Lola lost her virginity because, she said, she wanted to. She was dating a guy a grade older than her, and her friends were dating his friends. Her friends had already started having sex, so she wanted to, too. Her biggest fear was that her boyfriend would decide he could just find someone else who would have sex with him if she didn’t. So, one night at his house while his parents were downstairs, they had sex.
She made him light a candle first—some small part of the romance she figured she needed to not judge herself later. It was, in fact, a detail she always included when she told friends her story about losing it, hoping they wouldn’t judge her, too. It was quick, she told me. He used a condom. She didn’t feel much pain or see any blood, which had happened to a few of her friends. Then it was done. Afterward, she went to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror thinking,
Lola’s story is probably no more typical than a different sort of first time, one where the girl is date-raped, or pressured into it, or drunk. Alcohol is a common gateway to lost virginity, and although some wake up the next day upset with themselves that they got drunk and went all the way, others have confessed to me that they got drunk for exactly that reason.
Nikki told me she got drunk one night because she wanted to lose her virginity. Later on, she wound up puking in the bushes outside her friend’s house, but she said there was no other way she could do it without her peers thinking she was a slut. She didn’t have a boyfriend, but there was a guy she found attractive, a guy she knew wouldn’t go out with her but would definitely have sex with her if she said that’s what she wanted. So, she did exactly that. She got drunk enough to go right up to him and say, “I want you.” They went upstairs to a bedroom, and she lost her virginity to him. The next day, her friends felt sorry for her that she been taken advantage of. They supported her as a victim. I was the only one, she said, who knew the truth.
In chapter 1, we examined the idea that girls tend to associate sexual desire with being desired. A curious twist to the disallowance of desire is that in our culture, girls are permitted to want sex if love accompanies it. They cannot want sex without it, lest they be sluts. I’ve heard often from girls that their initial masturbatory experiences involved stories about boys wanting them—her hand on her crotch was a boy’s hand, a boy who tenderly loved her as he also enlivened her sexual arousal—whereas boys’ stories of first masturbations usually include images, something they saw, or something they might do to someone else.
Because of this need for real love to be involved, sex among teenage girls often “just happens.” They get drunk and black out. They dissociate from their bodies. Alcohol is an easy out, a way not to take responsibility for one’s actions, sexual or not, boy or girl. People say, “I was drinking—I didn’t know what was happening,” or “I have no control over myself when I’m drunk, so if I did it, it was the alcohol, not me, making the choice.” Alcohol has long been a regular gateway drug to sex. Often, boys take advantage of drunk girls, thinking that the drunkenness gives them license.
But many girls, like Nikki, admit that they get drunk to loosen up sexually. They get drunk because a drunk girl doesn’t know what she was doing and therefore can’t be a slut. In my interviews, many let me know that they used alcohol often as a sort of lubrication, as a way to open themselves more easily for boys’ passes. One noted, “If I could blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol [referring to a Jamie Foxx song] I could get away with anything I secretly really wanted with a guy.”
Jessica told me that when she was as young as twelve, she started drinking because she was unhappy with herself. It was a way to be someone else, she said. Someone who could hang out with friends and not constantly compare herself to them, who could be around boys she liked and not feel fat or ugly or unappealing. Pretty quickly, too, she learned she could be flirtatious and open with boys in a way that got her attention, which turned quickly to sex. She liked the attention and the sex. She liked finally feeling like she could attract boys, like she was comfortable in her skin. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was the way she was treated the next week in school. Everyone knew. She was called a “whore” and a “slut.” Friends started excluding her. At first, she became depressed. She drank more. She had more sex, just trying to feel better. One morning, a friend who hadn’t deserted her said, “Jess, you’ve got to stop drinking. It makes you do stuff with boys, and that’s why everyone’s being so mean to you.” Her statement was like a lightbulb for Jessica: “It was the alcohol. She could say it was the alcohol.”
And sure enough, the next time someone made a mean comment about her being a slut, she laughed and said, “I’ve got to stop drinking! I have no idea what I’m doing when I do. Cuervo is making me a slut.” The girl, who had once been her friend, laughed too, and over time they were friends again. Jessica learned the powerful lesson that it is OK to be sexually active with boys if you’re too drunk to have chosen to do so.
Sometimes, too, girls find ways to dissociate without alcohol. A young woman told me about her first time with a stranger twice her age, a man she met on the Internet. “He came over one night and he popped my cherry. I was so scared, but big girls, mature girls can’t be scared, so I blacked out. I completely blacked out.” Another said, “I can’t even remember the things I do with boys. It’s like the time disappears. Is that weird?”
Maybe girls want to have sex. Maybe they want to lose their virginities. Maybe they even just want to be sexual beings. But without a culturally acceptable avenue to act in such a way, they often feel they have to be blank—not there—in the process.
Drunk, they can avoid the emotions that come along with the cultural weight of having sex for the first time, and they only have to feel bad about it the next day, when it is too late and the deed is done. Girls rarely feel in charge of their own desire when it comes to sex, and certainly this starts with their first time. It’s easy to see why girls might revert to choices they later regret, and it’s easy to see why they often don’t know what it would even mean to feel “ready.”
Some may wonder, then, whether I think there is an age or developmental passage at which point I think a girl is officially “ready.” But the answer to whether a girl is ready to have sex is entirely individual. Judith Levine, in
NO—THE MANY FACES OF VIOLATION
Jennae was raped during Hurricane Katrina. While the rest of the country was terrified about the children and the dogs and the levees and the homes and all the people lost, Jennae experienced her own, very personal devastation. It was easy, sure, because no one was looking. It was easy because everyone’s eyes were glued to the television, or making plans to get out, or gathering in the Superdome. It was easy because Jennae just lay there, unsure what else to do. No one was around. She didn’t think anyone would care. She had already been called a slut at school. She had already had sex with seven guys, the fourth being her boyfriend’s best friend, who she hadn’t really wanted to have sex with, but he came into her bed one night, and she didn’t know how to say no. That was a violation, too, of course, but Jennae would say it wasn’t. Or she wasn’t sure. Because every guy she slept with she sort of wanted to, or she liked the attention, and a few she really wanted to, so she wasn’t sure how to separate the two—rape and not rape, violation and not violation.
But this time, it was surely rape, because she is almost sure she said not to. She’s almost sure she tried to push him off. She can’t be sure. They all run together sometimes—the one she really liked, the one she didn’t know if she liked but thought she could, the one she definitely didn’t want to have sex with. They had all led up to this moment for Jennae. The boy had come by because she hadn’t evacuated with her family because she had been fighting with them, and she had said she could handle things herself. He wasn’t violent, but he was intentional, forceful. He didn’t even try to kiss her. He was from her school. He knew she was a slut. And with her panties off, she saw that she couldn’t really handle herself. She knew in that moment, her head to the side so she wouldn’t see his face, that she wouldn’t handle anything again.
