I didn't have sex for the first time until I was 33 years old. Explaining all the reasons for this situation -- and I probably don't understand quite all of them in any case -- would require both a Ved Mehta-sized autobiography and maybe more revelations about my life than I'm entirely comfortable with.
But I want to write about some of my feelings about being a virgin until that late in life and what it felt like to finally lose my virginity, because there really wasn't -- and sometimes still isn't -- any one fact that made me feel more alone in this world than being a virgin as long as I was. I also want to write about it because I wouldn't have minded reading something on the subject, with a happy ending no less, at any of the anguished points in my adult life when I was feeling so unhappy and self-conscious about my virginity.
There isn't a lot of room for whatever a thirtysomething virgin is in this world, period. To use a cliche, you don't see yourself reflected anywhere. The word "virgin," whatever the age of the person it describes, is a snorting punchline; easy cultural code for "loser," like saying someone's still living in his mother's basement. You very rarely see a
hot ass porn scene discussed, and when it's done seriously the only way people seem to know how to acknowledge the existence of sex and porn is within the context of people, almost always women, with religious beliefs that lead them to abstain from sex (not my situation), or else "voluntary virgins" in later life who were consciously abstaining from re-entering the world of sex again until marriage (definitely not my situation).
There wasn't much information I could find on what virginity (or losing it) was all about, really, after I was too old for health class or Judy Blume's Forever, in part due to the ashamed way I was looking for it. I have vivid memories of confronting this information vacuum on a couple of occasions when I was in college. One was the ritual furtive scan of the Our Bodies, Ourselves index, for "virginity." I found nothing much of use there, which made me feel somehow very invisible and asexual.
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Another college memory is of walking around our student center late at night with a not-particularly-good friend and seeing, among a bunch of typed-up answers to anonymously-submitted questions about sex posted on the health center's bulletin board, a thoughtful response about the best positions for having intercourse for the first time. I remember pouncing on this piece of paper with my eye, trying desperately to look like I wasn't reading it. For years afterward, I wished I had had the courage to just stand still and read it all the way through, which I didn't allow myself to do, feeling like I would be giving away something about myself if I did.
