Talking about first sex should not be virgin territory

The teen years are still the most likely time to lose our virginity, according to author Kate Monro.

FEW events are as highly anticipated as losing your virginity, and yet few are as frequently disastrous. People blithely assume they will know what to do and how to do it, and that it will be amazing. We rarely talk about losing our virginity. The traditional definition of ‘losing it’ — the insertion of the penis into the vagina — seems quaint. There are many ways to skin a cat, as Kate Monro, author of Losing It: How We Popped Our Cherry Over The Last 80 Years, learned.

The experiences of her 50 interviewees span 68 years, from 1940 to 2008. Edna, at 91 the oldest, was 25 in 1940: “I was frightened on my wedding night, and when I saw how he looked, I laughed. I’d never seen anything so funny.”

Monroe’s findings are straightforward. Apart from Edna and people with strong religious beliefs, hormones win over culture: the great majority of us lose our virginity in our teens.

Sex has been around a bit longer than the internet, yet, 50 years ago, you were as likely to start having sex in your teens as you are today, despite not having 24-hour access to online porn. But the influences of religion and pornography can indelibly mark how we begin our sexual lives.

The Church remotely controlled the private lives of generations, in Ireland, so that you didn’t do it until you were married.

The average age for the first penetrative sexual encounter seems to be 17; some are younger, some older, but adult virgins are not prominent in Monro’s findings. “The people who wait are not part of the culture who talk about it,” she says. “We often assume that virgins are lank-haired social outcasts… this is not the case,” she writes. “The virgins I encountered are articulate, attractive people who just happened to have never had sexual intercourse.”

Referring to Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History and Laura M Carpenter’s Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences, Monro says there are three types of virgin. “Gifters are often religious, see their virginity as a precious gift, and are often disappointed and tormented when the first occasion is not what they expected,” she says. “Pragmatists know the first time may not be great, but choose someone they like and trust, and get on with it. And the stigmatised are those who want to get rid of their virginity as soon as they can, who see it as a burden.”

But what defines the loss of virginity? “There can be a technical date, and an emotional date,” says Monro. “How do we know we are all talking about the same thing? You can have a sex life without penetration. It’s about pleasure rather than ticking boxes.”

One gay interviewee gave three ages — 13, 17, and 28 — as his sexual life developed from tentative intimacy to full sex. A disabled man had his first sexual encounter, with a sex worker, when he was 36, which he recounts with graphic bliss; that’s the great thing about this book — it is frank, open and non-judgemental, whether you’re a virgin or not. “I loved the different ways in which people defined their virginity loss,” says Monro. “To my mind, virginity should not be defined by anyone else but ourselves.”

The people who matter most have not yet lost theirs; the teens and young adults whose hormones will soon activate their desire. While previous generations contended with religious domination, this generation has hot and cold running pornography.

Here lies, perhaps, the most crucial aspect of Monro’s research — how to address and counteract the corrosive gulf between porn sex and real sex, which, if you’re 16 and have never done it, will not be obvious. Young adults — especially boys — are learning about real life sex via online porn, and can’t differentiate between the two; for example, they have never seen female pubic hair (which is often the least of their misconceptions). Thank goodness for sensible, up-front educators, like advertising guru, Cindy Gallop, and her brilliant, simple, explicit website, ‘Make Love Not Porn’.

“I’m not anti-porn, but I am worried about pornography becoming the ‘go to’ sex education for young people,” says Monro. “Losing virginity was hard enough for our generation — and those before us, of course — but I think this generation have such lowered expectations, in terms of connection. It’s like they don’t even think to expect intimacy from their encounters and I find that really sad.

“If I were a parent, I would be pointing my children in the direction of Cindy’s ‘Make Love Not Porn website’. I sometimes feel that the sexual futures of young people really are at stake here and we need to cast aside the embarrassment we feel about sex education.”

*Losing It, by Kate Monro, Icon Books, stg£8.99