[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was the last of my straight friends to lose my virginity — to prove I was a man — and it took until I got to college. Virginity is something that means different things to different people, but as a straight man, it always meant vaginal sex to me. Growing up, it seemed like it was natural that the cool kids were the guys who had had sex, and it’s only really in hindsight that I realise that sex didn’t make them cool, I did. Most estimates say that the average age for a man to lose his virginity is between 16 and 17, so at 19 I felt I may as well have been 40. I had a few friends who hadn’t lost it either, and we would list celebrities we liked — Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Morrissey — who hadn’t lost their virginity until they were much older, or for whom sex was unimportant. It made us feel better, and as a virgin I certainly benefitted from having a close group of friends who were in the same boat.

I never told anyone I didn’t trust. I was embarrassed about it and I was convinced it was immediately obvious in everything I did or said. In school, I could make excuses for myself: it was an all boys school, and even if I had had the chance, adults were always watching. In fact, talking to people who lost their virginity at this time, these were the pressures that accompanied the act. These were not the problems that I had. These practical concerns would probably have become relevant if it weren’t for the fact that I was very shy around girls, and I’m sure some of this came from the fact that, as I got older, I was still a virgin. I remember hearing a story during my first term at Trinity about a girl who broke up with a guy as soon as she found out he had never had sex, and it seemed to make perfect, depressing sense to me.

Starting college and knowing that the practical obstacles had largely gone now, was no relief to me because at this point, I was beyond nervous, I was terrified. “What if I don’t know what to do? I mean, I know what to do, but can I do it? What if she laughs at me? What if she tells people?” The burden of virginity is something a lot of young people feel: a gay friend of mine, Connor, said that, “It did get to a point where I was in a (crappy) relationship and felt ready, but the other guy didn’t want the responsibility of taking my virginity. I became very frustrated that I hadn’t lost my virginity, not because of peer pressure or societal expectation, but more because I felt none of my relationships could progress with this hanging over them.”

While in some ways I found the initial college experience liberating, a chance to perhaps not look like the awkward virgin I felt myself to be, college is also a place where it is taken for granted that you will get rid of this burden, if you haven’t already. Sex columns like this one, while so good for discussing a variety of different experiences, seemed not to represent my own experience, and even rubbed it in. Aidan, for example, thought that, “Because sex is taken as a given to be something that everyone is regularly taking part in and everyone is totally cool with, not being on that same wavelength distinctly separates you from the herd. Lecturers joke about sex, condoms are handed out in society gift bags… It’s not that I begrudge that this positive outlook on sex has become the norm. It’s just that what for most people is a positive thing is this reminder of how I’m different from those people. I remember a tutor once made a comment that ‘It’d be hard to find a virgin in Trinity’. I wasn’t upset by it really, it’s just that immediately following that I was suddenly hyper-aware of how non-normal I was.” I think that is what it comes down to: feeling non-normal. I remember talking to a friend of mine, and a couple of his friends had very recently lost their virginities; they made a joke in front of him about sex, and then they fist bumped each other and told my friend he wouldn’t get it, he wasn’t in “the club”. All this was right in front of a girl he fancied. College is full of jokes about sex, and virginity, and some are more harmful than others.

When it finally happened for me, as well as being delighted I was having sex at last, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that I was no longer the butt of other people’s jokes. My insecurities about my masculinity were not suddenly gone, but I did feel like I had something less to worry about. It wasn’t a physical change at all, but a mental one, and I feel that if virginity were a subject that could be approached without feelings of shame or humiliation, some of the emotional pressure that surrounds the issue would be removed.

Illustration by Henry Petrides, http://www.witch-island.com