Tag Archives: my first time

When a Sexy Secret is Not So Sexy

I’m a virgin.

There—it’s out there. Shocking that it might seem so shocking, but whenever the topic of sex comes up, somehow the most intriguing thing isn’t who did what where but that I’ve never done it anywhere.

People often say I don’t act like a virgin. What does that entail exactly? Should I faint when I see a bare chest? Or maybe I should just recline on the edge of an active volcano and await the villagers?

When my virginity comes up, it has to be analyzed extensively. The easy solution would be to not bring it up, but when I’m at a bachelorette party or casual social gathering and people are divulging intimate details and asking me to respond in kind with my sexual exploits, I’m candid about the fact that I don’t have any. Lying about my sexual activities would mean I’m ashamed of not having them. I’m not.

I was raised knowing sex is fun and babies are great, but if you’re not willing to raise a kid with a dude, maybe you should hold off.

Very few of my peers are virgins, and those who are seem to have the same obstacles navigating the chaste path. Their reasons are their own, but the obstacles we face in today’s sexually candid society are similar. We’re often asked if we’re religious fanatics. When do we actively decide it’s time to lose it? Are we waiting for marriage? People sometimes expect sex when they’re not seriously dating, so should we tell a guy at the “talking” stage before we get to the “not seriously dating” stage?

At the end of the day, I’m a virgin because I’ve never loved someone romantically—call me naïve but my first time should be with someone I love and trust. And even though I don’t exude the virginal aura, persona, scent that I apparently should, people become very invested in my virginity and when I will lose it.

Dating can be tricky. You’ll hear people say they have the five-date rule or the ninety-day probationary period. All I can think is once I become sexually active, I’ll probably stay that way. So if I keep to the three-month rule and don’t get married, I could have 102 sexual partners by the time I’m 50. I’m just personally not comfortable with that calculation, so ninety days isn’t going to cut it for me.

When I’m interested in someone, I bring up the issue early on. In my first few quasi-relationships (repeat dates that did not lead to exclusive or long relationships), I didn’t bring it up until they did. One said I had insecurities I needed to deal with. One asked how long I expected him to wait. Now I bring it up early, and if it’s a deal breaker or the man shows anything besides respect, I move on—no harm, no foul. I’d like to say I don’t obsess over it, but I do. When you’re enjoying a flirty relationship with someone and know this may be something that they won’t be able to adjust to, it’s uncomfortable; and if it turns out to be an issue, it’s upsetting. But I’ve discovered that not all guys act like the first few did, and I’ve actually been privileged to date a few men who not only showed the utmost respect for my boundaries but also didn’t feel the need to continuously check in to see if I was ready or not.

While dating poses its challenges, the greater obstacles I face are actually from my friends. All my close friends are invested in my sexual status in some way, either trying to sexually liberate me or protect me from the predators I’ll undoubtedly date.

Maybe they’re confused because my sense of humor is more than slightly vulgar: I make sexually explicit comments and gestures; I tease and play. This somehow leads some of my friends to conclude that I need to get laid. When I point out that they are just as vulgar and sexually explicit as I am, and they are getting laid, I’m told it’s “different” and I’ll understand when I’m getting some. News flash: virgins can still discern hypocrisy. They may be right—maybe I’ll mellow out after my first sexual encounter—but I doubt it. Either way, I’ve learned to take it on the chin.

On the other side of the friend spectrum, there are the friends who all want to know if the person I’m currently dating is being respectful and not pressuring me. They offer their words of advice and urge me to wait. Some tell me about their first time as a cautionary tale. What will these friends say if I get sick of waiting for love and one day decide that I want to have a slightly reckless, future-cautionary-tale first time? I know it’s because they care, so what can I do but reassure them that I can handle the situation.

Our society seems progressive concerning sex, with TV shows and movies perpetuating one-night stands or casual sex, while critiquing those that deviate from whatever the norm is in media like TLC’s “Virgin Diaries.” So how do virgins navigate a culture that seems to look down on their entire life experience because they lack one experience? When I think about who I am and what makes me me, “virgin” never makes the list. Yet when attempting to cultivate a relationship I hope will last the rest of my life, it’s the one facet of my identity that those around me and, admittedly, even I get caught up on.

Photo by Rob Adams

Photo by Rob Adams

We Don’t Know: I’m Gay, So When Did I Lose My Virginity?

“Can we get rid of the term virginity? Because it’s basically bullshit.” – Laci Green on the history of “virginity,” the misconceptions around hymens, and your “sexual debut.” 

We’re talking a lot about “first times” and virginity this week, but what does “virginity” mean to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals? We started asking some members of the UE community about their first times and soon realized that this wasn’t going to be a Let’s Ask. Because, clearly, We Don’t Know:

What do you consider your “first time”?

“The first time we were both naked.”
“The first time there was some type of penetration.”
“The first time it felt like a mutual event, rather than a foreplay type situation.”
“The first time I orgasmed in front of someone else.”
“The first time I had butt sex.”
“The first time genitals were touching with eye contact.”
“The first time I enjoyed it.”
“I haven’t felt the need to define it.”
“A pre-planned date we had both chosen.”

Some people consider the act of lesbian sex to be having oral sex: do you?

“I don’t understand why ‘lesbian virginity’ is third base? Then again, I have no idea what home plate is either.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me. So many couples do so many different things.”
“I don’t like giving or getting head, but I love having sex.”

A lot of people consider the act of gay sex to be anal sex: do you?

“I do. But it isn’t for everyone! I have friends who have been together for years and aren’t into penetration.”
From a ‘Dear Alice’ on Go Ask Alice: “All gays do not engage in anal sex. I know many men who prefer not to engage in this sex act. I don’t think enjoying anal sex is synonymous with homosexuality. This might comfort some of the straight men who write you and say they enjoy anal stimulation. I believe being gay is about having emotional relationships with men and not necessarily about the type of sex acts one engages in.”

If you’ve had straight sex, do you consider that your first time?

“I did at the time, but I do not now.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, but then I also had a ‘gay first time.’”
“Sometimes I think, ‘Technically, I guess I’m still a virgin, because I’ve never had straight sex.’ But I have sex all the time, so I don’t really know.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

Let’s Ask: Lies My Mother Told Me About the Birds and the Bees

My mother is a pretty awesome human being by all accounts. It’s important that I make sure all of you know this. She’s been through a lot of crazy, tough stuff over the years and has clawed her way to the other side like a fucking grizzly bear. But what she did not do was prepare me in any way, shape, or form to have any semblance of a functional adult sex life.

All the sex “advice” my mom ever gave me had but one simple through-line, one motive: to convince me to never even think about having sex. EVER. For any reason. To instill in me a crippling fear of the anatomy of the opposite sex. “I’ve been there. I was a teenager in the 70s, okay?” And I had to believe her, how could I not? Now, to be fair, most of these pearls of wisdom were handed down to me when I was only about 10 years old, the year my mom awkwardly left the “What’s Happening To My Body?” book on my pillow and never spoke of it. So… maybe the whole G-rated fright-fest makes sense. But a G-rated lie is still a lie!

“Sex hurts. It’s not fun for girls, only for boys. Girls who tell you they like having sex are sluts who are just trying to make you feel uncool.”

Yikes. Way to make sure I’d grow up to be a total bitch ice queen with ZERO friends, Mom. And what exactly was I supposed to think of myself, the day I had sex and realized that I liked it? Was I, too, a slut? Are we all sluts? What’s the meaning of life? Are we alone in the universe? These are the questions.

“If you give him the milk for free, why should he buy the cow?”

Thanks, Mom, now you’re calling me a cow, too? I think this one is fairly common, textbook advice for girls. It’s also fairly ridiculous. I know plenty of people whose stable, happy relationships were borne of a random, sexy encounter one random, sexy night. The act of having the sex you want when you want it doesn’t hold the same cultural weight that it might have years ago. Guys don’t typically “lose respect” for girls if they “put out” right away. Also, can we as a generation sign some sort of pledge to do away with the phrase “put out?” It’s so dated, so very look-at-me-I’m-Sandra-Dee. It sounds so dirty, too: Put. Out. She puts it out there, guys. It. Her vagina. Shudder.

Anyway. I fully support a lady waiting a little while to sleep with a guy she’s just started dating, so she can get to know him better and make sure he’s a solid choice. But that’s different. That’s not a decision made out of fear because you’re worried he won’t respect you anymore if you do the deed. And if that fear turns out to be true, that he does lose respect for you after you sleep together, then this guy might actually be the worst. So… good riddance.

“Ten minutes of good sex is not worth the pain of childbirth.”

Because obviously every time a person has sex it automatically results in a baby being born nine months later. OBVIOUSLY. I don’t doubt that having a baby hurts like the dickens, but that’s kind of neither here nor there. Because of this, for the longest time, I thought that people’s parents only had sex the day they decided they wanted a baby. The concept of birth control didn’t really factor into this discussion until I was several years older, and I already knew what it was thanks to my friends who had courageously bought condoms and put them on bananas at a sleepover.

“Having sex is worse than saying the worst swear word you can think of.”

So… the F word? Wait. Is this what a conundrum feels like? I am ten years old and my brain just imploded. This might be my self-destruct code. Send help.

“You’re not allowed to get married if you’ve already had sex with someone else.”

It’s worth mentioning that my family was not very religious. We were the swing-by-church-on-Easter-and-Christmas variety of Catholics. But for some reason, my mom would rev up the Pope-mobile whenever it came to the subject of pre-marital sex. You didn’t do it. Period. Those were the rules—God’s rules. You can’t break God’s rules because he’s definitely gonna hear about it, being God and all. And that’s not necessarily uncommon: a lot of parents tell their kids that they shouldn’t have sex until they’re good and hitched. But my twisted, 10-year-old mind took this warning to a whole new, disturbing level by assuming that a doctor had to examine you and give you a certificate of “Nope, Never Done It!” before you could walk down the aisle. And the worst part? When I asked my mom whether or not this pre-marital medical exam actually existed, she said yes.

“Penises are really ugly.”

Well… okay, fine. I’ll give you this one, Mom. I’m glad I was prepared.

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

My First Time Was With a Paraplegic

I was lucky, in many ways, with how my V-card was punched. My mother had a fairly liberal non-shaming outlook when it came to sex, and her only advice was “Find someone who you trust and care about. It’s a big deal.” I took that advice to heart. I also valued honesty, which is why one day I walked into my kitchen to get a snack, looked at my mom, and said thoughtfully, “Hey mom? I don’t think I’m going to wait until I’m married to have sex.” She looked back at me and said, “Oh. Okay.” And I waltzed back into my room with my orange or crackers or whatever snack I had decided the moment warranted.

I’ll call the lucky recipient of my virginity “C.” I met C in high school when I was 16. He was four years older than me. He was funny, cute, fun to be around, and he had his own place… directly next door to his parents. Looking back, there were a lot of problems with the relationship, which really should have been obvious considering that he was 20 and stoked to be dating a 16-year-old.

Of course, none of that was obvious to a high schooler. I felt awesome and sophisticated to be hanging out with this guy and his cool, old friends! But I was fairly well-balanced and had a decent sense of self-esteem. I made it clear to him that I was a virgin and if he was expecting anything from me right away, he was going to be disappointed. To his credit, he took it very well and assured me that he was ok with waiting.

About five months into the relationship, we started having problems. He claimed that he was in love with me. I cared about him, and I wanted it to work, but I hesitated to call it love just yet. There were some other issues as well and I was unsure about him.

Until, one day, I got a call from one of his friends. C had been in a car accident, thrown from the car, and landed on a pipe in the industrial area of our town. He had some severe burns on his stomach and had broken his spinal cord in two places.

According to my mother, the minute she heard this she knew—due to my caretaker tendencies—that he and I were going to be together for a long time after that. Which, to my mom, wasn’t necessarily good news. But she kept her opinions to herself and, after weeks of waiting for him to be able to receive visitors, she gave me a ride to the hospital.

That first visit was fairly traumatizing. His throat had closed due to irritation from the weeks he had been on a breathing tube and they had done a tracheostomy so that he could breathe. Because of the hole in his throat, he couldn’t talk. He could only mouth words. He had skin grafts on his abdomen and scars from the spinal cord operation. Both he and I knew that he would probably never walk again. And on that visit, he asked me to marry him.

What else could I say? I was a scared teenager looking at my boyfriend in a hospital bed, who was waiting for me to answer a question that he couldn’t actually ask, he had to mouth it. So I said yes.

I waited a few weeks to visit him again, until after he got the trach out. Once he did, we talked about the “whole marriage thing” a while more and agreed it would be best to get me a “promise” ring and call it that for the time being. After that, I accompanied him to physical therapy and visited him regularly until he got out, and for a while, sex was a non-issue. He had other things going on with his body to think about.

I found out later that, while he was in the hospital, he attended what was essentially a “Sexuality for the Disabled” seminar, and had learned a lot. He could, indeed, still have sex and enjoy sexual feelings. He told me some of what he learned. I was glad to hear it, but we still hadn’t “gone all the way” yet and I thought we still had a while before we would have to deal with it.

He moved back home, and that’s when the pressure started. Before, when he was able-bodied, he didn’t mind waiting. Now, he felt any resistance from me was an indication of hidden repulsion. While that was untrue, I will admit that having sex now gave me more pause than before because I simply didn’t know how it would work. But, by now, I had very deep feelings for this man. I wanted to show him I cared about him, and that he and I could live and love in a normal way. And I weighed it: did I care for him? Did I trust him? The answer to both was yes. So, one night, about a year after we first started dating, and after I had turned 17, we had sex.

I told him I was ready that night, but just getting things going was an adventure in itself. I had touched him before, but that was all prior to the accident. He was numb from just below the breastbone down. I was very nervous because I wasn’t sure his body would even respond to me. It turns out, in his case, he could achieve an erection fairly easily in response to manual or oral stimulation. He couldn’t feel it, really. He could feel some slight tingling but he couldn’t really pinpoint where. It was a relief and at the same time it made me even more nervous because it meant I would actually be having sex that night, for the very first time. That was the moment where it became real.

I remember we had to do cowgirl position. I remember it didn’t seem to hurt at all. I wasn’t too surprised by this, since I danced and had been using tampons for a while now, but I still expected it to hurt or bleed or something. I had to provide all of the movement, which felt really awkward because I’d never done it before. How does a girl “thrust” when she has nothing to thrust with? I remember it just kind of…stopped, with no actual finish. And I remember I cried. I was only a little embarrassed to cry. He handled it well, and held me close. I had told him many times what a big deal this was to me, so it just felt natural to let the emotions out. I was very confused, because sex with C was so different from anything I had ever heard it or expected it to be, but I felt safe.

We dated for two more years after that. Our sex life progressed through a lot of experimentation. Among my friends, there was always a lot of curiosity about how we had sex. I was always glad to share (and am still) that there are many ways to have a fulfilling sex life in a relationship where one person is disabled. For example, the spot on C’s abdomen directly ABOVE where he stopped having sensation was actually ultra-sensitive. I would drive him crazy (in the good way) by gently running my fingernails over the area. Our options for positions were limited, but it was fun to think of new ones. He was unable to achieve physical orgasm, which is a loss he mourned, but he claimed he had had a “mental” one a couple of times. His erections never lasted very long but they were easily achieved again so it wasn’t a big deal. The sexual experience is going to differ infinitely between different injuries and disabilities. I can only share our own experience.

Our relationship ended on a difficult note, but I still say I’m very lucky with how I began my sexual life. He ultimately wasn’t the right person for me, but I am still very comfortable with how long I waited and the age at which I had sex. I’m glad it was with someone I cared about, and I’m glad it happened under sort of unusual circumstances. It made me more open-minded, more experimental, and since both he and I were, in a way, discovering our new sexuality at the same time, it meant that I was confident enough to figure out what I liked and ask for it, since he was doing the same with me.

I get a lot of raised eyebrows when I say the words, “I lost it to a man in a wheelchair,” but I want people to know that sex is a diverse, multifaceted, and often beautiful thing. I hope after I tell the story, people think about sex through a slightly wider and more colorful lens.

Photo by Remi Coin

Photo by Remi Coin