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When your sex life doesn't follow the script

In an ideal world, I would have shed my virginity in the first year or two of college, but the right opportunity never seemed to present itself
Last Updated 21 September 2015, 17:27 IST

If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would one day announce in The New York Times how old I was when I lost my virginity, I would have died of embarrassment.

By the time I was in my 20s, there were only two valid explanations for being a virgin: 1. You were extremely religious, and had taken a vow of chastity until marriage. 2. You were a “loser”: too unattractive or socially incompetent to succeed at the most basic of biological instincts.

I was not religious, and I knew I wasn’t a “loser,” but I nonetheless felt horribly ashamed of the fact that I wasn’t sexually active. It wasn’t that I was afraid of sex, or disgusted by it.

Like most people I knew, I talked about it near constantly. In conversation, I was cool, flirtatious, ballsy. Yet privately, my sex life was largely nonexistent, and not entirely by my own choosing.

In an ideal world, I would have shed my virginity in the first year or two of college, but the right opportunity never seemed to present itself.

I wanted to have sex, but I wanted to do it with someone I loved – or at least with someone I liked and trusted enough to expect our relationship to last more than a month or two after we did the deed.

And so I waited, growing increasingly ashamed of my status, yet never quite troubled enough by it to throw in the towel and have sex with someone I wasn’t into.

To feel shame about one’s sex life is an experience as old as Western civilisation. Whether it has been gays forced to bury their sexual desires for fear of being shunned or killed, or pregnant teenagers sent off to “maternity homes” to have their babies away from prying neighbours, sex has long been treated as a measure of our propriety, carefully monitored for even the slightest hint of nonconformity.

Evaluating sexuality

But in recent decades, the standards by which our sexuality is evaluated – and the sources of our sexual shame – have evolved. Sex is no longer just something we are told not to do, or else risk being judged as dirty and depraved. It is also something we must do, or else be declared pathetic, prudish and undesirable.

It’s not that the old orthodoxies have disappeared completely: We still live in a world that is rife with slut shaming and homophobia. But these standards are now accompanied by a new, more insidious set of ideals and aspirations around sexual frequency, performance and identity.

These ideals are implicit in the habitual surveys of how often we have sex, quickly transformed through popular culture into dictates of how often we should be having sex (two to three times a week, as any regular reader of women’s magazines will tell you).
They are in the portrayal of sex as a perpetually dripping tap that everyone is drinking from, and in the intimation that the sex you’re having probably isn’t interesting enough to satisfy your partner’s needs – or to secure a partner in the first place.

But the most nonnegotiable part of the new sexual orthodoxy is simply that you should be having sex. If you are in a couple, sex is a measure of the health of your relationship – an unbiased barometer of how much you desire your partner and how much he or she still desires you.

If you are single, your sex life is a reflection of your market value – of how attractive and how deeply engaged with life you are.

As the founding Cosmopolitan editor, Helen Gurley Brown, famously said, “My own philosophy is if you’re not having sex, you’re finished.”

If sex is good and joyful, a life without it must be lacking. If it is natural, not to have sex means defying nature. If sex is the ultimate pleasure, not to do everything you can to seek it suggests that you are broken. If you could be having sex but are not, you must be either repressed or undesirable.

This isn’t just a problem for 20-something virgins. It’s a problem for anyone who has ever feared that his or her sex life is something other than what it ought to be. Which is to say, it’s a problem for almost all of us.

Fraught with emotion
As good and joyful as sex can be, most of us go through periods when our sex lives don’t match the script that has been laid out for us.

May be you want less sex than you used to, and you’re wondering what that means for your relationship. May be you’re semi-involuntarily celibate in a world that imagines single life as one long “Sex and the City” or “Entourage” episode.

Maybe your sex drive is blazing, but you’re not currently able to find an outlet for it, or your deepest carnal desires are something you were raised to think of as disgusting. Maybe you’ve never understood what the big deal was, and you’d rather hang out with friends or eat a really good slice of pizza.

Sex will probably always be a subject that affects us deeply. It is too tied up with the way most people connect with and find intimacy with others (not to mention the drive for sexual release, and the reproductive consequences of heterosexual intercourse).

But it doesn’t have to be as fraught with emotion – and symbolism – as it is. We shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed of our desire for sex, but we also shouldn’t be shamed for failing to perform it.

For me, it was partly the passage of time that helped me to move beyond the embarrassment I felt about my virginity. So did growing up, and moving into a relationship that more closely fit the ideals that had been set out for me by my culture.

But it was also the realisation that even if my particular source of shame was unique to me, the feeling of not being “enough” when it came to sex was common to too many of us, and that one of the best ways to dissolve that anxiety was to share the parts of our stories that make us most uncomfortable.

For the record, I was 26.

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(Published 21 September 2015, 17:27 IST)

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