I have a confession to make, which will probably come across as a bit strange considering my line of work, but here it is: for all intents and purposes, I am a virgin. All of the guys I’ve kissed (none of the girls, mostly because I never felt like I had to tell them in order to get them to slow the fuck down) have been shocked by this information because, apparently, I’m “so hot.” The friends I told in college were also surprised, mostly because I talked about sex a lot (maybe to make up for the fact that I wasn’t having any of it).

Now that I’m out of college and less prone to sharing my business (unless it’s anonymously to strangers on the internet), I don’t really tell new people I meet unless I feel like it’s absolutely necessary or we become very close and I trust them a lot. This is mostly because I think oversharing is a bad habit to get into. I also am very sick of hearing how “shocked” people are and receiving their reassurances that it’ll be easy for me to lose it if I just put in a little effort. I’ve literally had guys beg me to fuck them. I know exactly how easy it would be and that’s part of why I’m not interested.

One of the best reactions I’ve gotten to telling someone I’m a virgin actually came from my co-worker Javi. He just asked me why. It was a very simple question, but it was perfect. It jumped straight past all of the surprise and the assumptions to get right at the heart of the matter. It was a response that showed he didn’t care about societal expectations and what was normal for other people. Instead, he cared about me and my personal reasons for not having had sex yet and nothing else beyond that.

Of course, I’ve had other friends react to the information really well in different ways, but before Javi, no one had ever asked me ‘why’ so directly. This meant that I had never really been forced to articulate my reasons out loud before. What I ended up saying was, “I’ve just never really wanted to before,” and this is true, but that was certainly an oversimplification.

The thing is, I’ve wanted to have sex in an abstract sort of way for as long as I can remember. I started reading romance novels when I was about eleven and I would feel tingly all over and then begin to touch myself when I got to the scene where the hero and the heroine finally made love. This should have prepared me well enough for health class, but all of the descriptions of sex in the romance novels were so euphemistic that I was completely unprepared to find out that sex (in the heteronormative sense) actually involved putting something inside me. My poor, prudish mother had no idea what to say to me when I came home a few weeks into eighth grade crying to her about penises.

Maybe, if I had been able to put a tampon in when I got my period, this penetrative revelation wouldn’t have been so horrifying to me. However, all of my attempts to staunch the flow of blood with a tiny little cotton penis were excruciating, so I figured the real thing would be much, much worse. Around the same time, I also began having intrusive thoughts about being a lesbian which was confusing because I had spent my whole adolescence being obsessed with boys.

I spent most of high school agonizing over my new found attraction to girls and avoiding any kind of sexual encounters with people of any gender. My parents rule about not dating until I was sixteen gave me a convenient excuse for this abnormally un-horny behavior. All of my further efforts to put in a tampon were met with painful resistance, so I saw no reason to engage in behavior that led to other things getting put in my vagina.

When I was seventeen and a junior in high school, I started going out with a boy from the National Honor Society because we were sort-of friends and I figured that if he liked me, I might as well give him a shot. He actually asked me out to the Sadie Hawkins dance, which isn’t how that’s supposed to go, but he kind of had to because I certainly wouldn’t have done it. To this day, I think I’ve only ever made the first move by accident.

Our relationship was so insubstantial that I hesitate to even call it a relationship. All we really did was sit in his basement and watch movies and sometimes hang out at school together. I think we went ice skating once. He attempted to kiss me several times, but only truly succeeded at initiating a make out session when he asked me explicitly. I was a nervous wreck for the entirety of our short relationship and I don’t think I felt a single sliver of arousal. When I finally broke up with him, it was the hugest relief I’d ever felt.

After that, I finished high school with no further romantic entanglements and I still wasn’t able to put a tampon in. My whole menstruating life, my mom had insisted that I was just being a wimp about the tampons and I needed to try harder. I mostly believed her, but I decided that I wanted a second opinion before I moved away to college in the biggest city in the US with people whose body parts might want to find their way into my vagina.

To my mom’s guilty horror, there was something wrong with me and it had nothing to do with my low pain tolerance (martial arts has made me realize my pain tolerance is actually quite high). As it turned out, there was tissue blocking my vagina with only a small hole in it to let out my menstrual blood. Three different doctors had to poke around down there and still, the nature of the tissue blockage and what would be required to remove it remained unclear. Unfortunately, I was leaving for college the next day, so there was no time for follow up appointments.

Between that discovery and now, I’ve made out with quite a few people and found it at least somewhat enjoyable. The problem is that attraction doesn’t come easily or quickly to me. I think, in general, I find many more women to be aesthetically pleasing than men, but most of those women aren’t interested in women. Regardless of gender, I’ve never been actively in a situation where I’ve wanted to touch their genitals or have them touch mine (nevermind doing anything else with them).

The closest I’ve ever gotten to sex was in the spring of this year while I was in California. I was staying in a hostel with my brother and we met this wonderful German boy and spent the whole day with him exploring the city we were in. Afterwards, he texted me to ask me out on a date. We went out on one date and then, the next night, we got a hotel. I really liked him. I’d told him all about my inexperience and the fact that I couldn’t put anything in my vagina. We had all of our clothes off except our underwear and I felt completely safe, but there was still no part of me that wanted to see his penis.

A couple months later, after five years of attempting follow up appointments, I finally had my surgery. All of my friends were so excited for me, but, as relieved as I was to have it over with, I was scared. I realize now that having that obstruction was the perfect excuse for me not to confront my real reasons for not wanting to have sex. It’s not that I didn’t have sex because I couldn’t have penetrative sex and I didn’t want to have to explain my condition to people; it’s that I just have never wanted to.

After my surgery, I decided that it would be a good idea to put myself out there more. Start flirting more openly with people and see where things went. Dating apps were and always will be out of the question (I am incapable of developing an attraction to someone based solely on their pictures and a couple clever captions), so I knew I would need to try harder to make things happen with the people I meet in person. My experience with the German boy had made me more confident that, if I communicated my boundaries, I could have the kind of experiences I wanted to have.

Shortly after developing this new outlook on life, I met Josh. Amazing timing (or so I thought). For the first time in a long time, I was instantly attracted to a man. He had dark hair and tattoos. He was tall and incredibly fit. When he came up to talk to me he asked if the church we were standing across the street from was open. I told him I didn’t know and then asked if he was trying to go to church. He said, “Nah, I just like looking around in old churches” and I was done for. Even my friend (who I was waiting for when I met him) took one look at the guy and said, “Scarlett, if you’d made your perfect guy in a computer, that’s what he would look like.”

When we finally went out, I was so excited to be this new woman who didn’t get nervous on dates and didn’t blather on about her inexperience. I planned to set my boundaries without explaining myself at all. I should have known better with the way he was touching me already at the bar–on my legs, my thighs, my ass–but I really thought it would be like it was with the German boy. I didn’t stop him from touching me and I kissed him and held his hand with abandon because I was having a good time, he was beautiful, and he hated air conditioning just as much as I do.

When he asked if I wanted to go to another bar or go back to his place, I thought that the fact that he was giving me those two options meant he cared about what I wanted. I told him I wanted to go back to his place. On the way there, I told him I didn’t want to have sex. In my mind, that was enough to cover all the kinds of sex. Or at least enough to prompt him to clarify before attempting any of the ‘other’ kinds of sex.

At his apartment, I peed and then sat on his bed while he washed his hands. I suppose I should have sat down on the couch instead if I’d wanted to slow things down a bit, but I wasn’t thinking like that. I was so captivated by him and by his apartment (which was decorated exactly like some dark academia manic pixie dream boy’s bedroom from some indie movie would be), that it didn’t occur to me to be cautious. I thought that he would listen when I said no, no matter where were sitting.

One second we were making out and I was explaining that I haven’t done much and asking if we could just keep things there. He asked if I could take off my dress and bra and he could take off his shirt. I said yes. The next second his head was between my legs and he was pulling the crotch of my underwear to the side so he could go down on me. I was so shocked that he would ask about the clothes but not about this that I froze. I watched him do it like I was watching him do it to someone else and this thing that I had heard so much about, this experience that I’d been excited to have sometime down the road when I knew the person doing it to me really cared, felt like nothing. He might as well have been licking my toe for the amount of pleasure it gave me.

At that point, I figured that I might as well let him keep trying because he’d already started. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I wasn’t feeling it and when tried to stick a finger inside of me, I shook my head and pulled his hand away. He backed off and I thought that would be the end of it, but after a couple of moments, he tried again. And he kept trying, even when I told him about my surgery, even when I told him how recent the surgery was, even when I told him I’d barely even put my own fingers inside me. Eventually, I rolled onto my stomach and just lay there, completely shut down, unable to believe that this was really happening to me.

While I lay there, he took his dick out of his boxers and essentially tried to get me to give him a blow job. When that didn’t work, he got on top of me. I started to roll out from under him, but he pressed down on my shoulders and told me he was just giving me a massage. Everything in me wanted to believe him, believe that everything before had just been a misunderstanding and this was his apology. When I felt his dick between my legs, I knew I was wrong. I freaked out and started to get off the bed, to tell him I was leaving, but he begged me to stay, so I laid back down for a few moments and let him tell me he was sorry and hold my face and tell me how pretty I was.

The worst part of that whole thing is that, even after everything he did, even now, three months later, there is still a part of me that wants things to work out. That part of me is tiny now, but it was huge the night I left his apartment. It took all of my willpower and me repeating ‘he will fuck you in your sleep if you stay’ over and over again until I convinced myself to get out. What I felt for him was so rare that I would cut off a finger just to have had that night go differently. Yet, even with how attracted to him I was, I still didn’t want to see his dick.

The fact that somebody wanted me that badly was incredibly erotic, but what that desire turned into was terrifying. I know that a lot of people say that sexual assault and rape are about power and not attraction. Maybe this is the case a lot of the time, but I don’t think that this was the case with Josh. I think it was a case of him wanting me so badly that he sometimes forgot to see me as a complete person. Or, he thought that he was doing the poor, scared virgin a favor by introducing her to the delights of oral sex and fingering. Probably some combination of both.

Sometimes, when I masturbate (which is rarely now, for obvious reasons), I can’t help but reminisce about the moments with Josh before I realized he was well on his way to sexually assaulting me. Even some of the moments after. I hate that this happens because it’s confusing and makes me feel ashamed even though I know that all the ways of processing sexual assault are valid blah, blah, blah. In another way, however, it’s enlightening because it’s helping me to understand what I actually need in order to want to do the things that Josh forced on me.

Usually, when I masturbate, I take inspiration from erotic literature, hentai, or my own life (although that doesn’t offer much). Watching most live action porn does almost nothing for me because it is so emotionless. If you’ve read my erotica, you know I’m into some pretty kinky stuff, but that alone doesn’t get me off. What gets me off in the end is imagining all of that disgusting, brutal stuff being done to me by someone I love who I know loves me.

For a long time, I thought that there was something wrong with me. I thought that maybe I’d read too many romance novels or maybe I was psychologically fucked up by my tampon trauma. Now, I think that I’m probably somewhere on the asexual spectrum, probably demisexual. I’ve decided that I don’t care anymore what other people think about what I should be doing and I’ve decided that I want to wait until I’m married to have sex: any kind of sex.

This probably sounds crazy coming from someone who is not religious (although I was baptized Catholic, if that counts for anything), but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense for me. I see no reason to go around having sex when I don’t want to have sex and I think it’s unlikely that I will ever want to have sex with someone who I don’t also want to marry. Now, just to get it out of the way, I’m going to go through some of the reasons why people oppose waiting for marriage and rebut them:

1. Would you ever buy a car without test driving it? Okay, first of all, I’m not a car. My future partner is not a car. I understand the point of this analogy which is that you should try having sex with someone before you’re married in case it’s terrible and you hate it. I guess it is conceivable that this happens to people if they literally don’t do anything before they’re married, but that’s not the kind of ‘waiting for marriage’ I’m talking about. When I imagine ‘not having sex,’ I imagine doing everything else. Mutual masturbation, tying each other up, dry humping, cuddling naked, having long conversations about our kinks and fantasies, watching porn together, etc. There is a whole lot you can do without any kind of sex taking place. I like to think of it as a really long edging session.
   Besides, there is no way to prepare for every possible scenario in a marriage. Just because you’re ‘sexually compatible’ at the beginning of your marriage doesn’t mean you’re going to be like that forever. Things like depression, injuries, and pregnancy can make it so you have to start all over with your sexual relationship anyways. At many points in the relationship, sex will be the absolute last thing on both people’s minds, so everything else had better be really solid.
   
2. You’ll regret missing out on sexual experiences with other people. I can still experience sexual things with other people without having sex. Since I can count the amount of times I’ve actually wanted to do a sex act with someone in the heat of the sexual moment on exactly zero fingers, I don’t think I’ll be missing out on much except for sexual experiences I don’t want and won’t enjoy.
3. It’s going to be difficult. Maybe it will be difficult to wait when I meet someone who actually makes me want to have sex, but I doubt it will be so difficult that I give up. I enjoy a good challenge.
4. Waiting is an anti-feminist, archaic vestige of purity culture. Maybe this is true if the reason you’re waiting is because you believe you lose your value as a person if you let yourself get penetrated out of wedlock. However, that isn’t why I’m waiting. Yes, there is a part of me that finds the idea of saving certain experiences for the person I’m going to marry very romantic, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if I’m doing it because I want to and not because I feel pressured by religion/patriarchy. Besides, my idea of virginity is much more complex because I’m bisexual and I could end up marrying a woman. I think this automatically makes my style of waiting a bit more subversive, because the way I’m defining sex for myself is not based in heteronormative ideas of virginity loss.
5. What if you change your mind? One benefit of doing this for personal reasons and not religious or cultural reasons is that I can change my mind whenever the fuck I want. I think that what I want right now is to wait for marriage, so I’m going to communicate that. If for some reason, I decided I don’t want to wait anymore, then I won’t. And I won’t feel guilty if I change my mind because this whole waiting for marriage scheme is more about making sure that I don’t get myself into situations where I am having sex that I don’t want to be having than it is about keeping myself in packaging so I’m more valuable later.

The point of sexual liberation isn’t to stop pressuring people into abstinence only to pressure them into promiscuity instead. I’ve spent so long thinking that there must be something wrong with me, but I’m done thinking that. Regardless of my reasons behind it, there is nothing wrong with me for wanting to wait to have sex and for not prioritizing romantic relationships at this point in my life.

None of this is to say that my way is the right way and other peoples’ way is the wrong way. I am a huge advocate for approaching romance and sex in whatever way makes you feel happy and doesn’t fuck up your life. If you want to sleep around, go for it! If you want to be in a committed relationship with five people at once, do it! I just think it’s important to really take the time to make sure that the choices you’re making are because you want to make them and not because you want to please your parents or impress your friends or feel cool.

Regardless of your strategy, I hope that all of you are able to cultivate a beautiful, fulfilling love life (or lack thereof). If you feel like you’re struggling with this, just know that you are not alone; everyone is dealing with a crazy amount of baggage and everyone has a unique timeline for figuring this stuff out.

Thanks for reading.

XX Scarlett