Whenever I’ve let it slip to a friend that I’m saving myself for marriage, they ask me what that looks like. They aren’t questioning my religious beliefs or suggesting a possible far-right indoctrination in my childhood that led to deep sexual repression. Instead, they wonder how I could possibly reconcile my “commitment to purity” and my stereotypically “promiscuous” bisexuality. How does that even work with women? Do girls count? they’ll ask. They inquire if there is any tangible difference between what I do with boys and what I do with girls. They want to know if I can describe to them what sex between two women even is.
For a long time, I couldn’t answer their questions. Sometimes I would lie awake at night pondering my choices and desires. I chose to wait for sex until marriage before I learned I was into both men and women. And there were times when I felt like it couldn’t possibly make sense for me to do so. How was I even supposed to know when I’d had sex with a girl? When did it count as sex? I’d consider throwing my commitment out the window before eventually falling into a lucid slumber, puzzling over the same mysteries in my dreamscape.
I tried to convince myself this way and that, recounting every sexual encounter I’d ever had in hopes of identifying some new truth that had previously eluded me. I was consistently concerned with the differentiation between hooking up with boys and girls. The answer I’d give my friends is that sex with girls is just “a vibe check,” and, thus, my commitment to waiting for marriage is even more of a “vibe thing.” I still call myself a virgin because I haven’t had penetrative sex with a man, but according to some crowd-sourced opinions, I have fucked a couple of girls. And while this classification might seem damning to my claim of virginity, I’m not so sure that it even matters at all.
I kissed my first boy in eighth grade. It was sloppy, and I was left so rattled by the overwhelmingly wet experience that I didn’t kiss another boy until my junior year of high school. By that time, I knew I liked girls too. I got with a few more guys, and my rice purity score steadily decreased. It was fun, and if something was fun, I did it. I was still hesitant with hand stuff and had never even considered the thought of giving head to anyone, but boys were pushy, and I started to think that sooner or later I’d have to get over my trepidations.
I kissed my first girl the summer before senior year. I could still feel her lips on mine when she broke my heart less than two months later. I spiraled and hooked up with my second girl two weeks after that, followed by three more guys in quick succession. In the backseat of her Tesla, bras on the car floor, she told me I kissed like a girl who kisses boys. I didn’t really understand what she meant, but I knew it wasn’t a compliment. So, I learned how to kiss like a girl who kisses girls by becoming attuned to the minute details and the subtleties of kissing. Boys kiss aggressively, treating it like a means to an end. Girls treat it like one of the main events—each kiss carries deep intention. I was convinced, for a moment, that no boy could kiss well and that every girl was innately blessed with the ability to kiss perfectly.
A year later, in Paris, a French man told me I really knew how to kiss—like the French—and that very few American girls could do the same. I was simultaneously flattered and offended for my fellow American women. The following night, a different Parisian boy kissed me until I felt like I was levitating, and everything that I’d ever believed about men’s ability to kiss flew out the window. He was my 21st kiss. Since then, I’ve had a lot of great kisses and some really bad ones, split evenly between ladies and gents.
But this article isn’t just about my NCMO adventures—the moral of my story is broader than that. For some time, I consistently categorized all of my sexual partners into gendered boxes in my mind. I felt almost obligated to believe that all girls had to be better at sex than all boys, because it validated my sexuality. If girls were worse, then why should I even like them? I exclusively got with extremely conventionally attractive girls—girls that my female friends were jealous of and that my male friends wanted for themselves. And even though my type was girls whose vibes screamed “she/they” in their bios and had obligatory septum piercings, if I couldn’t get heterosexual validation from my male friends that they also thought she was hot, I’d shy away.
In a sort of twisted way, I found validation in going further with girls than I did with guys, because that meant I really was gay and wasn’t doing it “just for show,” like I felt so many girls at my high school were. I went down on a girl before I blew a guy for the first time. After he reciprocated, I realized that I’d essentially done the same thing with a girl and called it sex, but with him, I hadn’t. The labels and categories that I’d assigned each of my sexual encounters to had created artificial distinctions—distinctions that negatively affected my relationships and self-image.
I’ve learned now that the true sexual differences between men and women are more perceived than anything at all. The stereotypes that exist about both men and women as sexual partners are just that—deeply-rooted, mostly-incorrect stereotypes. I’ve had boys ask me what I like and handle me gently with utmost respect, and I’ve had girls treat my labia like a DJ’s turntable as they struggle to find the clit. The more people I’ve gotten with, the more I’ve realized that the individual is more important than their gender. I’ve shared deep intimacy with people but deemed them irrelevant according to the world of classifications that I’d created for myself, just because of what’s in their pants. Really, each experience should be “classified” on its own within its singular context, because it’s hard to describe it otherwise. Lumping experiences together or entering a sexual encounter with misguided expectations has proven to be unhelpful in every way.
The term “sex” no longer means much to me. Despite the many forms queer sex takes on, every experience is undeniably real. If I can’t strictly define my virginity with respect to fucking girls, why should I define it with respect to fucking boys? And while I’m still saving myself for marriage, whether it’s with a man or a woman, what I’m saving is not just a physical checkbox defined centuries ago by a collection of old men. It is a specific amalgam of intimacy, care, and simultaneous emotional and physical vulnerability that I hope to share with them, and them alone.
This anonymous author needs a she/they bisexual theater girlfriend or an aesthetic posts-film-pics-on-Instagram athlete boyfriend.