Virginity: No Excuses

This post is for the Virgin!Roar feminist blog carnival.

If I said I was a 26-year-old virgin, what responses might I tend to get? Pathetic, lonely, unattractive, repressed, super-religious, weird, or just hopelessly uncool. Maybe my fate is terrifying, unfathomable, or even worse than death. After high school, no one really asks "are you a virgin?" anymore. But if it stopped mattering, there wouldn't be all these negative stereotypes. Luckily, I have a handy excuse: I'm asexual! No sexual attraction to anyone! So it's totally okay for me to still be a virgin! Right, folks? Right, folks?

In my rush to neatly explain my virginity though, maybe I'm doing a disservice to all the other adult virgins out there. We shouldn't feel pressured to provide reasons in a quest to convince others that our choices are valid. It can be hard to own a status that some people may consider embarrassing, but then again, it will always be embarrassing unless people own up. Whether we were "too busy" or "career focused" or "waiting for the one", we just did not feel like having sex.

I wanted to answer the question "is virginity my choice?" but gave up in frustration. The usual reasons why people have sex--romantic love or sexual attraction--don't apply to me. There is no personally relevant reason for me to have sex, although this might relate to my chosen priorities as much as my asexuality. I want to avoid sexual pressure, I don't want to be the subject of someone's desire, and I don't want to engage in sex as a means to power or an expression of gender roles. You know those feminists that people tend to be scared of, who bandy around stuff like "heterosexual sex is oppressive?" Well, I think that any form of sex can be oppressive, or not, depending on the people and situation. Sex of any kind would feel oppressive to me personally, outside of a very narrow range of hypotheticals that I am unlikely to encounter. This doesn't mean I'm repressed. To me, the most "traditional" sex is also the most unappealing. Nor am I against anyone else having sex. As they say, do you.

If being a virgin was so awful, I could find a sexual partner. But virginity is not so bad, and despite what this post might convey, it's pretty much irrelevant to my personal identity. Having sex for the first time is not a major rite of passage in my life, which would be the factor giving virginity much of its meaning. I would guess that by our late 20's, most people who really wanted sex have found some way to have it. So virgins, as we get older and fewer in number, might get more content with their status rather than more frustrated. That's been my own experience, and it's the complete opposite of what the media portrays. At 2o, I was confused and distressed by my lack of sexual experience, but at 26, I know that for me, this is normal.

I Love A Charade

A recent post from Espikai got me thinking about certain party games and the asexuals who loathe them. You know the type: Truth or Dare, Spin the Bottle, I Never. If you think that everyone escapes these games in grade school, well, you'd be incorrect. I've heard tell of people playing Spin the Bottle in college, and I have personally played I Never over the age of 18. From early childhood, I would do everything in my power to not participate in these games. My MO was usually to disparage the games as stupid and immature, portraying myself as far above it all. This was a line I held from grade school until college. But, no one ever seemed to find it odd: While I would rope unsuspecting friends into Monkeys-in-a-Barrel tournaments, I was much too adult and mature to play I Never.

The game I feared most wasn't actually a game, but a sort of ritual that my sorority had. At our chapter meetings, someone would get into "the hot seat" for a few minutes and field no-holds-barred questions from the rest of the group. Of course, most of the questions involved guys and sex. Unlike some other groups, our sorority didn't really have any hazing, so maybe this event was a sort of substitute. No one ever seemed to express any disapproval of it. And even though I found the activity to be somewhat cruel, I didn't speak up against it either; I didn't want to be thought of as a spoilsport, a prude, or someone with something to hide. Even though these were people I trusted and a community I cared about greatly, at the time, I wasn't yet out as asexual. My sexual inexperience seemed so beyond the pale that I couldn't risk bringing it up. Every meeting, a different person was called on, and I would always dread the moment. However, and here's the odd part again: I was never called on. Even when there was an, "Okay, who's never been called?", it was still never me. We were a very small group and it was impossible that people would not know that I'd never been in the hot seat. And I think I might have been the only person who was spared. Whether it was an oversight or an intention, I was allowed to keep my secret.

Why are these sorts of games so popular? I think it's because we really want to know what's going on in other people's sex lives. Not necessarily because we want to gossip about it, but because we want to share experiences and see if ours are normal. However, we got the notion somewhere that it's inappropriate to have honest conversations about these topics, and so we couch them in awkward and embarrassing games. No one wants to admit that they might be seriously interested about the subject of their friends' virginity. At least, this is one theory. A more cynical theory is that having people air their sex lives semi-publicly can have the effect of fostering conformity or policing a group, and emphasizing what is "okay" to say and what should be kept secret. People with more "standard" sexual experiences might be more willing to talk about them (or be honest about them), leaving people with more "non-standard" experiences more likely to be quiet about theirs.

It's been going on 5 years since I realized I was asexual, and no one has asked me to play any of these games. As an adult, Apples to Apples seems to be the standard, rather than Truth or Dare, and thank goodness for that. However, I almost wish I could go back to the hot seat, because my reaction today would not be the same as it was then. First of all, I would speak up and say that I didn't think it was a good idea; that if we wanted to tell people our secrets, we should be encouraged to do it of our own volition. I would tell people that for me, the innocent "who do you have a crush on?" question doesn't resonate with the chummy sense of inclusion that it might for others. I would say that for me, it was a question I've always feared, and explain why that was. I would ask why we were assuming that everyone in the group was straight, and why there was an atmosphere where it would be hard to admit that you weren't. At the time, I didn't know any better than to keep my mouth shut. But now? I would still rather play Monkeys in a Barrel than I Never, but if it came, I'd try to face it stoically, and use it as a chance to get people to rethink their assumptions about sexuality. It would be worth a try, and quite possibly, this would make everyone lose interest in the game anyway. Charades, anyone?

Intercourse

It's been too long since I've opened a book about sexuality, so I'm getting back to it with a bang-- Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse (1987). I'm about 3/4 of the way through it. Based on what I'd heard about the book, I'd braced myself for a tirade by an anti-sexual sexual. However, no matter what criticisms people have of Dworkin, she could never be accused of fitting easily into a label. In the book, she mocks anyone who would call her views "sex-negative". In fact, for someone so widely accused of being "sex-negative", Dworkin writes about sex with a reverence that I find hard to comprehend. In her lengthy literary analyses (which I also find hard to comprehend), Dworkin writes about sex as a grounds for self-knowledge and true communion. She expresses some frustration about the way "pop-culture magazines" portray sex as "intrinsically banal" (25). For Dworkin, sex is not to be taken lightly-- a view that was probably as unhip in 1987 as it is today.

Intercourse is notorious for allegedly stating that all sex is rape. As the forward by Ariel Levy states, many of the people making this accusation haven't actually read the book. If they had, they might have noticed that a statement like "all sex is rape" (which has not appeared in the book so far) is much too simplistic for a work that deals more in questions than answers. It's also easy to confuse the fact that Dworkin sees "sex" and "intercourse" as two different things, and this distinction undergirds her theories. Dworkin views intercourse as PiV (as I have oddly heard it called) penetration, "...one sex act among many..." (175). These other sex acts, divorced from intercourse (where most women do not orgasm anyway), could be "...part of other deeper, longer, perhaps more sensual lovemaking..." (175). To Dworkin, sex is not intercourse is not fucking is not lovemaking, a distinction that would certainly be lost on those who would critique the book without reading it.

Another of Dworkin's assumptions is that sexuality is not private, but social in nature. She rips apart everything asexuals (and everyone else) have been told about intercourse: That it's fun, healthy, natural, that it makes you a "woman" or "man", that it somehow leads to a greater maturity and therfore autonomy. She writes, "It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so"(181). Dworkin doesn't seem to care if you agree with her, she wants to make you confused and perhaps angry enough to start asking questions for yourself.

My favorite chapter so far was called "Virginity". In it, Dworkin compares the stories of Joan of Arc with that of Madame Bovary's Emma Bovary to examine how social attitudes around virginity have changed. To Dworkin, virginity is another part of sexuality that is social, not private. She writes:

The old virginity-- with its real potential for freedom and self-determination-- is transformed into the new virginity-- listless, dissatisfied ennui until awakened by the adventure of male sexual domination: combat on the world's tiniest battlefield. It took Freud to call refusal to fight on that little battlefield "repression" and to name the ambition to fight on the large one "penis envy". The cell door closed behind us, and the key turned in the lock. (135)

This chapter was powerful to me because it provides one of the "alternate narratives" that I treasure. It seems like this is all we hear about virginity: If you're very religious, that it is highly important to maintain it until marriage, and if you're not religious, that the very religious people are kind of creepy and that it's shameful to hold on to your virginity for too long. This chapter is one of the few things I've read that greatly diverges from either of those viewpoints. Here, virginity in the sense of Joan of Arc is described as "...an existential indepence, affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; not a retreat from life but an active engagement with it..." (120). It's not cool to be a virgin, or somehow superior. It's totally different from those ideas-- it's a social choice that has power, just like the decision to have sex has power. Last year, I wrote that " Even if we tried, I doubt we could ever divorce [the word "virgin"] from its strong connotations of religiosity and morality". The difficulty of that task doesn't faze Dworkin-- she plows through and does it anyway.

Even though Intercourse comes with enough baggage to sink a ship, I tried not to judge it because, simply enough, Dworkin does not judge me, or people like me. She doesn't think, as some feminists do, that women who don't have sex are failing to claim their rightful freedoms as liberated women. True, she would probably ascribe a significance to asexuals not having sex that many of us would not agree with. However, for me, beyond having no sex drive and little attraction, the spectre of sex with a straight man always came with a spectre of inequality that I could not shake. I've had this gut feeling for a long time. Could I have what I desire-- a truly equal relationship on all levels-- with someone who, unlike me, has a socially privledged sexuality? I really don't know the answer. As an asexual who has always been a strong feminist, the disturbing history of sexual relations between men and women is more real to me than sexual desire. What is really interesting is that Dworkin, who is sexual, seems to feel the same way.