How my mom helped me lose my v-card

That dynamic duo over at HoneyAndLance invited me to a roundtable on virginity, and who am I to deny that kind of combined sexual magnitude? So here’s the WorkLoveLife treatment of virginity.

Personally, I lost my v-card at 17. It was my junior year of high school and my high school boyfriend and I had been together for something like 8 months. That’s a serious relationship there. I knew he was the one I would lose it with, based on timing and all, but I wanted to wait until I was 17. The national average at the time for females losing their virginity was 16 and dammit, I wasn’t going to be some statistic. We went to a Brian Setzer/Bob Dylan concert, and didn’t stick around for Bob Dylan. Instead, we did it.

Eh. I literally remember counting ceiling tiles with that particular boyfriend. High school sex doesn’t have much to do with actual gratification in my experience, at least not for women.

The coolest part about my experience? My mom allowed me the space to be completely honest with her without judgment. She had my sister at 17 and me at 22. She also lost a kidney due to a urinary tract infection that spread because she was too afraid to tell her mother that she had been screwing around as a teenager.

She wanted both my sister and I to be as open as possible with her when we were “ready.” A few months before I lost it, I told my mom that I might be getting close. She took me a gynecologist and I got on the Pill. She never judged me or pried.

She asked me a few months later had I done it. I hesitated, “Yeah.” I furrowed my brow. “What?” she asked. “It just, um, wasn’t what I expected,” I said. She laughed, “It gets better.”

I’ve been a vocal advocate for women’s reproductive rights and against abstinence-only education for this reason. The way some politicians endorse ignorance is beyond me. Clearly, young women are having sex. Even if they weren’t, why wouldn’t you teach them? Hell, when my mom explained to me the downsides of a guy ejaculating inside you, I steered clear of that for years. And probably avoided a lot of nasty side effects in the process.

I also have a claim most women don’t get in this day and age. I deflowered my first three boyfriends. There was junior year boyfriend (see above), senior year boyfriend, and freshman/sophomore year of college boyfriend. And let me just say, virgin sex was lacking. While it might sound fun to get to “train” them, it’s not. Sometimes you just want someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. Once I finally did with my first non-virgin guy, I’m happy to say I’ve never done another virgin. Besides, age-wise it just would’ve been improbable at that point.

All of this said, I don’t think virginity is something to be taken lightly. Thanks to my mom’s openness with her experiences and having an actual sex education class, I really weighed my decision before I did it. I’m glad that I wasn’t drunk or with someone who didn’t care about me. I’m glad that I got to do it with someone who was doing it for the first time too. I didn’t feel intimidated or pressured. I didn’t feel ashamed or wish I had waited longer. I’m grateful for that.

As to this new rash of women selling it off, I’m disturbed by it. I’m not sure how I feel about the commoditization of sex. It’s nothing new, though. When a geisha came out of her apprenticeship period, her mizuage was auctioned off to the highest bidder. Really, that’s all these girls are doing. Of course, geishas were an important part of Japanese culture and this portion of it was conducted with a certain amount of respect and ritual. All in all, why would you want your first time to be with some guy who’s willing to spend upwards of $250,000 on deflowering a girl? Gross.

I figure the experience is difficult enough as it is – it’s emotional – at least it was for me – and it signals a new phase of life. Why would you want to bring any more pressure to bear on it?