wish I’d known I could have stopped. Listened to my body rather than submitting it to what felt inevitable at the time: this will go on until he is finished. He’ll come soon, he’ll come soon, he’ll come soon, until I spent the final hour praying to a God I don’t believe in for it to end. When I called my mother she asked: “If you’re such a strong feminist, why didn’t you leave?” I hung up, sobbing in the tub as the water turned red.
I called a close friend that night, someone I knew would understand. When my call went to voicemail, my entire being sank. My sobs quickly resumed, approaching hysterical, because I didn’t know who else to talk to. My roommate had gone to bed soon after I came home. On the phone, I told my mother all I wanted was for her to come hug me, but she didn’t. I felt alone, vulnerable, and traumatized without having a right to be. My friend called back the next morning, catching me in the midst of another inexplicable sobfest. She revealed how horrible her first time had been, that she has only orgasmed once during penetration, and that she far prefers oral to anything else. The night after I lost my virginity, I dreamt that I was raped. I texted my dad about my dream, making light of it, and he replied, “At some level it’s good your subconscious is processing the experience”. His response confused me; my encounter had been consensual. But when I shared my dream with my friend, she pointed out that while it may have been consensual from Eddy’s perspective because I didn’t say “no”, the act didn’t have my consent on it. I left my body, prayed for it to be over. So, in that sense… it was kind of a rape.
Even the most well-meaning men in my life assumed some of my trauma had to do with being disappointed that my first time hadn’t been great. I made it clear to them I had always expected my first time not to be great. What I didn’t expect was to be in agony for hours. To have my vagina torn open. To need medication and to not be able to take a fucking spin class. These men listened, made sympathetic faces, but I’m not sure they fully believed me. “It’s so sad your first time had to be like that” became a refrain in my life until I was too tired to argue that the adjective I’d use wasn’t “sad” but “traumatizing”, “infuriating”, or “debilitating”.
The more I shared my story with my female friends… the more I learned about their experiences. Things I had never known. One friend told me her first two years of being sexually active were agonizing. Each time felt like being stabbed, but she went through it because she loved her boyfriend. My mother told me she had hated sex for the first ten years of her marriage. She said this to reassure me; it broke my heart instead. My aunt opened up to me about her honeymoon: how her husband had wanted to have sex five times a day. That the whole thing felt like a nightmare; every day starting and ending with her wondering “When will he finally get tired?” She didn’t say “I don’t want to have sex” because that’s what honeymoons are for: endless fucking. The dream come true. But whose dream is that? Studies have found that at least 50% of women’s preferred way of getting off is by getting head… so maybe our dream would be a lot of oral with occasional penetration. But in a world where depicting that onscreen was considered lewd until 2010… that’s not what endless fucking means.
The way we deal with sex in heterosexual relationships works to the male advantage. If straight men had to be penetrated… they might come to consider adult virginity less “pathological”. We’re prudes if we want to have sex once a week or less. But I have a feeling if the definition of sex changed: if it could be a mutual exchange of oral or repeated clit stimulation and hand jobs, men would have sex with their partners far more often. Many women I have spoken to have shared how difficult penetrative sex has been for them. They still engage in it frequently because they know they’re supposed to and they want to make their partners feel good, but they don’t always particularly enjoy it. Another friend described her experience with penetration as “It’s not unbearable, and my partner wants to, so I do it.”
If we look at the literal definition of the word, my first time wasn’t “unbearable”: I was able to bear it. To get through it and fake a smile and let him kiss me at the door. Why is it that so many of us just accept this inevitable pain? My mother’s right: I am a strong feminist. And yet in that room… I lost my voice. The terror of being bad in bed with a guy I barely cared about overpowered everything else. I grew up thinking that was the worst thing a woman could be. Our bodies are made for penetration, to please men with. I knew I was a highly sexual being, and thought that once I had sex, the insatiably sexual part of me would finally be set free. I’d be like Samantha on Sex and the City: every man and woman’s unattainable dream. Because up until I’d watched Unorthodox, or talked to the women in my life… I had no idea that it was okay to not want to be split in two because it hurts. That it was okay to not want to have sex five times in one day on your honeymoon. I can see my aunt in that hotel room, dreading the inevitable moment when he would enter her again. I think about how long she stayed silent about her experience. Because us women? We don’t talk honestly about sex nearly enough. We ask “Did you fuck? Was it good?” and leave it at that. We don’t feel safe enough to open up to even each other. Some of my closest friends had been hating sex for years and I had no clue.
Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist who many dismissed as “man-hating” and even “insane”. I read a collection of her work, Last Days at Hot Slit, last year. I found it revolutionary at the time, life-changing. What she writes about is certainly extreme. But rereading her words now… reading them then… I knew she wasn’t wrong. In her essay Occupation/Collaboration, she discusses what sex is like for women, pointing out that: “There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion.” I don’t think this essay and the argument it puts forth applies to all women, but I do wish it would be included in Sex-Ed syllabi for young girls. Teach men how to put condoms on their own penises, teach us it is our right to always insist they wear one, and have us read this essay. Let us know that if intercourse doesn’t always feel good or right or natural… that’s because there’s a chance it isn’t. Dworkin points out that male discourse itself calls penetration “a violation” and, in some ways, it is. How we navigate that violation should be on our terms. But it isn’t. We get fucked, straight men don’t. And we’re supposed to want that. Films and television tell us the term “making love” is abhorrent. Gross. Cheesy. Who wants it slow and gentle? Prudes. Even when I would masturbate, I would fantasize about being ‘fucked’, unaware of what that really meant. That it could feel painful. That being “fucked” is perhaps an act of violence in and of itself.
I am bisexual. I’m equally attracted to men and women, and that attraction to men scares me. Because I’m still terrified of penetrative sex. I’m terrified of myself and my inability to listen to my body and voice what it’s feeling. And what kind of man will accept that I may not be ready to be penetrated again for a while? Writing that, I feel ashamed. The voice saying “there’s something wrong with you” comes raging louder than ever before. Because how can you date men without letting them fuck you? That’s so unfair to them. And what’s fair to me… Are you still a woman if you don’t want to be penetrated? If you’d be happy sticking to clitoral stimulation for life? Andrea Dworkin points out that society treats such thoughts as “deviant”… But for a moment here, I’m going to dare to be deviant. To put this out into the universe: I’m not sure I will want to experience penetrative sex again. Maybe I will… but maybe I won’t. And that’s okay. And maybe I’m alone in the way I feel… But maybe I’m not.
