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How not to have sex We shouldn't treat virginity as a burden

'It is not purity to blame, but sex positivity' (Credit: How to have sex/MUBI)

'It is not purity to blame, but sex positivity' (Credit: How to have sex/MUBI)


November 11, 2023   6 mins

The Zoomer Generation is notoriously uninterested in the risk-taking behaviours that were once a rite of passage to adulthood. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they’re indifferent to sex — not just to having it, but even, according to a new study, to seeing it depicted in books or films. One wonders how these young prudes will feel about How To Have Sex.

This film about a 16-year-old Brit desperately trying to lose her virginity on a girls’ holiday to Crete strikes me, in some ways, as an heir to America’s Raunch Renaissance of the late Nineties. Back then, movies such as Sex Drive, Can’t Hardly Wait, and American Pie brought us stories of the kinds of sexual obsession that can only be harboured by teenagers who haven’t actually done it yet. As in How to Have Sex, a central theme in these films was the notion of virginity as an albatross, a shameful burden of which you needed to rid yourself at the earliest opportunity. There was one key difference, though: the embarrassed, desperate virgins in those movies were always young men.

A girl was supposed to value her virginity, only allowing herself to be coaxed into bed with promises of love and commitment; if she had sex easily, let alone eagerly, she was invariably punished by the universe, be it with pregnancy, heartbreak, or worse. Watch a slasher film from this era, and note how often the slutty high schooler is the first to die. The message from pop culture was clear: girls were not supposed to have sex. But women, on the other hand, channelling their inner Carrie Bradshaw, were supposed to not just have sex, but have sex like men.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but this seems profoundly weird to me now: that the process whereby you were supposed to go from guarding your virginity with your life as a teen to having sex constantly and casually as a young adult was rarely depicted or discussed. How was a young lady meant to advance from never done it to elite level intercourse, just by moving to the city? How were you supposed to figure out what to do, what you liked, what you and a partner enjoyed doing together? Sex education was no help here — most programmes didn’t even mention the existence of the clitoris — but even the romcom industrial complex conspired to keep us all in the dark: all you would ever see was the couple tumbling into bed at night, and then all aglow the morning after. The sexual learning curve was glossed over, completely.

And, as we see in How To Have Sex, it still is — but now it is not purity to blame, but sex positivity. Pushed upon today’s Zoomers is the notion that sex itself is meaningless, and therefore so is virginity. Once you begin to argue that having multiple partners is no big deal, it’s hard to preserve any significance around having sex for the first time: one progressive sex-ed provider in the UK invites students to think of virginity as “a damaging social construct”. For this, we may thank feminism: women, who risk the most from penetrative sex — often while enjoying it the least — probably benefit from a culture in which it is no longer seen as a special prize to be won. We may also thank the increased visibility of LGBT people, for whom equating the loss of virginity with heterosexual intercourse presents obvious problems.

And yet, the resulting landscape is one rife with profoundly mixed messages about sex. While sex positivity tells us the act is so meaningless that you should feel no compunction about doing it for the first time with a total stranger, consent culture says it’s so dangerous that you’re always a heartbeat away from being violated and traumatised for life. But more importantly, the shrinking significance of virginity as a concept has made casual sex not only an acceptable way to do it for the first time, but the expected way.

Does this reduce the stigma of being a non-virgin? No doubt. But I’m not persuaded that it’s actually helping anyone figure out, per the movie title, How to Have Sex. Whatever the shortcomings of the pre-digital era in terms of its sexual double standards, teenagers at the time at least tended to learn by doing — by building intimacy through the mutually awkward process of figuring out the alien landscape of another person’s body while they fumbled their way around yours. And alongside the Raunch Renaissance, there was another model for what first-time sex looked like, something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a story which, however otherwise unrealistic, still depicted sex as something people did after they were certain that they really, really liked each other.

Today’s teenagers don’t even have that. They have porn — and hook-up culture, which means your first sexual experience could be with a partner who doesn’t love you, or barely know you. And the weirdest part is, this is supposed to be fun, a paradox that How To Have Sex highlights exceptionally well. The immense uncertainty surrounding a young woman’s sexual debut is painstakingly, and painfully, shown here, and the pressure to be unburdened of the albatross of virginity is only one piece of it. Another is the expectation — for everyone, not just women — that one must be not only as skilled between the sheets as a porn star but also as emotionally detached. In some senses, the Nineties model has been fully flipped: physical intimacy is now par for the course, while emotional intimacy is coded as cringe. That a person could view sex as the physical act of love, which is ironically the one thing that would actually make the whole process less fraught and more fun, is barely nodded at. Tara may not know how to have sex, but she knows enough to know that having feelings for the person you’re doing it with is super embarrassing.

Perhaps needless to say, this does not end well — for the characters in the movie, and often for young women in real life. I want to say that Tara has a uniquely bad experience on this front, but what really strikes me is how not-unique it must be, how common. The whole scene, these dark and pulsing landscapes full of beautiful young people dancing, drinking, sweating, screaming: it makes for great cinema, but how are you supposed to connect with anyone under these circumstances? Even the friendship Tara strikes up with another girl, after getting separated from her friends at a club, is like the platonic equivalent of a one-night stand: the emptiness of the connection stands in stark contrast to her relationships with her friends, even the bad friend who keeps trying to embarrass and undermine her. There’s a moment in the film where one of the girls notes that they need to be more social. “We’re never getting laid if we only hang out with each other,” she says. It’s true, but also: when you see what getting laid entails, hanging out with the girls and eating cheesy chips is clearly the better option.

That is, unless you’re a virgin so desperate to shed the mantle of sexual inexperience that you don’t even care anymore how it happens or with whom. Tara is on a mission — though it’s unclear if it’s a mission she volunteered for or one her friends have assigned to her — and there’s a giddy energy to her early exploits in Crete that’s not unlike the American Pies and Can’t Hardly Waits of the world. For the first half of the movie, her virginity is a burden, yes, but also a source of excitement, anticipation. Every time a boy touches her, you can see the wheels in her head turning: is this how it will happen? Or this? Or this?

And then it does happen. What’s possible becomes what’s inevitable, and what’s left is all the uncertainty, and none of the sparkle. And while it’s understood that Tara’s choice of partner has something to do with this, that things would have played out differently if she’d held out for a better and more respectful guy, it’s hard to say how differently, when even the best-case scenario is still a one-night stand with a virtual stranger.

This seems to be the biggest problem with the discourse around virginity, which focuses on sex as the end of something — one’s embarrassing virginal status — as opposed to the beginning that it is. Becoming sexually active is like learning to drive: the first time you do may feel significant in the moment, but it’s not going to be your best time, or your most memorable. Tara, like any teenager, would benefit from looking beyond the milestone and asking herself what comes after: once sex stops being about losing your virginity, what is it actually for? And absent the desire to be rid of her V-card, what does she actually want?

In the end, Tara has had sex. But she still doesn’t really know how to.


Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

katrosenfield

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Arthur G
Arthur G
1 year ago

The thing our culture tries hardest to hide is that committed, married couples have the most sex, and the best sex. It completely undermines the sexual revolution and “women’s lib”, but random sex sucks, especially for women. Sex with someone you trust and who cares about you is so, so much better.

Hint to Gen Z. If you want to have lots of great sex, get married to someone you love and stay married.

Last edited 1 year ago by Arthur G
Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Arthur G

The only people who say “random sex sucks” are those who didn’t get enough of it when they were younger

Alan Bright
Alan Bright
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Is that true? Genuine Q.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Bright

Don’t know, but I’m more suspicious the more I read this, and it’s a sentiment appearing in multiple articles all over the place in the past coupla months, so you do gotta wonder.

Either 1. there’s a large number of married people who suddenly realised in the past couple of months that their very own, very particular married sex is better than that had by their non-attached friends, or 2. someone’s found a way to package up jealousy & make it sound like a win.

Call me cynical, but my money’s got to be on the latter.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Bright

Probably not. Just from personal experience amongst the people I grew up with, all the ones that settled down young before putting it about all ended up with broken marriages in their thirties. The ones I’ve talked to have said they feel as if they missed out on the nonsense the rest of us got up to in our twenties while they were shacked up at home, and it’s something you can’t recreate later in life
All but one of the ones that settled down a bit later are still together.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Says the guy who always finishes before his partner comes.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago

There’s no point dragging it out, I’m a busy man I’ve got things to be getting on with

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Random sex is a mixed bag. Sometimes good. You often wonder why you bothered. And you’re often left with emotional fallout if one of the participants (usually, but not always the woman) thought it was more than that.

The thing about sex with someone you love is that it doesn’t need to be great to be great. Getting that feeling to last is still a challenge though.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 year ago
Reply to  David Morley

Ya, there’s an element of truth to the last para.
It’s done with a different kind of sentiment, so doesn’t need to be fantastic to be fantastic.
The main fantasticness may well be that after decades, you still do it at all.
Persistence isn’t usually a quality coupled with sweetness, but in this case it is.

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Along, of course, with those who didn’t – but like to imply that they did.

Roddy Campbell
Roddy Campbell
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I wouldn’t know.

Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
6 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

So… almost everyone?

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
1 year ago
Reply to  Arthur G

“Random sex sucks” is an unfortunate choice of words in that context.

rod gartner
rod gartner
1 year ago
Reply to  Arthur G

not even remotely true.
The *real reality* is that euphamistically “healthy sex live” is the defining boundary condition that sets up diverging pathways for a couple in relationship.
once you and your partner have had sex 85,000 times over the course of many years of formal relationship (itself the follow up to many years of informal pre-relationship phase), by statistical necessity exhausting the configurationa space of every variable applicable to the topic (every eccentuating modifier that can be agreed upon, iterated in every way agreeable, graded in a continuous spectrum from most to least intense), and hence finding the “global optimized” state, there are exactly 2 trajectories the relationship can adopt:
kids (aka years of mutually exhausted selibacy, or even possibly “forever” depending on such unarguable facts like healthcare outcomes from pregnancy)
Breakup.
I have seen #2 happen, sincerley, at least 5 times out of the 20 or so relationships I have held in my circle over the last 15 years

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
1 year ago

I can’t stand sex scenes on screen. I won’t watch allegedly saucy movies, and at the merest hint of a romp appearing on TV, I reflexively push fast-forward. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen sex scene that has advanced the story, but 99.9% of the ones I have seen are entirely gratuitous and pointless; to me, anyway.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

The sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain were glorious!

Andrew D
Andrew D
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Chacun à son goût

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Otherwise known as “For a Few Buggers More”?

Carl Valentine
Carl Valentine
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Lol

J Dunne
J Dunne
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

And nearly always totally unrealistic. The first fully clothed kiss to full penetration in about seven seconds is not anything like actual sex.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago

The least sexy thing about sex is the constant talking about it.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago

Monotheistic Semitic so called ‘faiths’ have much to answer for in this respect.

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago

Except when you are doing it at the same time, of course.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  David Morley

Certainly beats talking about something else mid deed. On a holiday when we were about 18 one of the boys went home one night with a woman in her 40’s who started complimenting the weather while he was going at it.
He described it as a massive kick to the ego

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Perhaps he misunderstood. “It’s so wet” or “ I like it dry” doesn’t always refer to the weather. 🙂

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  David Morley

Unfortunately it was sunshine related so he couldn’t even pass it off as dirty talk

Rob McMillin
Rob McMillin
1 year ago

The more I see this sort of cultural discourse, the more I incline to believe that the Victorians had the right idea for the median woman: no sex before marriage, and make men do the heavy lifting to prove their value. Sex for its own sake just is not its own end for women, for whom evolutionary pressures make it at best a means to an end. A great deal of modern feminist dogma is about overturning this situation, with predictable results.

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  Rob McMillin

Sex for its own sake just is not its own end for women, for whom evolutionary pressures make it at best a means to an end. 

I’ve heard this one so many times, mostly from men.

First: female sexuality seems to vary far more than male sexuality – in terms of amount of sex drive, adventurousness etc. it is absolutely not true that women don’t enjoy sex for its own sake. Some may not, many do. Some really do.

Second: it’s best not to decide what women do or don’t like on the basis of theory (“evolutionary pressures”). Look first at reality and see if the theory fits.

Last edited 1 year ago by David Morley
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago

Has UnHerd become The Sun?

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago

I don’t disagree with the sentiments of this article. However you need to view the way sex is portrayed in film in terms of the older men running, producing and directing films trying to persuade young women to have sex with them.

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago

Many,not all,but most of the glorious pop songs of the 1960s and 1970s were so many variants on Andrew Marvells plea to his coy mistress,”Let’s do it now before we get old”. In fact the whole Sexual Revolution thing was a load of randy (and talented) young men writing those songs plus a whole lot of social commentators saying sex was good for us,and should be available to all and as Queen Victoria was long dead there was no moral judgment any more. Now the young men are granddads,the social commentators are discredited,and a load of people are in jail.

Philip Sawyer
Philip Sawyer
1 year ago

What is good sex? Is it just a good physical climax? That’s rather easy, in fact, unless one’s partner is mostly about themselves — ergo, most men? Thing is, good sex CAN be quite a lot more. Spoiler alert — I’ve been married to one woman for 40+ years, and have only ever been with her. So sex is about far more than just physical pleasure. Which is why I think anonymous or random sex might seem to be far preferable, since you don’t think you need to worry about emotional complications, or possible betrayal. And given the generally parlous and shallow state of interpersonal relationships these days, that really does makes certain sense. But once again, this plays more into the hands of men, who don’t get pregnant, and don’t risk much more than getting STDs. But why even bother with another person when nowadays there are so many other options?

Micah Dembo
Micah Dembo
1 year ago

I sympathize with the female end of things, but wait till you hear the male side. “ Such fools these mortals be”, as Puck would say.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Micah Dembo

It’s just a game, trying and often failing to lose your virginity. Once you’ve lost it you’re c**k-a-hoop for a few days (you can always spot the apprentices who’ve got lucky over the weekend as the literally skip onto the site) but then it becomes an irrelevance and you move on to the next one

Last edited 1 year ago by Billy Bob
Ben Shipley
Ben Shipley
1 year ago

Sex without emotional attachment comes in a step or two below masturbation (where you at least get to choose the perfect imaginary partner!). I had many partners, but never went into sex without the possibility that this one might be the one who counted. There were a lot of mistakes along the way, obviously, and I should probably apologize to anyone I met before age 35, but for incompetence, not indifference. I wanted to love them all—which is why 90% of the conversation around the male half of the equation reads as stupid and prejudiced.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ben Shipley
Jake Prior
Jake Prior
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Shipley

So you never had sex without emotional attachment but can authoritatively say that it’s inferior to masturbation. Well done Ben, you’ve defeated the scientific method.

Richard Colman
Richard Colman
1 year ago

I found a quick read through this article to be refreshing and reaffirming being broadly in line with my own opinions. Somewhat disappointing were the comments.
I am still trying to better understand the significance, meaning and place of sex for human beings. It entails the expenditure of a huge amount of time and thought and encompasses a spectrum of activity from love to hate.  I suppose in the end one’s own views are the only ones that matter to you, each to their own but to separate the act from some show of love, friendship or relationship is to put it on a par with a w**k but possibly with significant unwelcome physical and/or emotional consequences. To lose ones virginity as described is sad.
I wonder if the modern approach of sex for its own sake might be missing something very deep and integral to human happiness and contentment.

tim Ireland
tim Ireland
1 year ago

this reminds me of a Canadian film of a few years back, entitled Young People f*****g. As one wiser critic said, the film was good, only the words of the title were misordered. It should have been labelled f*****g Young People.

Last edited 1 year ago by tim Ireland
Jim M
Jim M
1 year ago
Reply to  tim Ireland

The strap-on scene was somewhat different, but unrealistic. These people were directionless.

John Galt Was Correct
John Galt Was Correct
1 year ago

If humans only came into heat periodically, like other animals, I wonder if a more rational human race would achieve so much more.

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago

Not, Hypersexuality is an indirect payment for intelligence. The human baby depends on the mother for too long, which increases her dependence on the father.

John Galt Was Correct
John Galt Was Correct
1 year ago
Reply to  El Uro

Not in the UK. The state and welfare replaced fathers decades ago.

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago

Do you think that a few years of welfare can replace hundreds of thousands of years of evolution?

Jim M
Jim M
1 year ago

Human beings need constant sex for emotional bonding. It keeps the pair together to protect the offspring from mommy’s new boyfriend.

Martin Butler
Martin Butler
1 year ago

Can’t help but notice but most of the comments here are from men.

David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Butler

Most of the comments on Unherd are from men. What’s your point?

Last edited 1 year ago by David Morley
Cho Jinn
Cho Jinn
1 year ago

The c******s?

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
1 year ago

Back in the day an eevil patriarch made a joke about this:
“Women give sex in order to get love; men give love in order to get sex.”
I wonder what his eevil patriarchal design was behind that sexist and oppressive and harmful remark.

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago

The best thing I can offer girls is to lose their virginity in the arms of an experienced, ethical and woman-loving partner. Then all this drama of losing а virginity will turn into one of the most pleasant memories.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  El Uro

The sort of experienced older bloke who spends his weekends trying to take home young naive virgins generally isn’t the most ethical of men

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I don’t really understand why I have to explain to everyone that in the case of a young virgin, I meant a young guy of about 25, and not Harvey Weinstein or Clinton.
However, on the Internet it has long become necessary to add the word “sarcasm” to any sarcastic remark, but even this no longer helps.
My remark was not sarcastic, but it was quite reasonable.
In the same way, it is quite reasonable if a young man has his first sexual experience with a woman older and more experienced than him.

Last edited 1 year ago by El Uro
David Morley
David Morley
1 year ago
Reply to  El Uro

Perhaps they don’t believe that any man of 25 is experienced, ethical and woman-loving. Or at least, not all 3.

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago
Reply to  David Morley

I probably think too well of people

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  David Morley

The lads I know of that age bracket were never all 3. You don’t tend to be experienced at that age if you’re ethical and nice to women, and likewise if you are nice to women you don’t tend to be very experienced. Hence my assumption they were talking about the older cad type of gent

Last edited 1 year ago by Billy Bob