For the college freshman virgin, the first week of school can feel like happening upon an awkward but rambunctious teenage orgy. Fuelled by cheap liquor and the vague thrill of life without a curfew, your neighbors and roommates will transform the nondescript boarding house of your dorm into the court of Caligula overnight: a trailblazing duo of strangers will have sex on move-in day; there will certainly be bathroom sex at the first impromptu party on your floor; the tricksters who get access to the roof aren’t going to come down before having a bit of sex under the stars.
Indeed, your sexual inexperience will never be more keenly felt than in these first few weeks when everyone appears to major in the coital arts except you.
When I say that I was a virgin when I started college, I do not just mean it in the heteronormative sense of not having had penetrative vaginal sex with a man. I mean that no hand, mouth, or sex organ had grazed my bathing suit parts nor had any of mine gone on someone else’s. The completeness of my virginity was a matter of self-consciousness more than any sense of duty to moral self-preservation via sexual abstinence. Some combination of never having had a high school boyfriend, being petrified of my own nudity, and foolishly thinking that everyone else knew how to perform perfect manual, oral, and vaginal sex acts that I would fumble over left me with a far more wholesome résumé and reputation than I felt suited me. Not only did I lack a religious upbringing to credit with my adult chastity, but I was actually ahead of my peers in hitting other early adulthood milestones (abusing cocaine, distrusting capitalism), so being a virgin classified me as an oddity that required explanation.
I must have secretly been raised by ultra-conservative Christians and too embarrassed to talk about it. Maybe I was secretly a lesbian. Perhaps I did have a boyfriend but he was secretly gay so he didn’t have sex with me. Maybe I wassecretly raped as a child – was that the reason? All of these unsolicited conclusions relied on elements of deception or denial on my part, exacerbating the very self-consciousness that had prevented me from having sex in the first place.
These widely varying explanations were often provided by the same people who considered the most sexually active women among our peers fair game for ridicule. They revealed insecurity by dismissing women with much older sexual partners as “desperate” and making tired jokes about “village bicycles”. I did not yet have the vocabulary or the confidence to call this gendered double standard what it was, but I have seen remarkable courage and solidarity in today’s young people that gives me hope that this year’s freshmen will do better by each other.
The truth is, there will be virgins aplenty in your freshman class. Some will be religious and others won’t. Some will be heterosexual and others won’t. Some will have experienced sexual trauma and others won’t. There will also be people who have been sexually active for years. And the same caveats apply. The fact of the matter is, the things that you choose to do with your body or have had done to your body without your consent are no one’s business but your own. How you choose to discuss your sexual experiences when you do decide to have sex (and whether you choose to have sex at all) should not be the subject of a public trial by your peers.
I eventually had sex my junior year, at the age of 20, with a friend whom I trusted to treat my virginity as a non-issue. I had encountered men over the previous two-and-a-half years who treated it as either a precious, sentimental anomaly or as a personal conquest that would amplify their masculinity, but he was not among them. I ran into him on the night before I was leaving for a semester abroad. We got a bit drunk and went home together, so when he suggested sex, I figured: “Eh, why not?” Leaving the next day for several months had the added bonus of not leaving the option to dwell on him in the unlikely event that his sexual prowess would make me fall in love. Fortunately, it did not.Sex was every bit the uncomfortable mess some had warned me about, but I left his apartment relieved to have the milestone out of the way. On my walk home, I sent a text announcement to my friends that was equal parts crude and triumphant.
Do not be friends with those who would pathologize your bodily autonomy so cravenly. Your sexual history and your feelings about it are not nearly as strange as anyone might try to make you feel.
And if you’re still as worried as I was about missing out on all the sexy sex of freshman year, take comfort in this bit of wisdom from a woman who went on to get a Master’s in the coital arts: orgies are profoundly overrated.
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