Everything about this interview is fantastic. The interviewer, the interviewee, the questions, the answers… it is really really really fantastic. [Trigger warning at that link for description of sexual assault].
Maya, the interviewee, is incredibly articulate about her experiences and her beliefs; she’s clearly thoughtful and open-minded. I wonder, though, if we still wouldn’t be better off if marriage weren’t this marker that suddenly made sex ok; if we recognized that “virginity” is basically a made-up concept, and not something you “have” or “lose;” if sexual violations were considered evil because they twisted something pleasurable into something vile and not because they took away some fundamental part of a woman. I’m not pinning any of these views on Maya. But I do think that belief in the importance of virginity before marriage and the concept of sexual purity feed into a necessarily misogynist worldview, wherever those views come from. I don’t think you can separate those views out from misogyny, and from a view that says sexuality is potentially sullying if not performed in the service of something other than mutual pleasure — reproduction, God, the family, the state.
That doesn’t mean that people aren’t entitled to their own choices about sexuality. Given a particular background or worldview or set of experiences, an individual’s choice to not have sex until marriage may be the best choice for them. But I do wonder, quite honestly, about the sexual trajectory, and how jumping into the deep end may have serious psychological consequences. (For the record, this has nothing to do with Maya’s interview, and at this point are just my own scattered thoughts fueled by the word “virginity”). As an example: I know a woman who is very religious. Before getting married, I think she had kissed a man or two, but had done nothing else sexual. And by the rules of her religion, she was supposed to have sex for the first time on the night she was married (fairly standard religious fare, I think). I can’t help but wonder how that wedding night must have been. Because for me? Going from zero to sex would have been really, really traumatic. My own sexual trajectory was years long. I had my first kiss in eighth grade, and I didn’t have sex for almost a decade after that. And between that first kiss and my first PIV sexual experience, there was a lot of in between — of touching and getting to know other peoples’ bodies and sexual-but-not-sex behavior and all kinds of other normal developmental stuff. I was lucky, in a lot of ways, that I felt very entitled to my own boundaries as well as to my own self-exploration. I was probably older than “average” when I was doing most of these things, because I understood sexual behavior to be something that wasn’t just for boys but was for me as well. So if I felt safe and happy and comfortable and prepared, I proceeded. If I didn’t, I stopped. That frankly resulted in a lot of stopping until I was well into college.
There are two major problems I see with how young women relate to sex, and they come down to the right to say “yes” and the right to say “no,” and being totally mindfucked about both. Young women are taught that we are the holders of sex; we embody sex. We have The Sex, and men want The Sex (and yes this is all very heteronormative, but I’m talking about how many of us are culturally conditioned. LGBT kids are conditioned the same way, and then left out in the cold). But if we “give” The Sex under the wrong circumstances, then we are dirty / bad / slutty. But men respond well when we give The Sex, or exhibit some hint that we might give The Sex. So much of our relationship to our own sexuality revolves around how men are perceiving us, and how we walk this line between being alluring but not slutty to men.
The abstinence message isn’t, “Healthy sexual expression includes establishing boundaries, and you are entitled to your own boundaries, whatever those may be, so it’s totally ok to say no under any circumstances.” The abstinence message is, “As the female, it is your obligation to put the brakes on sex, and so you should say no because that is your job, and not saying no will make you dirty.” And then the broader cultural message isn’t “Sex can be good and fun and healthy and intensely pleasurable, and you should have sex that pleases both you and your partner.” The broader cultural message is, “Sex is something that men need, and being sexy involves having the kind of sex that most pleases men.” Even the most progressive sex education tells us, “Wait to have sex until you’re ready.” But — and I remember thinking this as a high school and early college student — how does one know what “ready” feels like? Sexually “ready” is, unfortunately, not like finding the perfect wedding dress — you don’t always just “know” when you know. But the clues that could be really helpful aren’t offered up on a large scale. I knew I was “ready” because I felt comfortable telling my doctor that I needed to go on birth control; I talked to my boyfriend about our past experiences and our expectations and what having sex meant to both of us; we spent a lot of time being physical with each other and getting to know each other on many different levels before having sex. I felt pretty “ready.” But I still wasn’t sure. Very few of my high school friends were sexually active; all of my college friends were. I felt like the odd woman out. I didn’t know how to determine whether sex was an authentic desire or acting on a curiosity (I was particularly lucky, I think, to be in a relationship with someone who was significantly more gun-shy about sex than even I was). I didn’t know for sure, but I went for it anyway. It was the right decision at the right time, but I still felt pretty alone in making it. I wish that back then, I had more resources than just “wait until you’re ready” or “wait until marriage” or “just be safe.” But even as an almost-30-year-old woman, I have no idea what those resources would be.
We are very limited when it comes to sexuality. We are especially limited in how we talk about it, and how we teach those who are newly experiencing it.
This is getting much more personal and over-sharey and stream-of-consciousness than I usually get, but I think it’s important, so bear (or bare) with me.
There’s no good framework for saying no; there’s no good framework for saying yes. Even the yes/no framing positions sex as something that men try to get and that women either provide or deny. In our mainstream, heteronormative culture, we have a poverty of language for discussing sexuality. Many of us are having wonderful, pleasure-affirming, outside-of-the-PIV-only-framework sex, but we don’t have the words to talk about it. I suspect many more of us want to be having that kind of sex, or at least want to imagine that kind of sex is possible, but don’t know how or where to start or how to communicate that to our partners. I suspect many of us don’t know how to break through the thoroughly reductive and fucked-up ideas about sex that we ourselves hold.
I worry that making marriage the point of when sex is “good” and “safe” is neither good nor safe, even if we qualify that with “But this isn’t for everyone, it’s just my choice.” I worry that emphasizing the right to choose to wait until marriage frames the conversation in a way that is fundamentally unhelpful. We all do choose to wait for sex until X moment. We all of course have a right to choose to make marriage the X. But what does it mean when we decide that consent to sex is best given in relation to a ritual or a particular day rather than in relation to a mental space or a feeling?
I think it means, again, that we lack the tools to holistically talk about, and even understand, sex. One is not simply “ready” or “not ready.” There isn’t a line you cross over. And so we pin readiness on rituals or arbitrary markers. Marriage. College. Birth control prescriptions. 16th birthdays. We create external forces to establish readiness, instead of doing the much more difficult work of parsing the messy reality of sexuality and self-awareness, and the understanding that this is not black and white.
Marriage as a marker doesn’t depend on how both parties feel; it depends on a ritual and a day when suddenly sex goes from “bad” to “good.” And if you’ve had little or no sexual experience up until that point, I imagine that sex is foreign and sort of exciting but largely scary. If the expectation is to have sex on your wedding night, there’s no long lead-up. Not to get too crass here, but there aren’t the years of heavy petting and handjobs and non-penetrative naked time that accustom you to how your body works and how other bodies work and what feels good and what doesn’t and when to know when to say “no” and when to say “yes.” There aren’t even months or days or hours of getting accustomed to all of that. There’s just the expectation of “yes, all of it, right now.” Zero to 60.
I don’t think that’s a good thing. I especially don’t think it’s a good thing for a partner who’s being penetrated. I especially don’t think it’s a good thing for a female partner, when the culturally-accepted definitions of “sex” and “virginity” are constructed around the male sexual experience, beginning with an erection and ending with ejaculation. I wish that the sex advice that Dan Savage gives to a young gay couple were given, in slightly altered form, to every person in the world before they embarked on any sexual activity. Because the thing is, when it comes to the spectrum of sexual experiences, you can’t do all of that in a day. There are inherent problems to hierarchies and timelines of sexual behavior; the “base” model, with first base and second base and third base meaning whatever it is they mean (I don’t think we’ve all agreed) is not a good one. The model of first comes handjobs then comes oral then comes vaginal sex is not a good one, nor one that many people stick to. But I do wish we agreed, culturally, that going from no sexual activity to penetrative sex is not usually a good thing to do in the course of just a few hours (or minutes). Because I do believe that sexual exploration should be an exploration. It should be a process. Penis-in-vagina sex should not be the only thing we recognize as “real sex.” It also should not be entered into without preamble.
But we glorify it and paint it as the most “moral” choice. And the choice that is at its most morally moral when executed without the lead-up.
All of my sex-related ramblings aside — and again, that wasn’t a response to Maya’s interview, but rather a letting-out of a bunch of Thoughts related to sex and virginity and abstinence that have been spinning in my head since this article — let’s get back to Maya, who has some great things to say. I love how she talks about the contradictions between how she dresses and how she chooses to live her life sexually — that she recognizes it’s ridiculous to think that what someone is wearing as any bearing on what they do (or don’t do) in the bedroom. I love how she is self-aware enough to recognize that online survivor communities weren’t helping her, and that she deserved time to process and grieve and go through a range of horrible emotions before declaring that she felt she had “survived.” I love that she feels entitled to decide when she will have sex and with whom, and that she is happy and secure in those choices. I love that Jia, the interviewer, asks amazing questions and is thoroughly respectful without pulling punches, and I love that she chooses interview subjects who aren’t caricatures or stereotypes and who are wonderful and fascinating and generous with their experiences and beliefs.
I still wish we all had a broader vocabulary with which to have these discussions.
Similar Posts:
- The Problem With Purity by Jill August 24, 2012
- The Line: A New Doc About Consent by Audacia Ray August 6, 2009
- Interview: Heather Corinna of Scarleteen by Chally August 2, 2010
- Liberal, Sex-Positive Sex Education: What’s Missing by Clarisse Thorn September 22, 2011
- Dealbreaker indeed. by Jill August 8, 2011
Yes, going from “no sexual experience” to “traditional PIV sex” is just about the worst idea ever. I had my first kiss on the same night that I had all of my first sexual experiences, not all of which were consensual. But I think consent/lack of consent blurs very rapidly when you’re living in a world of constrained female imagination. I say imagination rather than choices because I was so morally ignorant of the different ways one could be in a relationship or could be sexually that it went far beyond imagining non-PIV sex — it was more like, I didn’t know how to imagine myself as anything other than the dutiful virginal straight-A student, or else… the compliant, good-giving-game girlfriend who does whatever she can to be amenable to the new boyfriend. And of course none of this worked for me, and I ended up enraged and stifled and malicious, until the relationship fell apart.
And unfortunately I don’t think you can simply reason your way out of sexual conditioning with FEMINISM. I still don’t know quite what I want out of my sexual and romantic life, because I have yet to experience anything that wasn’t tinged subtly (or overtly colored) by sexism and coercion.
I simply cannot believe this discussion is still being had in the 21st century. I cannot believe that Bronze Age myths still warp the minds and sexual pleasures of so many people in this world.
There is no God but, even if there was, how can an immortal, perfect being give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what you do with your genitalia?! Really.
And, while we’re on the subject, why did an all-loving God create humanity with sexual desire and then command humanity to deny that desire until marriage because it was a sin? That’s like stabbing someone and then commanding them to not bleed.
Your body is you. And you can do what you please with your life. Period. You’re probably well-advised to discover how your body actually works to get full advantage (ie. your body can’t actually stop you from getting pregnant through rape) but that’s all the advice I will give to my daughter.
Actually, I’d argue that a perfect divine being would give a flying fuck about what we do with our genitalia, but pretty much only to the same extent any decent person of any species should care, and that is only in the same way as we should give a fuck about what anyone does with any of their other bodyparts. Namely: don’t use ‘em to harm other people.
Well, if we’re going to take the perfect, divine being to it’s natural conclusion, we’d have to acknowledge that it wouldn’t allow evil to exist in creation ergo, no harming others with your genitalia (or anything else, for that matter). That’s the thing with a perfect, divine being; it’s not compatible with the universe we live in.
Any decent person in society should certainly care, but they aren’t perfect or divine; just decent.
Well, yeah, there’s the whole problem of evil. You’re preaching to the atheist choir. :)
My point was more: if a divine being is concerned with condemning premarital sex for people other than xeself because Magic Special Purity, xe is not only failing to be perfect or omnigood or whatever in a big way, but in fact xe’s morals are questionable at best because xe is not meeting the minimal standard for decent person.
Yes. I see what you’re saying. And I agree. Nothing to see here…
This has always been my takeaway as well. I mean, I respect Maya for sticking to her beliefs and for struggling through her ideals. But I just don’t understand people who believe in a god who does so much stuff that would appear, frankly, cruel and manipulative.
Even if you put aside the fact that a man raped her under the guise of “Humans have free will, and god’s not responsible for their evil,” you’re still left with an ostensibly divine moral code which gives you something good on the one hand and then tells you to act on it is bad.
tl;dr pretty much any god you can feasibly believe in is a sadist or an uncaring asshole.
You’re making really arrogant assumptions about what she or anyone else must believe in order to be Christian. You don’t have to believe in a man in the sky who pulls all the strings to be a person of faith. Read your Tillich if you want to rant about Christianity, and please lay off the strawmen.
You owe her the respect of responding what she has to say rather than going off on a red herring about what you’ve decided she believes. Way to kick some scarecrow ass.
THANK YOU. There is plenty to criticize about religion(s)–and I say this as a theist and a practicing Jew–but please, try to learn something about what you’re criticizing first. Taking the time to find out about how different believers actually conceive of and experience their religiosity, and reading some major theorists of a given tradition are sort of the basic bars to clear here.
Surely, what someone believes in order to be a Christian is laid out in the Nicene Creed. Are you suggesting that a perfect God is not a founding precept of the Abrahamic faiths and the belief in the divinity of Christ is not imperative to the Christian faiths?
Because, I think you’ll find that those 2 concepts are fundamental and imperative to all Christian sects.
Also, it’s Maya who says she’s staying a virgin because her faith tells her that’s what God wants. No one is projecting that belief on her. Perhaps you are a Christian and don’t believe that but that’s God for you – everything to everyone and still nothing at all.
Is this something new, by the way? Referring to a strawman argument as a scarecrow?
@ SamBarge, religions are what people actually believe (and the beliefs they act on), not what’s on a piece of paper. Most versions of Christianity I’ve met freely pick and choose which bits of their religious documents they adhere to strongly, which casually, and which they disregard altogether. There’s a certain level of cognitive dissonance people need to be able to tolerate to have faith. People who are into that kind of thing tell me they’re called “Mysteries.”
Can you show us where DP has done any such thing? All I’ve seen DP do is assume that she believes in God, which sounds completely reasonable.
@Alexandra – “Christianity” has a definition. Ignoring the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make it go away.
, it’s Maya who says she’s staying a virgin because her faith tells her that’s what God wants. No one is projecting that belief on her.
Actually, you’re projecting that belief on her, because that’s not what she says at all. She’s asked if “that was a personal desire, not a faith obligation?” and responds with yes, and I don’t know how you get from “My gratitude and love for myself, my body, and how God made me makes me want to keep full knowledge of it for someone who really loves me and who I really love” to “she’s doing it because that’s what God wants.” It’s pretty clear that it’s what Maya wants for herself, and denying her that agency and nuance of her (very personal) decision is, at best, disingenuous.
There’s also the minor details that the Nicene Creed says nothing about a “perfect” God, that there’s groups of Christians that don’t follow everything in the Nicene Creed (and that it’s not gone without controversy over the years), and that your definition of a perfect divine being doesn’t match up with the ideas about God that Christians have had for centuries. And since we’re talking about the Nicene Creed–if nobody is capable of doing anything bad, why is Jesus coming back again “to judge the living and the dead”? Kind of pointless if nobody’s able to do anything wrong, ain’t it?
(I also don’t understand how anyone can look at a religion that includes the book of Job as one of its canonical texts and then question how they can believe in a God that lets horrible stuff happen, but hey.)
Haha, WHAT? Here are ‘assumptions’ making up my ‘strawman’ of any given person’s Christian belief:
a) They believe in an omniscient, omnipotent God (trinity or unified, whichever).
b) They believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
c) (Mostly) they believe in resurrection and miracles.
That’s it. The rest could feasibly be called window dressing but that’s kind of the baseline for all Christians.
If you believe in an omnipotent creator, then that creator has the ability at all times to stop terrible things from happening. We can put aside whether it caused them (the ‘watchmaker’ theory of divinity’) but if you get attacked, a god could theoretically at any moment strike your attacker dead or vanish him or turn him into a newt.
If it doesn’t…that god is either a sadist or just a neglectful asshole towards his creations. Similarly, if god gave us all genitals and sex and all the pleasure that comes with it, then told us to arbitrarily save it for one person, that’s just annoying and petty and dumb.
LOL, by your logic the central debate of the Protestant Reformation is just “window dressing.”
(Also, what all Christians believe isn’t all that relevant when you’re talking about one specific individual who is pretty clear on the relevant parts of her faith. And it doesn’t take much effort to find that those “window dressing” differences between denominations are, actually, kind of important.)
It’s abundantly clear you’re commenting from a place of profound ignorance and oversimplification of an issue that pretty much every religion (not just Christianity) has struggled/worked with for centuries. But I guess someone’s deeply personal life choice and discussion of her sexual assault is a great excuse for Monty Python references! If you want to talk about “annoying and petty and dumb” I’d start there.
In retrospect, I wish I’d started having sex younger. So, the notion that we don’t exist—often pushed by the abstinence-only crew—is a lie. We put way too much importance on this one specific act and front load it with so much significance. And in the end, it was like, “Oh, this is fun, but really it’s not like THAT big a deal.”
Thanks for some very thought-provoking reactions–I very much identify with a great deal of what you have said. One point you made prompts me to join the conversation:
“I worry that emphasizing the right to choose to wait until marriage frames the conversation in a way that is fundamentally unhelpful. We all do choose to wait for sex until X moment. We all of course have a right to choose to make marriage the X. But what does it mean when we decide that consent to sex is best given in relation to a ritual or a particular day rather than in relation to a mental space or a feeling?”
If I am not alone in my experience, then many of us have, consciously or unconsciously pinned our (mis)understanding of our own readiness on arbitrary milestones (a few of which you highlight in the following paragraph), but it strikes me that perhaps a different argument can be made for marriage as a milestone. Maybe it is not arbitrary, or not as arbitrary as other milestones. Especially in this age, at least for some members of our culture (though admittedly not all), marriage can signify an autonomous decision to enter into a new stage of chosen intimacy with another person and a willingness to unite with that person on multiple levels. If we reach this step of joining ourselves to another, whatever that means to each of us, but at minimum a new stage of emotional intimacy, it could be a very meaningful step towards sexual intimacy as well. Leaving aside the questions you raise around pace–the myth of the wedding night and the absence of accomodation in the way we talk about marriage for slowly moving through different kinds of physical intimacy rather than zero to sixty immediately after tying the knot are still very valid points and worthy of exploration–choosing to wait for sexual intimacy until marriage could, for many, be a very natural and meaningful signifier of readiness, even if it is also, when touted as a moral value, very troublingly entangled with historical notions of misogyny and difficult to separate from that psychologically.
Sexual compatibility, though, is a hard thing to estimate before having been intimate with your chosen partner, particularly if neither partner has been sexually active at all before!
I get what you’re saying about the advantage of not being sexually intimate until you’ve consciously acknowledged the depth of your trust and affection for your partner, but marriage is more than that – it is a knot, a securing of one person to another, and even in places with no-fault divorce, unravelling that knot is a difficult, costly, time-consuming, emotionally exhausting thing to do… so people may end up choosing to have their sexual needs unmet rather than dissolve a relationship they committed to before friends, family, community (and if you believe in that sort of thing, the eyes of God.)
Talula, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but going back to what you quoted:
Weddings and marriages take a while to plan. Not for everyone, but typically, someone who imbues marriage with such significance/ importance isn’t going to do the Vegas thing, they’re going to plan an event and invite people that are important to them to witness this joining together. So when you get engaged or make the decision to get married, that’s when you’ve made the decision to enter into a new stage of intimacy with that person. And then you . . . wait. Sometimes for half a year or more, you wait to have sex. Why? Isn’t getting engaged the signifier of readiness? Isn’t that when you’ve decided that you’re ready?
Huh. I thought I had pretty decent sex ed up here in the Great White North, but this is still a lot of stuff I hadn’t thought of before, especially that a long build up to PIV sex is probably a good thing and perfectly normal. Thanks!
“I was lucky, in a lot of ways, that I felt very entitled to my own boundaries as well as to my own self-exploration. I was probably older than “average” when I was doing most of these things, because I understood sexual behavior to be something that wasn’t just for boys but was for me as well. So if I felt safe and happy and comfortable and prepared, I proceeded. If I didn’t, I stopped. That frankly resulted in a lot of stopping until I was well into college. ”
Without making this an interview of Jill, I would be curious to know who/what/how this very positive attitude developed. I can’t say that I knew many women in HS or even college that felt this healthy about their own sexuality and approaching sex on strictly their own terms. Was this the influence of your parents? Siblings? Friends?
I have a son, and I carry a lot of my own personal baggage, but I believe that my parents provided me with a fairly positive blueprint that I intend to rely on when his time comes. On the other hand, if I have a daughter some day, I worry that my own personal biases and double-standards will somehow inhibit her from developing such a positive attitude towards something I view as one of life’s great joys.
Personally I was both self-confident and comfortable with my sexuality due to my parents being vocally feminist and raising me with an understanding of not owing anyone anything and that sex is a fun thing you do when YOU want to. Also body positivity and deliberately normalising the word “vagina”.
I never really ran into much pushback culturally, but I am from NZ and we are notoriously not invested in virginity, comparatively.
That said, I was also raised to say FUCK YOU to “the man”, and not be a follower, and for lots of reasons got on better with my teachers than peers in school (I had a small group of friends) and would quickly cut my losses if people tried fucking with me.
Aaaaand when I was 16, I hadn’t kissed any boys yet though I had kissed my female friends, and most of my peers started “hooking up” at 13 or 14. I got really drunk at a friend’s party and ended up alternating between kissing two different guys throughout the night – behaviour that got me branded a “slut” by random people I didn’t know. That pretty much solidified to me that people are morons and if *that* counts as sluthood I might as well do whatever I liked. I’m contrary like that.
So I do think it’s possible to shape your children in that direction but of course they’re all individuals and I’d be terrified to raise a girl (one of many reasons I do not want my own children.)
Maybe everyone could focus a little more on emphasizing with the rape victim rather than attacking her religious beliefs or talking about how they wish they’d actually had sex sooner? Like, a little more respect?
I loved this story. While I’m an atheist, I’m so happy that there is someone like Maya who can be a model to those who decide to wait. Here is a fairly sex and body positive perspective on abstinence, one that manages to deal with the fact that sexual assault might impact sexual experience, for all women, whether or not they choose to abstain from sex. In many ways virginity is a construct, but it’s still real. And It was interesting to hear a religious person reconcile that.
I don’t think anyone has attacked her religious beliefs or expressed a lack of empathy. You can empathize with someone and respect them and their right to hold their own beliefs, but still think that some of those beliefs are problematic.
The way we talk about sexual experiences is very hierarchical with PIV sex being at the top. In a more healthy world, each consensual sexual experience would be what it is, and not necessarily a point on the road to PIV sex or orgasm.
If I can take the liberty to use a quote from Jill’s piece as an example of how engrained this is.
I’m not picking on Jill– most of us frame sex this way. I am wondering why we frame sex or a series of sexual experiences as teleological or progressing somewhere. It would be more useful to look at sexual experiences in a non linear way to foster broader understanding of our own sexualities– and those of our partners’.
Bingo. Even for hetero couples/pairings, the idea that all is leading to the big PIV moment (everything else being “foreplay,” or “waiting”) has the stamp of patriarchy all over it.
Also:
isn’t true for a lot of people, which just adds another level of pain to the lack of autonomy around sexuality.
I really liked this as a piece of writing, fwiw. Not much to add, but it was interesting to see what something a little more ‘drafty’ from you looks like.
(yes, I’m annoyingly meta. I can’t turn it off.)
Thanks Chava, I appreciate it! I am re-reading it and cringing at how scattered it is, so that’s nice to hear.
“Not to get too crass here, but there aren’t the years of heavy petting and handjobs and non-penetrative naked time that accustom you to how your body works….There’s just the expectation of “yes, all of it, right now.” Zero to 60.”
You don’t need to practice with other people beforehand to have nice sex on your wedding night. And I doubt that your spouse will expect you do anal the very first time you have sex, so there is no reason that you need to practice that beforehand. I would also suspect that considering your spouse expects to have a lifetime to get it right, they aren’t going to angry with you for no going from Zero to 60 on your wedding night. I would also suspect that a person who is waiting to have sex until their wedding night does put as much emphasis on the importance of having good sex as someone who feels that they should have been spending years perfecting their sexual technique with various partners in anticipation of having sex on their wedding night.
Waiting until marriage to have sex can be a good decision, as long as that is what a person wants to do.
Yeah, but there are parts of this country (and many parts of the world) where there is still this deeply ingrained idea that you’re not really “married” until you’ve had sex and displayed the metaphorical (or literal) bloody sheet before your community. While I think ideally people who choose to wait until marriage wouldn’t feel all this pressure to plunge directly into penetrative sex on their wedding nights, the people and communities that put the most emphasis on abstinence til marriage are also the communities that put the most emphasis on procreation – and thus PIV sex – as the reason you get married in the first place.
I wasn’t talking about anal. I was talking about penetrative vaginal sex. And I do believe that it’s not a good idea to go from never having had anyone touch you sexually to vaginal sex in one night.
Your spouse may not be angry with you if you don’t have sex on your wedding night, but certainly sex is the expectation.
No disrespect, but I feel like this misses the point. The point is that sexual exploration helps many individuals become comfortable with themselves and their own bodies. Its not about “perfecting sexual technique” because, everyone wants different things in a sexual relationship. Just because you have awesome sex with one person doesn’t mean those same things are going to result in awesome sex with the next person. Its an intimate relationship between two people. So its not about technique, IMHO, its about becoming comfortable with your own body and exploring the body of another person. Can you all of a sudden become comfortable with sharing your body with a person AND allowing them to penetrate you (ugh, this phrase!) all in one night? That’s a lot to ask.
And, as Jill said,
Yes. This. Because I know someone who told me about her experience and she said it took her about a year to actually want to have sex with her husband because she had such strong feelings of sex = evil, dirty, sinful that it was difficult to turn those feelings off. She didn’t know she was going to feel that way, but it was really hard for her to flip the switch once she had gotten married. I’m sure that actually happens a lot and people just don’t have the space to talk about it. It can feel embarrassing to wait and expect it to be this wonderful, awesome experience and then to worry that a) something is wrong with you; b) you and your husband will never have good sex; and c) maybe you are doing something physically wrong and you don’t even know it. And how hard must it be to discuss that with someone? Sex being something new and the marriage just begun, all those teachings about sex being private and sacred swirling around in your head…that kind of creates a space for isolation.
I also think there is this idea that everyone can have great sex together if they just work at it…and maybe this is just me…but I really don’t think that is true.
I think the idea of “sexual trajectory” is one that really doesn’t get addressed enough. I grew up in a conservative evangelical environment and the attitude was very much one of “you can maybe kiss before you’re married, but be careful you don’t kiss while laying down or kiss for too long or kiss too passionately because you might ‘go too far’, but it’s probably better if you don’t kiss. actually, it’s so much more romantic to not kiss anyone until your wedding day, right? once you’re married you can totally figure the rest out!”
but it didn’t work that way for a lot of my friends, who ended up having really shitty marriage troubles because they and their spouses couldn’t get over feeling like being sexually active, even within marriage, was sinful. it was really tragic.
a college friend of mine got married this summer and she and her now-husband had just hugged up until their wedding day, where they would have their first kiss. I was chatting to the MOH on the day and she was expressing some horror at the fact that, when she asked K what she was most looking forward to about the wedding night, K said “eating Teddy Grahams and then snuggling while we fall asleep”, and nothing about sex, and the MOH was upset she couldn’t convince her that “You need to at least TRY since you finally can!” and I tried to explain that if you haven’t even kissed someone, going from a kiss to a whole boatload of things you have never done or maybe even never let yourself think about, could be pretty overwhelming.
even in a lot of shows and movies, characters seem to be either kissing, or having intercourse. the big dilemma does seem to be whether or not it’s “time” to have sex even though the couples in question don’t seem to have done much else than kiss.
For me it was 11 years between my first kiss and my “first time”, and in those 11 years I learned a lot about myself and my body and my needs/desires/dislikes. my evangelical upbringing kind of rang in my ear as I was growing up that “sex is for marriage”, though I enjoyed other sexual activities aside from intercourse during my late teens and early twenties, and The Purity Myth changed my life in freeing me from the virginity bullshit, that not only did it not matter whether I was or wasn’t, but virginity wasn’t even a thing, and I could stop holding on to something I didn’t really believe. I remember this time, just over a year ago now, when a girlfriend I hadn’t seen in a while asked if I’d “done it” and asked why when I said no, and instead of saying “Well, I’m not married” I said “I guess I just haven’t yet” and that was the end of the conversation. a couple months later I did take that “step”, though it didn’t really feel all that momentous or earth shattering, and it mostly was just like adding something new to my repertoire? if that makes sense? I didn’t feel changed or anything, but I also didn’t feel ashamed or sinful.
also this is not my blog! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to go on so long. this article just really spoke to me! thank you.
Yes! I totally agree with you re: the difficulty of overcoming the teachings of sex = sinful even during marriage.
it really is sad. a couple of close friends of mine (we did our undergrads at the same conservative college) who considered themselves very progressive and feminist nearly divorced before their first anniversary because they were both experiencing such oppressive inner reactions to the fact that they now “could” be sexually active. despite the fact that they loved each other and were very compatible and best friends, the sudden addition of “sexual freedom” to their relationship was almost too much all at once. she and I were talking once and she said, not that she wished they had begun the “journey” earlier, but that someone would have even mention that that could even possibly be a thing to prepare for. evangelical culture has a lot of problems, and selling the lie that “post-marital sex is amazing and magical and you should definitely wait and it will bring you closer together and it will be the best sex of all time” is one of them.
… I just realized that sounded like a reverse just-so story. when I was growing up I heard a lot of “And then she had sex, and then she dropped out of school and was poor for the rest of her life and no one ever loved her” stories… which is so not what I meant. just that I think instilling a “don’t have sex” mentality in people, especially when you link it to personal sexuality and personal well-being, can backfire in really really awful ways when that person is then left to unpack/get rid of all of that on their own at the start of a marriage/partnership.
Although I grew up in conservative evangelical culture, I was never very good at “purity”. While I did “wait” for marriage, the only thing we hadn’t really done was p-in-v, which was what I, perhaps somewhat self-servingly, chose to see as THE sex, so my sexual trajectory was similar to what you described and I don’t regret it at all. What I DO regret is that this made me a “slut” in the eyes of my parents (and they didn’t know the half of it!) and many of my church and school friends and acquaintances. It also meant that when I was raped in college, I blamed myself (I led him on, I was in a compromising situation…all the standard excuses) and didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell my parents until five years after the fact, even though I was living with them at the time of the assault. And even though they said they understood and felt terrible that I went through all that alone, it didn’t change their general philosophy at all. In fact, they pretty much outright forbid my wearing a wedding dress that was colored rather than white because my sexual purity might be called into question, which was a really uncomfortable conversation. This also made me hyper-aware that when we left our reception for the hotel that every sweet former Sunday School teacher, grandparent, and babysitting client knew that we were leaving to have sex. Worst. performance. anxiety. EVER! Even though I’m still a Christian, I think this system is pretty messed up.
I am so sorry for your trauma and that you had to deal on your own!
I’m with you that the system is messed up. it sounds like we had really similar growing-up experiences, and I think that culture produces a lot of people with some really unfortunate hang-ups and ideas about sexuality! Like you, my parents didn’t know the half of my sexual activity, but I did get caught in a couple of “compromising” situations a couple of times, and both times my mom told me quite tearfully that my dad was having a really hard time dealing with it since “a girl’s sexual expression is a reflection of her relationship with her father”. at the time I thought that was true, and now when I think back on those conversations I’m really skeeved out, especially because I’m pretty sure my dad never thought that and my mom was just trying to communicate that she thought I was being all wanton or something. (also now I really want to ask her if she thinks her and my dad’s sex life is a reflection of her relationship with her father…)
and evangelical weddings are the weirdest animal, right? it’s like “now everyone make as many jokes as possible about how you guys can’t wait to get out of here because you’re allowed to have sex now and man isn’t that a relief!”
if you don’t mind my asking, and if you do I am sorry and you don’t have to answer! because you waited (at least for the one “pinnacle act”, barf), was it difficult to get over sex feeling like a sin, even though being married meant it was finally “okay”?
Um, ew, that mother-daughter conversation sounds super icky! I sometimes think parents in general, and evangelical parents in particular are so freaked out and not ready for their babies to have hormones that they just say whatever manipulative crap comes into their heads that they think will be effective. I know they do it out of love, but, geez! They don’t really think it through sometimes. I have two littles of my own now, and I hope I can avoid some of the crazy when they hit the teenage years.
To answer your question, yes, it took some time. It was actually much harder for my husband than for me (I’ve already mentioned how shame was not a great deterrant for me!), which made me feel kind of like a freak. We also had some major snafus on our honeymoon (yep, totally got my period- I hadn’t really figured out the timing on birth control yet. Hope this isn’t TMI!) and I just, in general, have a higher sex drive than my husband. This stuff was not covered in our church-mandated pre-marital counseling or in the Christian how-to sex manual my parents gave my husband and I a few months before the wedding- another super-awkward conversation! (Fun fact: The book was “The Act of Marriage” by Tim and Beverly LeHaye. Yep, I totally learned about sex from the Left Behind guy!)
So, yes, lots of problems that have had long-term effects. I know they don’t screw everyone up- or at least don’t seem to, but we can’t be the only few out here with these issues. Maybe we’re the only ones who feel we can talk about it!
oh my goodness I know that book! my ex-fiance and I had to read it for our premarital counselling. Tim LaHaye is a ridiculous man.
I think you’re right that there aren’t a lot of “sex resources” that fall under the evangelical banner. the premarital books that I’ve read tend to be pretty vague with lots of words like “beauty” and “mystery” and about how (thanks James Dobson) the wife will have to sometimes have sex when she doesn’t want to in order to give her husband the love he “needs as a man”. and then after? I guess there’s that Driscoll book (*throws up in corner*)? I think evangelical culture tends to see sex as A Very Serious Thing That Is Beautiful And Special, so there isn’t a lot of room for discussing your sex life with people who aren’t your spouse? maybe that’s just my experience… but I have found that my married Christian friends are completely tight-lipped about their sex lives. which is fine! but it’s like… I don’t know… it’s like they don’t think they’re allowed to have funny sex stories or anything (like the time I accidentally kneed my Mr. in the face because I didn’t know he was going to crouch down to take off my pants. it was horrible but he still thinks it’s hilarious)? and no one HAS to take part in conversations like that if they don’t want to, obviously, but it’s like we take that “secrecy” about sex and bring it into marriage and it’s still this hush-hush thing, and then you have people like you and me who are going “hey, maybe we need to approach this differently”… but we’re kind of drowned out by the Mark Driscolls who are like “I am Totally Sex-Postive! Except Actually Not!”
murky waters, anyway…
“As an example: I know a woman who is very religious. Before getting married, I think she had kissed a man or two, but had done nothing else sexual. And by the rules of her religion, she was supposed to have sex for the first time on the night she was married (fairly standard religious fare, I think). I can’t help but wonder how that wedding night must have been. Because for me? Going from zero to sex would have been really, really traumatic. My own sexual trajectory was years long. I had my first kiss in eighth grade, and I didn’t have sex for almost a decade after that. And between that first kiss and my first PIV sexual experience, there was a lot of in between — of touching and getting to know other peoples’ bodies and sexual-but-not-sex behavior and all kinds of other normal developmental stuff. I was lucky, in a lot of ways, that I felt very entitled to my own boundaries as well as to my own self-exploration. I was probably older than “average” when I was doing most of these things, because I understood sexual behavior to be something that wasn’t just for boys but was for me as well. So if I felt safe and happy and comfortable and prepared, I proceeded. If I didn’t, I stopped. That frankly resulted in a lot of stopping until I was well into college. “
wow-
this is the most well articulated example i’ve read of the reason people should be able to slowly sexually develop-
because its the most HEALTHY.
(marriage/sex/bed/no experience=trauma?)
very likely, unless the partner is incredibly sensitive.
and even then,who knows?
but that idea(chastity) isn’t about the woman,
it’s about “possession”of the woman.
*shudder*
Even in abstinence-obsessed christian cultures, women are faced with a balancing act. On the one hand, their status in the community is tied to their reputation for “purity,” but on the other hand, their status is also tied to their ability to marry well. If they follow the “purity” teachings to the letter, they will not display enough sexuality to catch a man. They need to break the rules by expressing their sexuality, but only enough to attract a man and not so much they lose their standing in their community. What’s worse, these women are taught to be submissive, but they also need to constantly be on guard against the threat of their boyfriend raping them, because even if she does not consent, a survivor will be seen as impure. This system forces women to deploy their sexuality only in context of her boyfriend’s interest and her reputation in the community with no regard for her personal desires. It results in increased suffering for women in cognitive dissonance, STIs and rape.
I like the idea of sex as a consensual, cooperative activity that has the goal of giving pleasure to everyone involved. For young adults to grow up with this view of sex, however, will require more than just good sex ed classes. It will require a society where children are raised with positive reinforcement instead a negative, with a respect for their right to explore their feelings, express themselves and set personal boundaries and with a celebration of joy and pleasure, both sexual and non-sexual. And maybe a replacement of the capitalist kyriarchy with a non-hierarchical gift economy.
I came across an interesting article just recently that points out the problems that can arise in the opposite extreme from controlling, patriarchal culture:
http://www.salon.com/2001/08/22/hippie_parents/
I’m getting the impression that any culture based on an ideological rejection of the broader culture can run into problems, because these cultures often don’t have enough practical experience to determine how their ideology will play out in real life. Plus they draw people prone to extremism, and this tendency to extremism limits the ability to critically analyze what is happening. If you know mainstream culture is broken, you may be more likely to uncritically accept an alternative, and if it starts producing bad results, you may be inhibited from questioning it, because putting the breaks on the idea means you’re not as committed to the ideology of the group.
How do we as a society instill a respect for personal boundaries and celebrate sex while also addressing risks and status competition, without simultaneously instilling fear or shame or a sense of not being normal? Sex can be great, but there are risks – predators, STIs, pregnancy… And everyone is different – asexuality, Kinsey scale, emotional readiness by age – so that any hard lines will make someone feel left out, e.g., enthusiastic consent doesn’t quite fit for an asexual person who has no mental sexual feelings but enjoys making hir sexual partner feel good. Maybe the best societal response is not an ideology but a piecemeal, evolving system that learns from experience what works (produces lower STI rates, mental health problems, etc.) and encourages being in tune with one’s own feelings and boundaries as valid while respecting other’s feelings and boundaries even if they are different.
FWIW, Jill, it’s heartening to read an experience of healthy sexual development, attitudes, and experiences like yours. As a later bloomer, I too did a lot of the things you talk about before THE BIG PIV, but – laughably, now – I still maintained that I had never “had sex.”
another good book on that early bit – Not under my roof. compares how american parents and norwegian parents respond to their kids having sex.
My wife was brought up in a Baptist home, Her parents were strict teetotallers and sex talk was frowned upon. She had endremetriosis when a teenager and had several operations before I met her. Both of these facts made her awkward about her body, both the mental conditioning and the fact she had endured and hated people fishing about in her body. In that sort of home, a gynaecological condition isn’t spoken of as if it were say, appendicitis.
It wasn’t till we got engaged that we even started our own personal discovery and even after we got married it was like having 3 people in bed, her, me and Jesus.
I agree entirely with Jill’s points.
I also wonder why Maya was surprised that young men did not want to pursue things when they found out she was saving herself. Her rape was awful, but perhaps her religious attitudes led to her not wanting to prosecute, thereby letting a rapist carry on. I don’t know, prosecuting a rape must be like being violated all over again. It often is in the uk, where I live. But it is these religious attitudes that have been largely responsible for society’s sexual hangups and for being a ape victim being seen as more shameful than being a robbery victim.
I doubt that men not being interested in going out with her had anything to do with her being a survivor. For starters, because that’s much less likely to come up in conversation until you are already in a relationship with someone.
No, most likely men weren’t interested because they wanted a relationship with sex and weren’t prepared to either wait til marriage or commit to a relationship that may lead to marriage. I’m exactly the same; I decided a while back that I wouldn’t date anyone ‘saving themselves’ because sex is an important part of a relationship to me and a way of bonding as a couple.
I don’t know if your point about Maya being considered undesirable because she wasn’t having sex and your point about why she didn’t report her rape are supposed to be linked, because that sounds really victim-blamey. Survivors have all kinds of reasons not to report their rapes and guilting them about it is just another form of victimisation.
I don’t think my post was unclear in the slightest.
I am not surprised young men did not want to pursue a relationship in which there would probably be no sex. Only one would marry her.
As for victim- blaming, I am saying her religiosity led to a deep sense of shame and probably had something to do with Maya’s not prosecuting the rapist. As Jill’s post is about the damage religion can do to a healthy view of sex and relationships, I don’t think I was saying anything remotely controversial. I suggest you re-read what i said rather than what you seem to think I said. Rape victims are frequently seen as somehow damaged goods. Religion is IMO at least partly responsible for this. The religious community as a whole lays considerable stress on purity, (Muslim and Evangelical Christians are very similar here) and in Pakistan, rape victims have been forced to marry their rapists.
Some of your GOP politicians would be at home with the Taliban.
Ok well it’s definitely not ‘my’ GOP since I’m not from the States.
And there as many reasons for why rape victims didn’t prosecute as there are rape victims. Religion may have influenced her decision not to press charges; it’s clearly a big influence in her life. But there’s nothing wrong with that and nothing wrong with her decision.
Survivors cop enough shit without more people criticising every decision they make, so please knock it off. Her religion may have led to feelings of shame or it could have helped her healing process, we don’t know. I know survivors who have found all kinds of support and healing within religious structures.
I feel like you’re using this woman’s trauma as a point scoring exercise for atheists and I don’t like it at all.
Jill,
Thanks for this post! I’m going to bookmark it and send it to people who ask me why I don’t think saving the first kiss for the wedding day is a good idea.
I think you missed (though it’s not a detriment to the piece!) how, particularly in Christian culture, the emphasis on female virginity and purity is praise for passivity. I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was 25, and thus never had the opportunity to do all the “terrible” premarital nookie I’d been warned against. And yet, when I said I was a virgin at 24/25, I got praised for it – “Kudos to you for bucking the norms! You’re someone our daughters can look up to!” Because I was mid-20s and a virgin, not because I’d gotten a BA and an MA by the time I was 24. The praise was because I’d been passive in this one area, not because I’d been active and smart in others.
There’s a lot of praising of passivity in women in the Christian realm. If you ever feel like a horror story, read Joshua Harris’ “Sex Is Not the Problem” – it’s current Christian culture’s attempt at “healthy” sexual ethics, and it’s gender essentialist hogwash. But I draw attention to it because in the chapter on how men and women lust (because we lust differently, apparently), Harris talks about how women are lusting after seductive power over men, not necessarily physical pleasure. And that exemplifies the misogynistic problem with purity culture – Harris can’t even admit that women have a sex drive that is based in physical pleasure. Instead, lust – because lust is a “disorder” and “sin” – in women is because we seek to leave our rightful place as passive recipients of the sexual act. We must lust because we want power, not because orgasms feel really great.
There’s a lot more to say, but I’ve already talked too much. I’m currently working on a book on this topic, so I always end up with a ton of thoughts – but, Jill, this post and the interview will be greatly useful for me in my project. Thanks!
Dianna, your work sounds fascinating!! I haven’t read “Sex Is Not The Problem” but I’ve definitely read Harris’ other works and they’re just as problematic as this one sounds. do you keep a blog or anything? I’d love to read what you’ve written on this topic if it’s available!
“Many of us are having wonderful, pleasure-affirming, outside-of-the-PIV-only-framework sex, but we don’t have the words to talk about it. ”
I think women should be free to be bi sexual and feel good about it. I think it’s perfectly natural. That is what the sexual revolution was all about. If someone chooses to save her virginity until traditional marriage fine, but that does not work for everyone.