Losing It E-Book

Kate Monro

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In an increasingly sexualised world, how we lose our virginity remains an untold story. Inspired by her Cosmopolitan award-nominated blog, The Virginity Project, Kate Monro sets out to ask men and women from every walk of life, how did it happen for you? Losing It brings together an astonishing collection of stories. From the experiences of Edna, who lost her virginity in 1940 aged 25, to Charlie, a young, disabled punk rocker whose first-time experience many able-bodied people would envy, Kate reveals the poignant, funny and often surprising truth about other people's most intimate sexual stories.

Leseprobe

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2013 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.net

Previously published in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

under the title The First Time

ISBN: 978-184831-583-9 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-184831-601-0 (Adobe ebook format)

Text copyright © 2011, 2013 Kate Monro

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Interview transcripts constitute the opinions of the interviewees, and do not reflect the opinion of the author or publisher.

Extract from Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela reproduced by kind permission of Little, Brown Book Group

Typeset in Minion by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Copyright

About the Author

Introduction

1: Like a Virgin?

2: The History Girls

3: Boys Don’t Cry

4: The Invisible Virgins

5: Love Bites

Epilogue: Is that it?

Acknowledgements

Resources

About the Author

Kate Monro’s career has taken in spells with the rock band Blur, publishing mavericksDazed & Confused, experiential marketing agency Cunning, and most recently creative advertising agency RKCR Y&R. She also pens Cosmo award-nominated blog Big Guy Small Dog Blog.

www.virginityproject.typepad.com

Introduction

Writing this book has made for some interesting conversations. I can’t tell you how many times I have perched, poised between two choices as someone has asked me what I do for a living at a party. Shall I opt for the more pedestrian answer, freelancing as a personal assistant in the creative advertising business? Or shall I tell them that in my spare time, I interview people about virginity loss? I think you can guess which one I go for.

Bam. In five seconds flat, I have bypassed the niceties and got straight down to brass tacks. You don’t need to bother with small talk when you tell people that you investigate sexual experiences in your spare time. The conversation has just moved onto an entirely different level.

But I didn’t plan this. Writing a book was never on my list of things to do, particularly not one about virginity loss. So how did it begin? What led me to a point where this sort of exchange was, and still is, a regular occurrence?

It all began on a beach. It was the end of the summer in 2005 and as we basked in the Californian sunshine, my boyfriend and I had entertained each other by reminiscing about our misspent youth. We had actually known each other when we were teenagers but we had never hadthatconversation.

‘How did you lose yours?’ he asked, finally.

He didn’t need to specify which ‘yours’ he was referring to. I knew exactly what he meant. From the practical details: the venue, the background music and the choice of attire (somebody’s garden, Spanish euro-pop and a sun-bleached pink T-shirt, in my case) to the emotional nuts and bolts, we soon began to relive this unique experience and to talk about how it had changed our lives.

What had been our expectations for this much-anticipated moment? Compared to the reality? And what did we seenow, sitting on this beach so many years later, that our tender teenage minds couldn’t comprehend at the time? As our respective tales came to life, I was struck by the contrasting dramatic elements of these stories. They contained humour, sadness and joy. In fact, they contained all the ingredients for a top-quality drama.

They would make a brilliant book.

There it was. I was captivated by this idea. I had a perfectly good job in a marketing agency but I was looking for something different to do with my life. I wanted to flex my creative muscles and I wanted to do it in a unique way. This idea couldn’t fit the bill any more if it tried. In the days that followed, I kept trying to push the whole concept to the back of my mind but it kept coming back. My boyfriend and I were not the only two people with tales to tell. This was theuniversalexperience that almost all of us will encounter, no matter who we are or where we come from. There must be millions of stories out there that were every bit as good as the two that had just been told.

I decided to run the idea past my friends. This was probably the best litmus test I could have taken. Asking people to think back to their first sexual experiences garnered an immediate response. People’s faces changed the instant I asked the question. Good, bad or indifferent, every single person that I spoke to had something to say. My mind was made up. I bought a Dictaphone, I started making phone calls and I got cracking.

Looking back, I am amazed that people agreed to take part, given that virginity loss has the potential to be one of the most vulnerable moments of your entire life, but that didn’t seem to put people off. Once again, I appealed to my friends for help and a little like the loss of virginity itself, my first fumbling efforts didn’t look promising. Jamie, my 24-year-old colleague, agreed to be a guinea pig and patiently put up with my attempts to break new journalistic ground as I quizzed him at my kitchen table one Saturday afternoon. But it was a start and at least I remembered to switch the tape recorder on (something I would not always remember to do in the future).

I followed this up with a trip to Yorkshire. This time, the subject was a very game 91-year-old family friend. To my utter astonishment, my mother had asked Edna if she would like to take part in this project and she said yes. Over the following eighteen months, I found myself travelling, literally and metaphorically, to all sorts of unexpected places, with all sorts of unexpected people. The subject matter seemed to capture people’s imagination. In the case of Edna, despite the fact that her generation were not given to such conversations, I sensed that she was seizing an opportunity, not just to give me the information that I wanted, but also to tell me a love story. She and her husband had been married for 50 years.

Slowly, as my interviewees referred me on to friends, family members, lovers and neighbours, a slow trickle became a steady stream of voices. Without ever intending to, I morphed into a different person. A person who could walk into the home, often of a complete stranger, sit down with a cup of tea and proceed to quiz them on the finer details of their sex lives.

While it wasn’t too hard to pin these people down, I came to see that they had different reasons for sitting in the hot seat. Some of them did it just because I asked them to, but for others it was a rare opportunity to talk about their personal lives. How often do you get to do that in a non-judgmental environment? It is a well-known fact that much of the value of the therapeutic process lies in the sheer relief of having someone listen toyoutalk, with no interruptions. People grabbed the opportunity to sit with me for a moment, away from the maelstrom of their lives, and reflect on an experience that most had never shared with anyone before.

And boy, did they reflect.

I was astonished at what came out during these sessions. Virginity loss was the inspiration for some epic stories. As people spoke to me, they spun tales of shame and joy. Their stories contained breathtaking romance and mind-numbing mundanity, often in the same sentence. They talked about great expectations and equally grand disappointments. I watched as people revived ghosts from the past, and laid them back to rest. Sometimes it seemed as if these ghosts were right there in the room with us. I felt like I was mining a rich and untapped seam of personal history.

Men were the biggest surprise. We all know that men don’t want to discuss their intimate lives … don’t we? Men shocked me with their ability to speak openly and honestly about the critical moments of their sexual lives. It was almost as if no one had thought to ask them what they really thought before. I was only too happy to be the one who got to listen.

Frequently my interviewees looked lighter as they spoke. Occasionally, this translated into a physical process. I watched one man sweat from the start of his interview to the end, the drops springing from the indent above his cheekbones and rolling slowly down the sides of his face. His story was difficult to tell.

Unpacking the past is a powerful experience. Reliving a formative, and often teenage moment as an adult can be revelatory. But clearly my interviewees were not the only ones taking a trip back to the past. I was going somewhere too. I often asked myself why I was spending my weekends interviewing people I had never met before about their sex lives. Was I just nosy? Or was there a deeper need driving me?

On the surface, it was about social history. I got so much enjoyment from the fact that I was documenting the lives of my fellow human beings. I hoped that some day in the future, this unusual collection of stories might help people to understand something about the intimate nature of our lives as one millennium moved into the next. But I also knew that there was agutmotivation for my endeavours.

Perhaps it is easier to understand if you ask yourself the same question. What are you doing here, reading this book? What is it that you need to know? Are you just curious? Or do you need the reassurance of knowing that your experiences are the same as other people’s? Because we all have the desire to fit in. I am no different. On a subconscious level, I needed to know that my hopes, desires and fears were the same as everyone else’s. Not just women’s, but men’s too.

Having got this information, something else propelled me forwards. On the days when I questioned the logic of asking people to tell me about their sex lives, an underlying momentum kept me going and it was this: the cast-iron belief that other people might benefit from what I now knew. Every time an interviewee looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t suppose anyone has ever told you this before …’, just as I was thinking to myself, thankGod, I’m not the only loser who has ever had that thought, I knew I had to share these stories.

Structuring these very human insights into a cogent stream of information has been an interesting process. I will start, in the first chapter, by asking a question to which I previously thought I knew the answer. How do we define the loss of our virginity? How do we know for sure when that moment has occurred? After all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people, let me tell you the answer is not as straightforward as you might think. Defining virginity loss is a highly personal matter.

The second chapter tracks the momentous changes in the lives of the women that I interviewed for this book. The oldest woman I spoke to lost her virginity in 1940 and the youngest in 2008, 68 years later. Comparing these stories proved an intriguing tool with which to understand these developments.

In response, chapter three will look at how men’s lives have moved on. If women have become more independent in almost every department, have men returned the favour by adopting more feminine traits? They certainly could not be accused of skimping on detail while telling me.

The fourth chapter will look at a modern phenomenon: the virgin. I call it a phenomenon because after a journey that has taken in some questionable adventures, it was always the story about the married virgin that messed with people’s minds the most. Virginity, for many people in the modern world, is a taboo. Chapter four will explore the many different reasons why people retain their virginity, some of them due to personal choice and some of them not.

Finally, the last chapter will look at the present day. How far have we travelled? We have more information about sex than our parents ever did. Does that mean that we are we having better first-time experiences? And finally, while we can’t change the raw facts about our stories, can we at least change how we feel about them? Chapter five examines the transformative power of a story that we will never forget.

This brings me back to the beginning. Because if I take a long, last look back at the beach and the day on which an unplanned book was born, I see one other important detail. Many years had passed since my companion had lost his virginity, but he could still tell meexactlyhow he felt about it. The memory of that moment was easy to conjure up, even 30 years after the event. For that reason alone, this was not a difficult book to write. It didn’t matter how much time had elapsed; this potentially life-changing event was the catalyst for some inspired storytelling.

In a world that celebrates sex on every street corner, every advertising hoarding and every television set, there is very little written – or said – about this very private sexual moment. I will be eternally grateful to a brave selection of individuals for taking the opportunity to help change this. As I found out, there is a first time for everything, including the telling of a very secret story.[1]

[1] All names – apart from the author’s – have been changed.

1

Like a Virgin?

‘Virginity can be lost by a thought.’

ST JEROME, 340–420 (FATHER OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH)

Virginity loss has taken me on a fascinating quest. I thought I was just going to record an interesting bunch of stories and be done with it, but no. Along the way, it has come to my attention that there are very few subjects in life that raise as many questions – or eyebrows – as the subject of virginity and its loss. Maybe it is just because I was ever-so-slightly obsessed with my subject but as I looked around me, I realised that virginity is more or less everywhere you look.

One of the first stories that we are taught is about virginity loss. We all know the story of Adam and Eve. No sooner had these two hapless teenagers given in to the temptation of the ‘fruit’ than the course of their lives, and ours, was irrevocably changed. Once that bridge had been crossed, there was no turning back for Adam and Eve. This irrevocability has been a constant theme throughout the history of virginity loss. Mostly, it must be said, for women.

Christianity and its iconic female representative, the Virgin Mary, continue to play a role in the lives of millions of men and women every single day. Virginity, particularly outside of marriage, is revered, respected and on some occasions demanded, not just by the Christian faith but by many faiths. But if you think that virginity only has significance for religious people, you are wrong.

Virginity packs just as big a punch in the secular world. In 2008, 22-year-old Nathalie Dylan decided to auction her virginity on the internet to pay for her master’s degree. Over 10,000 people were motivated enough to make a bid. The highest came from a 39-year-old businessman who was allegedly prepared to pay £2.6 million for this once-only offering. This probably isn’t the first time you have heard a story like this and I doubt it will be the last, but it does tell us something about the value and thepowerof virginity, even to people who have no religious leanings whatsoever.

Some of us might find the idea repellent. After all, what kind of man would pay such a large sum of money to ‘win’ a woman’s virginity? Is this the twisted modern-day equivalent of a hunting trophy, albeit a rather expensive one? And what motivates a woman from an affluent Western country to auction her virginity in so public a manner? Either way, here were two people who understood the power of virginity only too well; not only that, but both of them were prepared to leverage it to their own advantage.

We still use virginity as a metaphor for something precious and unique. Once it is ‘broken’, it can never be replaced. Or so you might think. I have found some fairly weird virginity-related news stories in my time but this one took the biscuit. In 2005, theWall Street Journalran a story about a 40-year-old medical assistant who couldn’t think what to give her husband of seventeen years for their wedding anniversary. Here was a man who already had everything, so she went one step further. Yep, you guessed it; she gave him her virginity. Jeanette Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, just so that she could lose her virginity all over again. ‘What an awesome gift to give to the man in my life who deserves everything’, she said. ‘It was the most amazing thing I could give him as a woman.’ This operation has grown in popularity in recent years, although, sadly for the women concerned, not usually for the same reason.

These are extreme examples. But for most of us, male or female, religious or not, whether we want to hold on to our virginity or shake free of it at the first opportunity, notions of virginity and its loss have concerned us since the beginning of time.

The Romans placed virginity on a pedestal, quite literally, by creating the concept of the vestal virgins. The vestal virgins were female priestesses. They entered into a 30-year contract of chastity and service to the state but in return, they were accorded phenomenal power and influence. A pardon from a passing vestal virgin could save a condemned man from the gallows. A vestal virgin could own property and write a will, rights unheard of for a woman in ancient Rome. But as you might expect, there was a price to pay for this freedom. A vestal virgin who dared to break her vow of celibacy came to a very sticky end, buried – alive – in a chamber beneath the streets of Rome.

By contrast, sometimes just when you think that virginity might have had some stature, it has been completely disregarded. In 1554 a German physician, Johannes Lang, described the ominously named ‘green sickness’ as ‘peculiar to virgins’. His controversial solution? Sufferers should ‘live with men and copulate. If they conceive, they will recover.’[1] Even in an age when virginity was generally revered, not everybody thought that hanging on to the ‘V’ card was such a great idea.

I found these deviations into the world of virginity fascinating, but one question remained timeless and unanswered. If virginity is so important to us, then how do we define its loss? Do we have one blanket definition to cover all eventualities? Or a hundred? Because no matter where I went or to whom I talked, it never ceased to amaze me how many different and very creative ways people found to define one experience. We might think we are in agreement about this, but we are not.

People have often searched for physical proof of virginity, particularly a woman’s. Medical literature begins to mention the hymen, the inconsequential piece of skin thatcanpartially cover the entrance to a woman’s vagina, in around the seventeenth century. The story goes that when a woman first has sexual intercourse, this piece of skin can break and cause the woman to bleed. This explains why even today, some cultures believe that the bloody bed sheet is proof enough of a woman’s (freshly lost) virginity.

One of my female interviewees surprised me by telling me that she had lost her virginity on the back of a bike. She explained further:

OK, so people say they know when they lose their virginity. I didn’t know. But I did know that I took the dog for a walk, I was feeling lazy so I thought I’ll tie the dog to the bike and I’ll ride down the road and the dog can run beside me. And that started really well until the dog saw another dog across the road and shot in front of the bike. Of course I went over and I hit myself on the crossbar and I started to bleed. So it wasn’t really a big thing for me, losing my virginity. Although it did hurt.

This story makes my next point for me. Using the female hymen as a barometer with which to test a woman’s virginity is not a good idea. When it comes to the hymen, the only thing that can be proven is this: if it existed in the first place – because many women do not have hymens – it can be broken easily and in a variety of different ways, including sports (particularly horse riding), the use of tampons and of course the one to really watch out for, dog walking.

History relates a number of equally tenuous ways in which we have sought to define the existence of female virginity, whether by physical means or occasionally by slightly more ephemeral methods. I turned to Anke Bernau and her brilliant book,Virgins: A Cultural History, for some examples:

The late-thirteenth-centuryWomen’s Secrets, popular and influential well beyond its own period, suggests that apart from downward-pointing breasts, other ‘signs of chastity’ are: Shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men and the acts of men. Urine also features prominently in such discussions: ‘The urine of virgins is clear and lucid, sometimes white, sometimes sparkling’. A virgin urinates from ‘higher up than other women, because ‘the vagina of a virgin is always closed, but a woman’s is always open’. Certain plants, such as ground up lilies, or the ‘fruit of a lettuce’ will make a virgin ‘urinate immediately’.

She makes similar discoveries about theabsenceof virginity:

A nineteenth-century expert takes a different approach in listing alleged signs oflostvirginity: ‘Swelling of the neck, rings around the eyes, the colour of the skin and urine.’ He also mentions the popular story of a monk who claimed he could tell a virgin by her smell.

It’s easy to laugh at such stories (and to wonder how a monk, of all people, managed to gain such finely honed olfactory skills), but not a lot has changed when it comes to the testing of virginity loss, whether for men or women. We arestillevaluating its existence with methods not much more reliable than our sense of smell.

Perhaps it is precisely because virginityissuch a nebulous, ever-changing proposition that we have often chosen to fall back on such unreliable and unproven tests of its existence. Men were just as confused. All sorts of people engaged me in conversation about this project, including my car mechanic, and I can still picture the look of utter confusion on his face as he asked me the question: ‘But Kate, how does a manknowwhen he has lost his virginity?’ To which I can only say this. During the course of almost 50 interviews and many more conversations with people of all persuasions, around the beer-soaked bar tables of my local pub and the kitchens and living rooms of various friends, I discovered that the definition of virginity loss is a deeply personal issue. It can be defined in any number of ways, largely depending on how wefeel.

But as a generalisation, it often comes down to technicalities. Even if we don’t articulate it as such, the first incidence of penetrative sex is frequently the one that counts. For this reason, I was tempted to entitle this first story with a cheap quip like ‘getting off on a technicality’. Because this story does involve the technical loss of virginity, but perhaps just not in the way you were expecting.

Charlie Thomas. Born 1962. Lost virginity in 1978 aged sixteen

I always knew that I wanted to interview lots of different types of people for this book. In the 1990s, during my tenure at a magazine calledDazed & Confused, we collaborated with fashion visionary Lee Alexander McQueen to produce a special issue of the magazine. The theme? Fashion and disability. Lee put Olympic athlete and double amputee Aimee Mullins on the cover of the magazine wearing nothing but a sleek pair of Adidas track pants and her custom-made running ‘legs’. It was challenging and it was brilliant. Sexuality and disability are not always seen as comfortable bedfellows. The experience made an impact on me. Over a decade later, I knew that I didn’t want to present a homogenised, two-dimensional view of virginity loss. I wanted every section of society represented in all their shapes, sizes and permutations. I certainly didn’t want to fall victim to the underlying assumption that just because a person might find it physically harder to have sex, that this might be analogous to their level of interest in it. What I didn’t realise was that I alreadyhadmade an assumption. A really big one. When I finally did find a disabled person who was prepared to share their story with me, I never expected it to be one of the best virginity loss stories that I had ever heard.

Born in 1962, Charlie Thomas was the unfortunate victim of thalidomide, a drug that was given to thousands of women in the 1950s and 1960s to relieve morning sickness. Tragically, and unbeknown to them, it also caused dramatic birth defects. Charlie Thomas is a tall, handsome man who just happens to have arms that finish at his elbows. A smart, popular boy, we join his story at the age of sixteen, just as the Sex Pistols were ransacking the late 1970s and just as Charlie’s mother and stepfather had moved from very ‘happening’ London to the very non-happening Welsh countryside:

It was the late seventies and my school consisted of Welsh people who were into Elvis and absolutely everyone wore flares. But there were also the children of the hippies who had moved to the country and formed all these hippy communes. One of them was a lesbian commune. Can you imagine how popular they were with the local villagers? They were lesbian, dope-smoking, patchouli-smelling English people and they were all witches as far as the Welsh were concerned.

There I was, in the middle of all this and then she walked into the room. She was the daughter of one of these lesbian couplings and she was called Stella. Stella had huge bosoms, reeked of ‘teenage’ and sashayed down the hall in a way that stopped everybody in their tracks.

Our village was having a village hall disco one night. Imagine my surprise that day when Stella came up to me on the bus and said, ‘Are you going to be at the disco tonight because I’d like to dance with you?’ Pandemonium. You know, it was just a little bit too much for the other passengers. The weird English punk guy with the short arms getting propositioned by the witch girl with the big boobs.

The evening came and went and I walked her back to the end of the lane where her commune was and we had a bit of a kiss, but she had this really annoying all-in-one denim trouser suit on so any idea of getting hold of those breasts was just not happening because it was like a second skin.

Cut forward about a month and she invited me back to hers for tea. By this time we were almost officially girlfriend and boyfriend and it was the weirdest house you’ve ever been in. There was a woman called Gloria who looked like a man and had a moustache. An actual moustache. Now I look back on it and I just think, yes, they were a bunch of lesbians in a hippy commune. It was the late seventies in Wales, what do you expect? But at the time, for this little straight boy, it seemed really weird.

Anyway, the mother sent us off to Stella’s room with our tea and Stella got her Jimi Hendrix record out. She was still in her school uniform and she lay down on her bed lolling her legs slightly open and I was sitting on the floor so you can imagine the view that I was experiencing. Then she just went, ‘Touch me’. What she actually meant was, you have got carte blanche to go straight to base three.

It was basically being offered to me on a plate. The sexiest bitch in the school, with the biggest tits, was showing me her vagina and saying, ‘Touch me’. I had never really got anywhere with anyone and there it was, all there, for me. I bottled it.

I wasn’t ready for it. I needed the base one and base two, you know? I hadn’t even touched her nipple. I wasn’t ready to insert my fingers into places that they didn’t know what to do with once they’d got there. So, in a rather desperate moment of attempted comedy, I put my finger on her knee, because technically that could be construed as ‘touching’ her, and thinking that I’d also answered with wit to mask my insufficiencies.

Cut forward again to a month later and there was a gang of about five or six of us that were the dope-smoking, punk-rock-liking, beer-drinking naughty people, who also had the parents who cared the least. We would hang around together, staying up till four and sleeping in the living room. On one of these nights, Stella and I were the only two left. It was three in the morning and there wasn’t enough bedding for two so we slept together.

One thing led to another and she lay down and opened her legs and I sort of got on top of her, I had no notion of foreplay or anything like that and I managed to put it in her with a little bit of assistance, and then I started putting it in and out and in and out again. And I remember thinking, is that it? Is this what I’ve been waiting for? Because this is shit! This is nothing! I didn’t come either, so I didn’t really understand the feeling that can go with it. I’d done it. I’d done the act but I didn’t have the feeling.

It wasn’t long after that that we were doing it every night and I’d kept it from her that I couldn’t come. We used to do it in the public toilets up the lane from the disco where everyone used to go. It was so popular that you could usually recognise the grunts of a familiar co-worker. Then one night she just sat back on the toilet bowl and went, ‘Where’s your fucking spunk?’ Or something like that. She was a game girl, Stella; I was a very lucky boy.

That weekend, I saw a film calledCandyand I was wanking while I was watching it. Suddenly I felt this really weird sensation, kind of like buzzing. My ears went a bit weird and I stood up and ran into my room, still with a hard cock, and carried on wanking, my legs felt wobbly for a second and I thought, oh my god, what’s going on, and then suddenly, yes! Finally, I’ve orgasmed! I’ve come. Produced sperm. Da da, da da! I’m a man! And that was my virginity.

I was desperate to see Stella again after that, obviously. I think I got one more in, and that was the one where I finally managed to have sex with her and come. A week later, Stella’s best friend Nancy asked her if she could borrow me because she wanted to lose her virginity. College was beckoning and she was buggered if she was going to go off to college still a virgin. Stella actually said to me, ‘Would you mind sleeping with my best friend?’ I was kind of like, ‘Err, sure, yes, I’ll do that.’

And I did. I actually enjoyed that a lot more because I almost thought I knew what I was doing by then. Happy days. Directly after that, when I went off to my A-level college, I was quite confident and buoyed with the success of my double whammy in the summer holidays.

I met an older woman next who introduced me to LSD and the clitoris. She was 30 and I was seventeen. I called someone a cunt in the pub and the next thing I knew I was being punched in the face and I was on the floor with a woman leering over me with pink hair, Dr Martens and a boiler suit. She was pointing at me shouting, ‘Shut up! I like my cunt!’ and it was literally, like, ‘Wow!’ at first sight.

She was a communist and she was very angry. She looked at me and saw a man who’d been disabled by the state because basically, that’s what thalidomide had done. She wanted to unlock my anger by fucking my brains out and giving me acid. She was partially successful. Sexually speaking I had a lot more of an idea about what I was doing by the end of that summer.

I had a lot of partners over the years because I was in rock-and-roll bands and I was shagging everything I could get my hands on. Some moves were not an option to me, because of the disability stuff; there were some areas that I literally could not reach. So I became damn good at oral sex to make up for that. Making the leap and learning how to go down on women was a huge step forward for me because then I could absolutely guarantee their pleasure.

Many years later, this is pathetic of me I know, I tried to sleep with Stella again but it didn’t work. Halfway through the date I realised that I didn’t actually fancy her any more and I was just trying to get closure on something that … didn’t need closure, so that was as far as it went.

I have been married to my partner for fourteen years now and I’m an old hippy. I believe that the physical plane is not as important as the spiritual one, and I’m also a pagan insofar as I’m anti-Christian insofar as I believe we should have as much physical pleasure as is possible. And practise it as much as possible, because it will help us reach Nirvana. Rather than abstention from physical pleasure. No! I don’t agree with that. Absolute rubbish! Wank, fuck, do all of that as much as possible, that’s what I say. Because, come on, who of us here can quite honestly say that in times of stress, bringing yourself off in the bath or whatever doesn’t relieve the damn stress, and make you feel better afterwards? How on earth can that be a bad thing?’

This is why talking to men was so interesting. I know how my own body works but it never occurred to me to think about how boys might feel about their own physical development. Erections, ejaculation, wet dreams; these are potentially exciting but highly alarming events in the life of a young man. Why wouldn’t they be? You only need to ask a woman about her first period to answer that question. This was the first of many steps to understanding why virginity loss is every bit as dramatic for a man as it is for a woman, but perhaps just in a different way.

Having penetrative sex for the first time was of little consequence to Charlie. That’s not to say that it wasn’t exciting or even emotional, but contrary to the commonly held belief that we lose virginity when we reach this all-important milestone, it wasn’tCharlie’smilestone. That came later, and at the same time that he did; the moment that he had intercourse and ejaculated. It was almost as if this visceral physical experience was evidence of something else that he mentions. Something of great importance to almost every man I ever interviewed for this project: the concept of ‘becoming a man’.

What an impactful phrase that is. ‘You can’t come until your voice has broken’, Charlie told me later, ‘the two things tend to happen at the same time. You’re not a woman until you have periods, right? So you’re not a man until you can come.’

The loss of virginity can be a physical process with physical consequences, ejaculation being just one. But this is tangible evidence for what can also be seen as anemotionalchange. It became clear as I went along that while we frequently do mark the loss of virginity by observing significant physical milestones, the process of virginity loss can have almost nothing to do with the corporeal world.

I wasn’t the first person to realise this. St Augustine was born over 1,600 years ago. He is loved for his well-known aphorism, ‘Lord, give me chastity, but not yet’, but he also had something pertinent to say about virginity loss. A philosopher and theologian, his words rang true as I sought to understand why virginity loss often has nothing to do with physical practicalities.

‘[Neque] enim eo corpus sanctum est, quod eius membra sunt integra’,said St Augustine. Or, ‘the holiness of the body does not lie in the integrity of its parts’.[2]

Augustine was ahead of the curve. He was mooting the idea that virginity could reside in the mind and that, as such, it could never be forcibly taken because it did not physically exist. If the mind had not consented, then neither had the body. This was a radical piece of thinking for the time; particularly given that people’s attitudes towards female virginity were a lot less evolved than they are now. Even if a woman had lost her virginity against her will, it is quite likely that the finger of blame would have been pointed at her anyway.

Jump forward 1,500 years and I discovered that Augustine’s words had the potential to resonate just as much now as they did then. When I came up against my first really difficult interview, with a woman who most definitelyhadlost her virginity against her will, I had an unplanned opportunity to test the power of Augustine’s words. Martha was a friend of a friend and she agreed to talk to me for very personal reasons. She was a religious woman. She had also been date raped by her first boyfriend in Paris in the 1960s. This was to be the first time that she had ever told her story to anyone.

I hadn’t had any training for scenarios such as these. I had rushed into this project without thinking that far ahead and I certainly hadn’t considered how I might deal with potentially traumatic storytelling situations. I quickly learned, though, that coupled with basic human kindness, listening really was the best policy. People wanted their stories to be heard. I just needed to sit and witness them.

As we sat alone together, the tape recorder nestled between us; it was difficult for her to recall such painful memories. When she had finished telling me her story, I felt compelled to read her another Augustine quote: ‘No matter what anyone else does with the body or in the body that a person has no power to avoid without sin on his own part, no blame attaches to the one who suffers it.’ I wondered if it might make her feel slightly better about what she had just told me. I felt terrible when she burst into tears, but she quickly followed this up by telling me that she had never heard these words before and that they had helped. I was relieved – and amazed. Amazed that the words of a man whose robes had swept the streets of ancient Rome could still have such an uplifting effect on the life of a woman telling a story in a Soho members’ bar so many centuries later.

If nothing else, I had also discovered the sheerpowerof definitions. For the duration of her life thus far, Martha had allowed herself to be defined by her so-called lack of purity. As you can imagine, this wasn’t a happy situation for her. As if dealing with the trauma of rape were not enough, she also had to deal with her conscience because, technically speaking, as far as some people were concerned, she was now sullied. In the eyes of her ancient fellow Christians, Augustine’s contemporaries, she would have been defined as morally lacking and therefore damaged goods. But by looking at virginity loss from a new perspective, and ironically a saint’s at that, she had eased the grip ofsomeof the guilt that had dogged her for over 30 years.

Hannah St John. Born 1964. Lost virginity in 1982 aged eighteen

For a lady of Martha’s age, virginity loss might also have been considered a loss of innocence. Because once we have been inducted into ‘the ways of the world’, as my grandparents might have called it, we cannot go back. We cannot ‘un-know’ what we have learned. Our childhood is effectively at an end. We have lost our innocence. My next interviewee demonstrated that you could lose your innocence lock, stock and barrel. But does that mean that you have lost your virginity?

This is probably the right point at which to tell you about my blog, The Virginity Project. Several years into researching this book, I realised that I needed an outlet, a place to let off steam about my adventures. I realised that there were too many unexpected and extraordinary stories to ever be able to fit in one book. I also figured there probably weren’t too many other people in the world doing what I was, so I decided to start a blog. Ultimately, I ended up starting a conversation, with people from all over the world.