The article ‘Like a Virgin’, in the October issue of Girlfriend, argues, quite rightly, that there is a double standard when it comes to men losing their virginity and women losing theirs. “It’s time we stopped talking like virginity loss turns boys into men and girls into ruins,” writes Emily McGuire.
McGuire includes the experiences of young people including Karen, 15, who “just wanted to get it over with” and Krissy who was keen to “move on from feeling annoyingly virginal.” Despite the big event being less than physically great, she says that afterwards she felt “relieved” to have done it.
Holly, 17, says: “Boys think if they don’t lose their virginity by a certain time, then they’re not man enough. Then they do, they’re praised. With girls, it’s easier to say you are a virgin than not, because girls are given a hard time when they do have sex and can become labelled.”
Of course there is a double standard. We don’t see any ‘purity balls’ where sons promise their purity until marriage before their mothers – it appears to be always a father/daughter event. But I would have liked to have seen some more exploration here for why Karen wanted it over and done with and why Krissy felt it was annoying to be a virgin. Perhaps there are messages in the culture that contributed to the girls feeling this way? A culture that tells girls they should ‘put out’, pornography-based socialisation into early, even sometimes premature, sexual initiation. There no stories here from girls who felt that it wasn’t easier to say they were a virgin than not. Girls often tell me they pretend they are sexually active for fear of being seen as losers or hung up. A 15-year-old girl I met at a school a couple of weeks ago told me she was considering having sex with a 19-year-old she had met twice because she was being teased for not having had sex yet and feared being labelled a prude. It was clear she wasn’t ready. I didn’t feel there was an adequate representation of stories here because an experience I am told of, over and over and by girls of increasingly younger ages, is pressure to engage in coerced and unwanted sex and regretting first sexual experience characterised often by drunkenness and force. It’s good GF reminds readers that 75% of its readers are not sexually active (according to a survey) and that “If a guy threatens to leave you if you don’t have sex with him, dump him quick-smart. Dude’s a jerk.”
As published on Generation Next blog.
One Response
So interesting yet so sad, that these days a girls worth is connected to her sexual activity, that second base is oral sex, that the only ways many girls feel validated as females is by the sexual interest from boys. They are all worth so much more than the sum of their body parts and how they use them!