As a follow-up to her recent piece about her son’s “panda three-way,” Lynn Beisner continues the conversation about first sexual experiences.
Last week I wrote about how my son lost his virginity: in a panda three-way. (An established couple with a sexually inexperienced guy.) One of my goals in writing about it was to open a conversation among liberals and feminists about how young people are initiated into sex. For too long now, we have allowed moralists and romantics to dominate the conversation and they have made it about purity rings, purity balls and magical nights with the perfect someone. The problem with these ways of thinking about sexual initiation is that they make a person’s first sexual experience about everyone except his or herself. For the person who has previously worn a purity ring, sexual initiation is a social, religious, and political statement. For the girl who attended purity balls with her father, her virginity is either about her relationship with her father (and how ooky is that) or it is about her virginity being a commodity that is held in trust by her father until it can be passed to her husband. And for romantics, sexual initiation is about finding the “right” person.
I believe that we as sex-positive feminists should take back this conversation, or at least start making our voices heard in it. We should remind the sexually inexperienced that how and when and why they choose to become sexual is about them, not about society, parents or even the “right” person. We should be making the point that virginity should not be something that is taken or lost, and we should encourage young people to set the precedent that “my body is my own” beginning with their first sexual experiences. Our conversation should acknowledge how formative and fraught with peril first experiences are, and that these risks are at best minimized by not following the rules of moralists or romantics. We should be advocating for young people to make informed and intentional choices in sexual initiation.
If young people are making informed and intentional choices about how they want to begin their sexual lives, they are not left to the mercy of happenstances. So often in our culture, a young person’s first sexual experience “just happens” with the first person who will “let the person in his/her pants” or the person who builds in them a tidal wave of passion so that they feel “swept away.” A conscious, planned sexual initiation takes power from the fates, the seducer or even the rapist and gives it back to the initiate, and it increases the chances that the person will be safe both in terms of “safe sex” and of physical danger.
One of the reasons why this subject is so important to me is that my first sexual experience as a young adult was horrible and nearly deadly. After years of “saving myself” first as a social and moral statement—and later in the romantic hope of meeting the “right one”—I lost my virginity to the first guy who created in me a tsunami of arousal and passion. What started as consensual sex turned violent at some point. But as a complete neophyte, I did not see the turn until it was too late. When it was over, I had no idea that I was seriously injured. I had read in those stupid bodice-rippers that women bled the first time and were sore thereafter. So I thought that the searing mind-blowing pain I was experiencing and the blood pouring down my legs causing me to leave bloody footprints everywhere I walked was normal. Had it not been for a family friend who I trusted not to judge me, I would never have sought medical attention. She got me to the hospital just as I was dying. There I was revived, received blood transfusions, and underwent emergency surgery to repair the laceration that extended from the opening of my vagina through my cervix.
My motive for telling this story is that I do not want the pivotal role played by sexual illiteracy and inexperience to be dismissed. If we chalk my experience up as another variety of sexual assault, we risk missing something very important: just how limited the sexually inexperienced are in their ability to give consent. I agreed to have sex, but I did not agree to be harmed. What I could not know because I was too inexperienced was when the situation turned from being sex to being assault. I can say with absolute certainty that had I known then what I know now the evening would not have ended with a crash-cart and a near death experience.
Of course not all first experiences are as physically dangerous as mine was, but they are perilous in so many other ways. We simply cannot know what we are getting into before we go there. We cannot anticipate how we will feel during or after. We cannot know for sure how the other person will react to our vulnerability, if the person is truly safe and will use the appropriate precautions. We cannot truly anticipate the relationship ramifications which can be as painful and dangerous as anything physical. And we certainly cannot anticipate the things that can go wrong. I recently got a frantic call from one of my children’s friends. She and her boyfriend were in the middle of his first sexual experience when he began acting bizarrely. She thought he was having a religion-inspired wig-out. I knew that the young man was a diabetic, and rightly guessed that the anxiety and exercise had caused his blood sugar to go awry. A couple of glucose tablets and a near-tragedy was averted.
Perhaps the most significant peril of sexual initiation is how it shapes our future relationship with sex. A dear friend of mine had sex for the first time on her wedding night. It was perfunctory, awkward and left her believing that she was just not a sexual person. A former partner of mine lost his virginity to his brother’s girlfriend; as soon as it was over she confessed that she had done it because her boyfriend had coerced her into it. My former partner spent his young adulthood feeling like a rapist and convinced that sex is something women are coerced into. Another of my partners lost his virginity to a woman who was sexually unresponsive. He went on to believe that he was an incompetent lover. My own experience at first left me so traumatized that within four months of it I had dropped out of college and had married the safest guy I knew—my children’s biological father. Such a marriage was ill-fated from the start, but we stayed together long enough to have two wonderful children. My children and I are who are, quite literally, because of that experience.
I think that our feminist foremothers did well to de-emphasize the importance of virginity. It was then, as it is in some places now, a commodity and a moral bludgeon. But in the process of neutralizing virginity’s ability to be used as a commodity or a weapon we have failed to acknowledge how significant sexual initiation is for people of all genders and sexual orientations. It reminds me, in some ways of how virginity is handled in the book, The Red Tent. In it, the young protagonist’s hymen is ruptured by female family members at the celebration of her first menstruation. It is said to be not only an offering to the Earth Mother but also as a way of protecting her from charges of impurity in the future. The problem with that idea, however, is that the young woman’s first sexual experience still ends in genocide. Even in feminist fiction, devaluing virginity does not remove the significance or lessen the perils of sexual initiation.
A panda three-way is sort of the anti-purity-ring. And yet both acknowledge the same thing: that sexual initiation is fraught with meaning, peril, and opportunity. I am not sure that making like pandas is a solution, but I am quite sure that jewelry proclaiming sexual status is not. Sexual initiation is too important to leave it to the moralists and the romantics. We, the sex-positive and the open-minded, need to start having a serious conversation about transforming sexual initiation.
Lynn Biesner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi.
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