Trigger warning: General discussion of rape culture
I regretted one thing I left out of my original asexual coming out post. I overemphasised the whole asexuals can engage in sexual behaviour with other people just like allosexuals (those whose sexual orientation aligns towards experiencing strong sexual attraction). This was ironic, because my personal experience is the opposite. Yes, the fact I’ve never had ‘sex’, as it’s commonly understood.
A friend asked a few months ago if I was a virgin, straight up. I was super-embarrassed and blushed with shit sticky feelings of stigma before giving an indirect cryptic answer, and then finally admitting to it.
Another time, I blurted it out with a far longer silence than usual—as someone renowned for their silences.
A few months ago, I wrote list of stuff I wanted to do this year. One of them was have ‘sex’.
Since these experiences, I’ve come out as asexual and my thoughts on virginity have developed away from shame.
I now think the guilt and shame I experienced about not having sex is part of heteronormative patriarchal social relations in capitalist society. They specifically relate to compulsory sexuality: what Lisa describes as “a set of social attitudes, institutions and practices which hold and enforce the belief that everyone should have or want to have frequent sex (of a socially approved kind).”
I explore the concepts of virginity, sex, male virginity and rape culture, which raises more questions as much as answers, and raises interesting problems for what sex and asexuality means.
Virginity and sex
Virginity is socially constructed as the supreme status according to Google of ‘never having had sexual intercourse’. Sexual intercourse is involving ‘penetration’ ‘especially’ heteronormative ‘insertion’ of ‘a man’s erect penis into a woman’s vagina’.
This logic is the logic of the heteropatriarchy. It excludes all other forms of sex, which is particularly queerphobic at a deeply institutional level. It’s from the penetrative perspective of the penis, not the vagina enveloping the penis. It’s stuck in the gender and sex binary, that excludes those born as intersex, and those whose gender identity is not ‘man’ or ‘woman’.
What is with this obsession with ‘virginity’ and not other things? Limiting myself here linguistically to the English language, there is a term for virginity—demonstrating its importance—but equally important—there is no word for ‘non-virgin’. In contrast, there’s no words for someone who has or has not experienced deep emotional love for significant other(s).
Some argue the gendered tropes and language attached to virginity, such as ‘popping your cherry’ and the verb ‘losing’, grants an expectation of something happening to undo the assumed ‘purity’ of the hymen, which encourages uncomfortable penetrative sex.
It’s a dangerous assumption that one ‘loses’ something by having their first sexual experience with another person. The gendered belief that a woman or gender nonbinary person is more ‘pure’ because she or they haven’t had sex feeds into slut-shaming and the contradictory policing of the virgin/whore binary.
The invention of virginity has long been about male policing and possession of non-male bodies. Hence virginity conjures up images of policing of anatomy like the hymen as ‘scientific’ proof of virginity, but not so much images of men. Google retrieves four and a half times more hits for female virginity compared to male virginity, demonstrating the invisibility of male virginity.[i]
Male virginity and biology
Masculinity itself is generally constructed as if men are always interested in sex and should expect to become non-virgins fairly automatically, when this is not normal for many men. In contrast, femininity is constructed as the oppositie, as if women are generally less interested in sex and have to ‘value’ their virginity, which is essentialist patriarchal rubbish. However, in a highly sexualised society, there is pressure on all genders to have sex, with men privileged with sexual entitlement.[ii]
In their cut chapter cut chapter from Virgin, Hanne Blank writes on male virginity:
Can we even speak of such a thing as a male virgin? The word “virgin” stems from the Latin “virgo,” a word whose double meanings signified both girl and virgin, but etymology isn’t the only factor that makes it necessary to use the qualifying adjective “male” in front of the word “virgin” if we intend not to speak about women.
Men’s virginity, as far as the historical record shows, has never been thought of as being the same as women’s. Where women’s virginity has, virtually without exception, been valued very positively, men’s virginity has (with only a few limited exceptions) been valued negatively.
[…]
Part of the hugely pervasive sexual double standard that has historically permitted men far greater sexual latitude than women is that men have simply never been expected or mandated to be virgins. Every male, like everyone human being, necessarily goes through a phase of his existence in which he has not (yet or ever) engaged in any sort of sexual act. But a man’s virginity is, from a cultural perspective, nothing like a woman’s. In many ways, there is not and never really has been such a thing as a male virgin.
Virginity has no biological basis. Blank writes of the frenum—skin connecting the foreskin and the underside of the penis below the glans—as an ‘equivalent’ to the hymen to indicate virginity. Like the hymen, the frenum is no marker of whether someone has had normative sex with another person as it’s biologically different for different people, and easily breaks from washing and masturbation—although a 1958 study recorded injury to the frenum during male defloration.
I do not recall much discussion about virginity at my all-boys high school—although there was an expectation one would have sex at some party somewhere—and if you weren’t you were a socially isolated ‘ugly’ loser.
This expectation in rape culture is structural male entitlement, male violence and male privilege that men expect to be able to demand sex from women.
The flipside of the gender roles of men in patriarchy is that those men like myself who don’t have sex, or have not have much sex, feel particularly guilty and embarrassed for not doing so.
Men having lots of sex is seen as the ideal, underlined by the fact there is no derogatory term to refer to men who do (unlike women); instead, men who have lots of sex are studs.[iii]
Looking back at the few times I assumed that others have appeared sexually interested in me—before I identified as asexual—I felt social pressure to be sexually attracted to them and ‘lose my virginity’, not being able to immediately walk away despite ultimately not being interested.
The patriarchal gender roles here are why some have suggested asexual men struggle more at coming out as on the asexual spectrum. Other factors I think are the slippery broad uses of ‘sex’.
Sex and asexuality
Thinking of sex as something that is of a sexual nature between at least two persons is limited because something solo like masturbation is often seen as inherently sexual. The association was one thing that put me off considering asexuality fully for months.
One person’s definition of masturbation as a sex act has lead them to conclude that kids ‘lose their virginity’ by playing (as I did) with their genitals.
Asexual people can have ‘sex drives’ of all different sorts. Some asexual people may engage in what is commonly viewed as sexual behaviour. Many asexual people like me masturbate, a commonly understood sexual behaviour, many do not. But asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to other people.
The phrase ‘asexuality’ has many limitations when it’s describing an orientation which really means lacking the experience of sexual attraction—lacking-sexual-attraction-ality—not can’t and haven’t had ‘sex’ necessarily, or although some do not, not can’t find sex pleasurable, or although some do not.
Asexuality is more social than physical. Lack of feelings of sexual attraction are here separate from one’s ability to be physically aroused or respond to sexual stimuli. [iv]
Ultimately because ‘sex’ itself is such an unstable concept, sexual attraction too is grey and not black and white. It can be easy to be pulled back into binary opposites, asexuality and allosexuality; as if there was an easy distinction between attractions and behaviours between consenting people, be they what is commonly (but not always) sensual such as hugging and sexual such as genital contact.
All of these complications about sex flow to the policing of virginity being especially problematic, and its normative understanding leading to feelings of shame. For many asexuals, the concept of virginity is unimportant and harmful. On their asexual blog, Jo argues neatly for undoing virginity:
But I think feminism especially needs to recognise that sex has different levels of meaning for different people, and sexuality is not something that can be assumed in everyone. The concept of virginity, and all the significance that is placed on losing it, does just that: it assumes sexuality, often only heteronormative sexuality. Participating in the dichotomy of virgin and non-virgin, experienced and inexperienced has nothing positive to give: so it’s time to ditch the concept completely.
Get ‘lost’ virginity
It’s important to note I felt more stigma attached to being open about my sexual experiences than my sexual orientation, and left out this discussion until now. I think they’re both deeply personal, but I think it might reflect the difficulties of overcoming internalised acephobia and misunderstanding of asexuality.
I’ve felt fake; that identifying as asexual can’t be real unless I have sex with someone; and then can ‘know’ for ‘sure’ if I’m yet sexually attracted to anyone. And to think how absurd it would be to question someone’s heterosexuality just because they had not had sex.
But it’s also crucial to understand the fluidity of sexuality, and that my sexual attraction may not be fixed. One example may be that in a close relationship with someone, it’s possible I could develop sexual attraction, which is termed in the ace spectrum as demisexuality.
People should be free to have as much or as little to no sex as they like. All virginity and heteronormative understanding of sex do is provide a framework to police sex and sexuality, and perpetuate heteropatriarchal social relations.
Because the concept of virginity is so fucked up, I now no longer feel any need to see myself with that label.
When I came out to myself I wrote, “Quite frankly, if I die a virgin, I don’t care.”
Now I think, “Quite frankly, if I die without conforming to mainstream expectations of masculinity, I don’t care.”
[i] Googling “male virginity” and “female virginity”, 39500 to 179000 hits (21/12/13).
[ii] Michael S. Kimmel, The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality (SUNY Press, 2005), p. 14.
[iii] Jessica Valenti, He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know (Seal Press, 2009).
[iv] Anthony F. Bogaert, ‘The A, B, C, and Ds of Sex (and Asex)’, in Understanding Asexuality (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).
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