Diary and Memoirs of a Virgin

September 27th 2009
The glories of a mellow sun lit Sunday in London are many. I had no ‘official’ work to do, when I walked through the streets around High Street Kensington, I got the impression that London was taking a nap. On a Sunday afternoon in September one has the definite sense that the world is taking a deep breath before the hectic working week begins again. Sunday is a day for slowing life down, and reflecting on time past and a day for sharing memories...

And so I come to my blog, and illustrate the reasons why I remain virginal.
I wasn’t always the prim, proper, princess who writes prissy blog entries. Heck no. I didn’t even know there was such a concept as ‘chastity’ when I was growing up. Keeping one’s virginity till marriage? Hah – people only did that in times before contraception.

I grew up in the 90s. Sex was everywhere. Never before had the means of procreation become the means of so much entertainment. Every popular TV programme had a thread of sexual action in them. This was an era when most people had not even heard of the internet, and for average middle class families in Ireland, TVs sets were the focus point of the important rooms of the house. TVs were effective baby sitters, and sure Mum and Dad weren’t always there to censor everything that their little girls watched.

I remember other girls playing with Barbie and Ken dolls, and role playing with the dolls the sexual discourses and activities that they had viewed on soaps. There were always lots of TV storylines with childish looking teenagers having babies and being miserable, or having abortions and being subsequently carefree and jolly.
According to Irish statistics, 30% of Irish mothers were on the Pill when I was going to primary school in the 90s. And in my primary school class, a lot of the kids would coyly discuss they Pill packets they saw in their parents’ bedrooms, and the panicky discussions that their mothers’ would have with their older sisters about going on the Pill. Girls with milk-white Irish skin, freckles and The Simpsons school bags would see their mother rush to take her contraceptive pill in the mornings, and then hear their mother advise their teenage sister to go on the Pill.
Then there were girls who knew that their teenage sisters carried condoms ‘just in case’. I remember going into a chemist with a friend at the age of nine, and us both giggling and having a ‘who-can-spot-a-condom-packet’ competition. Later on when we were eleven, one girl took condoms from her brother’s wallet as a dare.

Every ‘cool’ actor on TV or on the big screen had a hot sex life, and most of the adults in our lives encouraged pre-marital sex by encouraging teenagers to take contraceptives, or by simply giving their approval. So by the age of ten, I thought that a teenager having regular sex with other pimply, fumbling teenagers was as good and necessary as having a shower. At twelve, I read the teenage mags Just 17 and Sugar. Both magazines were full of ‘how-do-you-know-you’re-ready-for-sex’ articles, each article full of glowing pictures of advertisement-perfect couples locked in embrace. The girl was always gorgeous, and the guy looked lovingly at her. Funny thing that I only ever saw pictures of these doting couples, but never saw couples like that in real life. These teenage mags extolled the importance of being ‘ready’ for sex. That was paramount. As long as you felt ‘ready’, then you could have sex whenever and with whoever you wanted. The mags carried stories of the guys and girls who were sleeping together at age 16, and what contraception they were using, and how they had waited until they were ‘ready’. The teenage magazines seem to have provided the NHS manifesto for ‘preventing’ teenage pregnancies. There was a lot of jargon thrown in about ‘waiting till you were the legal age’, but given that market research demonstrated that the majority of girls reading Sugar and J17 were actually eleven to thirteen, would even an astute twelve year old have understood the concept of sex being illegal... I know that I didn’t really get the whole thing about sex being illegal before 16, and it seemed so funny that the ‘boys in blue’ or the police would throw you in the local slammer for ‘doing it’...

But the single most influential reading material for me were the Judy Blume books. Judy Blume is a very talented writer, and it was obvious from her writing that she wanted her readers to have an adequate understanding of human sexuality. Blume’s novels however do not offer a rounded experience of pre-marital sexuality. Put simply, we cannot all be as ‘lucky’ as the characters in her novels. Her books do not offer young people, especially the twelve year old who re-reads and re-reads her books the opportunity to think about saving sex for marriage. I read Blume’s book Forever one night when I was twelve. I waited till everyone was asleep, and then kept the light on until 3AM reading the book that describes one girl’s passage from virginity to losing her virginity to leaving the guy she lost her virginity to. The girl used condoms, went on the Pill, didn’t get pregnant and didn’t get her heart broken. The sequence of events was all quite seamless for the newly sexually active girl. The message being that if you have sex for the first time with your boyfriend, that everything can work out, and that it needn’t be forever. You can go on and find other boyfriends and sex can just be a normal part of the relationship. One thing that struck me as odd was that Judy Blume included a male character in her novel Forever, and this fellow is averse to having sex with willing girls. He becomes mentally unstable, and has to have respite from society. At age twelve this plot line seemed a little perverse to me; did he become socially unacceptable and mentally compromised because he would not have sex with girls? The novel suggested that because he wasn’t ‘active’ with girls that this was a sign of some deeper imbalance.

Blume’s novel Forever is conservative by 2009 ‘standards’. The mother of the teenage girl has only slept with one person; the girl’s father. And the teenage girl loses her virginity when she’s ‘the legal age’.

Alright, I thought my teenage years will develop much like the teenage girl in Forever. I would just wait for the attractive males to come into my life, seduce me and I’d make sure he wore a condom.

Something changed that challenged my planned teenage sex life. When I was fourteen and not an especially likeable teenager because I was too sure of myself, my size ten figure and my own opinions, I became an acquaintance of a teenage boy, who was far more intelligent and polite than I was. Let’s call him Shaun. I felt like a buffoon next to Shaun. Shaun was from a more straight laced family than mine, and his parents went to Catholic Mass most days, and they were always trying to have more kids. Anyway, one Sunday, I attended a kind of workshop with Shaun. It was organised by a group of men and women in their twenties who wanted to show teenagers the value of keeping sex until marriage. Shockingly for me, as the workshop ensued, I learned one thing that they had in common...they were all virgins. Wow. This group of virgins did various role plays and gave their personal perspectives on why they were going to stay virgins until marriage.

One aspect of the workshop, which sticks with me today in minute detail, is the part where they invited Shaun to join them for an activity where they took thick brown sell tape and wrapped it around his arm. They explained that this was like his first sexual encounter, and that the stickiness on the sell tape was like the bond he would create with the girl. Then they ripped the sell tape off, and Shaun reeled for a bit, and was told, ‘when that first bond is broken it will hurt a lot’. And so they re- applied the same sell tape to Shaun’s arm, and said ‘and this will be like the second sexual relationship that you have, and because it will be your second bond, the stickiness will be weaker. But when you break up with your second sexual partner and the bond is ripped off...’ Cue here for sell tape being taken off like a band aid. ‘It will not be as painful as the first.’ The sell tape was weak at this stage and Shaun’s arm hair was speckled on the tape. Then they furled it around his arm a third time, but it hung loosely and needed to be held in position. ‘Now this is for when you have a one night stand. You’ll want the sex, but you’ll not be able to bond with the girl, and well you’ll only sleep with her once...so what’s the difference?’ They pulled the sell tape and Shaun didn’t notice a thing. ‘And it won’t be painful. You’ll just forget about the one night stand the next day. Your mind will wander back to the first girl that you slept with. But sooner or later you’ll meet a girl and she’ll be the girl. That girl; the one you want to marry.’ For the fourth time, they hung the sell tape on Shaun’s arm, but it fell off. ‘Now when you sleep with your wife, you won’t be able to bond like you did with the first girl who you slept with. The bond may not be there, and if any bond is there, it will hang loosely. And if there’s no bond to keep you together, you might find that you want an occasional affair.’

Shaun stood there, and looked noble with the straggly sell tape resting on his still arm. He smiled at me, and I grimaced. Why was he agreeing with all this sticky tape stuff? Who said that he would definitely have an affair? I hated the thought of all this pain when a sexual relationship would break up; it was wrecking all my fantasies of easy-come easy-go sex. Was I really setting myself up for painful break-up after painful break-up if I had sex with every boyfriend...? There surely must be a way of cheating, maybe you could find the one, and have sex with him, marry him, keep the bond and not get hurt. A sort of package deal where you had the sex before marriage and in marriage, but with the same man.

The ‘creating a bond’ with another human being played again and again in my mind. What?! A bond is created when you have sex? That sounds deep... There was nothing about creating a bond with someone in the mags and in the Judy Blume books. But this talk of forming bonds sounded sincere and true. But this business about keeping sex only for marriage seemed completely OTT. We’re not in the year 1950, I felt like screaming out. I probably would have at least sneered, but that my peer Shaun seemed to think what the twenty-something group of virgins was saying was so good and true. Stuff Shaun and his carefully gelled hair and neat shoes and shirts. He could be waiting until he’s thirty to have sex. That’s not for me, I’ll find Mr. Right, have sex with him when we fall in love, and we’ll live happily ever after.

Time passed, I distanced myself from Shaun because he lived in such a pure way and well, I found his Catholic school boy way a bit unnerving. In reality, I was the one with the problem because being such a teenagey teenager, I couldn’t accept Shaun. Shaun: so different but individual didn't fit into my orbit where every ‘average’ and 'conventional' person was doing the same thing and this meant that they were all planning to have sex whenever it was convenient. And Shaun was a boy who was planning to wait!

I was just waiting for ‘the right fella’ (‘fella’ is a real Irish turn of phrase), and for the man who was good enough for me to have sex with then, and for the rest of my life. I used to think about what would happen if I became pregnant-outside-of-marriage, and unusually this didn’t cause me personally a great amount of discomfort. I was always the child who had a family of dolls, and getting pregnant meant a human baby would be all mine. In accordance with this, I used to fantasize about what names I would give possible children, where I would rear them and the fun we would have together. I would walk through children’s clothes departments and see if there was anything that I would definitely buy for phantom children.
Tempered, however, by the work shop that I had attended with Shaun, I started reading more about STDs and especially the warty ones that are obnoxious for women. Then something occurred to me, what if my Mr. Right had slept with others before me? Wouldn’t I be likely to inherit the bundle of diseases that his body stored?
Then I read tracts detailing other people’s experience of casual sex. Most of the girls were not like the teenage girls in the Judy Blume books. They felt ‘dirty’ and ‘used’ after a boy had tossed them aside. The boys revelled in the limitless licence to have sex, and couldn’t understand why the gals felt so hard done by. The boys were then presented with the words ‘I’m pregnant’, and were neither emotionally evolved nor mature enough to support the pregnant girl adequately. Then the girls were always being given slaps on the wrist for not being ‘careful enough’.

I began to think seriously that the sort of dodging pregnancy and diseases but having to inevitably live with a sundered heart were not things that I wanted my own children to cope with. So when I was fifteen, I started thinking to myself that I would tell my kids not to have sex before marriage. Yeah, it made sense to tell your kids to wait until marriage. I knew that Shaun’s parents used to tell him that they had waited, and that they were his ‘good example’.

One day in my Walter Mittian way, I was thinking of a little pep talk that I would give some adorable twelve year old child of mine about not having sex until marriage. Of doing the same thing as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and waiting until Prince Charming had put the ring on their finger. In my fantasy, my child turned to me and asked and ‘so Mummy, you only ever slept with Daddy when you were married?’

How could I ask my children not to sleep with anyone before marriage if I had not kept chastity until marriage? I would look an utter hypocrite. It was in that split second that my decision to keep sex until marriage was born.