The first time I had sex, I started crying.
It was delicately messy and awkwardly chaotic and uncomfortable, even with my loving boyfriend at the time. And it was undeniably painful, exacerbated by the all-encompassing stress I felt in the moment. In giving my body to someone else, it seemed like I had lost all control of myself, and in that unprecedented vulnerability, I froze. All I wanted was for it to be over.
My tears that followed were then a combination of not just physical pain but also frustration—a manifestation of emotional grief, that losing my virginity was not at all what I thought it would be. It neither felt romantic nor enjoyable. I knew this was not a reflection on my relationship or either of us in the slightest. Yet in my head, I had this grand concept of what my first time would be—amorously idyllic and transformative.
It’s not like I was blindsided—I knew what sex entailed, I knew that it hurt most women the first time, and I knew the person I was having sex with. In the end, I was not overwhelmed with feelings of love but instead with shame and embarrassment, upset that it had fallen short of the expectations I had created in my head and placed on myself. My idealized perception of physical intimacy made me feel inadequate, as if I was the problem—not the narratives that shaped my naivete.
Sex was elusive. It persisted as an idolized and mysterious concept we could only grasp at—you didn’t know what it really was until you did it, as if it was some fulfillment of maturity.
In my smaller high school, it felt like there was a clear divide: people were either constantly having sex or not at all. It was an all-too-pervasive topic of gossip and speculation, whispers of who was sleeping with who and whether or not a couple had done it for the first time. And it seemed omnipresently lingering, as some next step I would have to take and address with every boy I got involved with. So, it became overwhelmingly monumental in my head.
This, of course, is coupled with the unrealistic expectation for women to be effortlessly perfect. Women are held to a distinct, higher standard of attractiveness and sexual desire. While this is not a new phenomenon, it only burdens us with pressure rather than allowing for the experience of true intimacy.
But sex seemed to be monumental in popculture too—in books and movies and TV shows—even from a very young age, influencing our perception of it through these glamorized glimpses of physical intimacy. The portrayal of sex in the media more resembles fantasy rather than reality; sex is idealized and romanticized as the pinnacle of beauty and romance, with flawless moments and people as well as seemingly silent yet perfect communication and ease. But like most other things in the media, this is not real.
And while the woman has to be perfect, she too has to be innocent. It feels like it’s always the woman actually losing her virginity—men just have sex.
The media feeds into this as well; many media portrayals paint a woman’s first time as a moment of euphoria, a climactic transformation of a woman discovering her sexuality. A woman tenderly gives up herself and her body as a profound gesture of love and devotion. We place such gravity on women losing their virginity as if it should be some transformative event and rite of passage in a way we rarely see, if at all, with men. Men’s sexual journeys are framed more casually, without the same level of scrutiny or consequence.
Take Bridgerton, famous for its explicit sensuality: set in regency England, ladies are unforgivingly ruined with any sexual encounter where men face few consequences for their unchecked promiscuity. The first season depicts the main character Daphne’s journey towards sex as a monumental plot point, the storyline revolving around her inexperience and mystery of sexual intimacy with her love interest Simon, whose sexual history becomes inconsequential. While admittedly set in an earlier time period, Bridgerton is still emblematic of broader media culture signifying a woman losing her virginity as pivotal, carrying an outsized significance. Her first time is seemingly magical.
In tandem, this all contributes to an unrealistic idea of what sex is more broadly—especially for a woman’s first time–that I deeply believed. My perception was flawed and idealized, but my expectations were the product of the narrative I had been fed. As a society, we’ve made sex to be elusive.
In reality, sex can be imperfect and complex. And that’s okay. This is not to complain that I had a disquieting experience and this is not to say that every sexual encounter is going to be unfulfilling, nor that sex isn’t meant to be meaningful. This is instead to encourage that a woman’s sexuality does not need to be a defining moment, laden with profound emotional significance and moral weight. This is to reassure you that your first time does not need to feel effortlessly amazing. The narrative proliferating television and literature that sex needs to be cathartic is inaccurate. When we unburden ourselves from these narratives, we can then truly experience and accept sex for what it is.
In the end, losing my virginity was about confronting that vulnerability, both with myself and with someone else, freed from all other expectations.
Written Anonymously for the Independent.