Edel Coffey: Is there ever a right time to lose your virginity?

Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

Is there ever a right time to lose your virginity? I found myself wondering this as, amongst the many revelations in actress Rebel Wilson’s memoir, was the fact that she didn’t lose her virginity until she was in her thirties. The revelation caused quite a stir.

It’s a long time since virginity was something I thought about but the Wilson story did get me wondering about how we think about virginity nowadays.

When I was growing up, there was still very much a sense of virginity being connected to moral virtue, which I think was a hangover from my mother’s generation, whose experience of sex could involve difficult-to-procure contraception, unwanted pregnancies, Magdalene laundries, and the fear of shame brought on families. Not quite what you’d call a ‘sex-positive’ era. 

I remember hearing Madonna’s song ‘Like A Virgin’ on the radio and asking my mother what a virgin was. She told me it was a flower and that was the end of the conversation. 

In fairness to her, I was very young at the time but I still remember thinking the answer made no sense. 

But this was Ireland in the 1980s, where sex and its attendant vocabulary had to be approached sidelong, much like how we approach the viewing of an eclipse — put your protective glasses on and don’t whatever you do for God’s sake look at it directly or your retinas (soul) will be burned.

I was always a big music lover and remember being intrigued by the fact that the American rock musician Juliana Hatfield was a virgin in her 20s. 

However, the interest in her virginity as reported by male-run music newspapers and magazines always felt weirdly prurient. 

The more I thought about it, the more I found I could think of lots of weird and creepy examples of society being obsessed with women’s virginity and I didn’t have to look too far back into the mists of time to find examples either. 

Remember the virginal Britney Spears who was marketed as a wholesome, traditional girl who believed in waiting until marriage to have sex? That image led to a grotesque interest in her sex life along with an actual monetary offer of £7.5m from a businessman in the year 2000 who said he was willing to pay this price to relieve the young Britney of her virginity. 

Spears rejected the offer and later revealed in her memoir that she had actually lost her virginity at the age of 14.

Juliana Hatfield later spoke about her choice to wait as an empowering decision. “I was proud of the fact that I was still a virgin because it meant that I was a strong, independent female, and no one had pressured me into doing anything I wasn’t ready to do yet. I waited until I was damn ready, when I was 26, actually,” she told Nylon magazine.

A copy of Rebel Rising by Rebel Wilson, the headline-making memoir.

I was thinking that it would be nice to hear more voices like hers and Wilson’s talking about the fact that one’s virginity doesn’t have to be offloaded by the time you’ve left college. 

Wilson spoke about feeling embarrassed and ashamed of being a virgin at the age of 35 but there’s a weird double standard around virginity — lose it too soon and you’re considered one of many unsavoury misogynistic terms, lose it too late and you’re a pathetic loser. 

The downside of this double standard is it puts pressure on people to lose their virginity instead of figuring out what the right time might be for them.

There’s probably never a right time to lose your virginity if you consider that the first time doing anything is probably going to involve a bit of trial and error. I suppose thinking of it in that sense might be a less pressurised way to approach it than expecting it to be a life-changing earth-
shattering experience.

Perhaps it can be a meaningful rite of passage without being the most perfect or the best or the most romantic. Ideally, of course, it would be all of those things but realistically for many people all it is, is their first experience.

We live in a very different sexual environment to the one that I grew up in but I hope things are better for young people nowadays. 

I think it’s great that you can go into any supermarket and buy contraceptives and a plethora of paraphernalia that might go some way to making a person’s first sexual experience a positive one.

Virginity, like sexuality, is completely personal and individual. Hopefully, Wilson’s revelation about her sex life might give pause for thought around how we respond to people’s virginity status but also might give people the space to decide when the time might be right for them. 

Whether you’re 14 or 40 when you lose your virginity or whether you remain a virgin for your whole life is nobody’s business but your own. 

And perhaps if we stopped focusing on it so furiously and attaching so much meaning to the age it needs to happen by, it might become a less pressurised experience for many.