Does your first time have to be special?

"I had vaginal intercourse for the first time when I was 15. It took place after school in a teenage boy’s room and was altogether very unromantic and uneventful. When I was researching virginity and writing about it for my thesis, I was astonished by how much pomp and circumstance people expected from their first time. 

While I don’t think there’s anything inherently harmful about wanting a special experience, I do think it’s dangerous to perpetuate the idea that losing it under unspectacular circumstances somehow compromises your dignity. It’s simply not true that the “magic” of first-time sex is irreplicable nor is it easy to delineate what even constitutes sex when you have purity pledgers engaging in rousing games of Just The Tip."

- Writer Lena Chen, answering a reader's question about how she lost her virginity. The reader recently had intercourse for the first time with someone she wasn't in a relationship with, and she's not sure how to interact with him now. 

Read Lena's full response at her wonderful blog The Chicktionary. You'll see and hear more from her in our film!

Fromt the archives: What's this film all about? A bounty of Q&As will answer all your questions (except what color dress Therese finally wore at her wedding)

As we work though the tough process of boiling down 70 hours of interviews and Miley Cyrus videos into an hour-long film, I've been looking back at some of the things we've been writing about. This is a pretty good distillation of the things that have driven me batty enough to do this film. So for those of you just joining us, a little distillation and review:



I want to thank a group of fantastic bloggers who have spread the word about our project far and wide. A few of them did Q&As with me, and their questions were so good, they made my brain hurt. Here are some of the hopefully smart-sounding answers I produced in response.



From Amanda Hess's The Sexist who asked about the different meanings of virginity in the contexts of abstinence pledging, porn and the wedding industry:



Therese: I think they’re remarkably similar in that they all work within the fantasy of female sexual purity as something to be fetishized. They have different props—the Big White Wedding Dress, porn’s white panties, and the purity ring—but all use a sort of ritualized process whereby a symbolically virginal female is offered up to a male for deflowering. I say symbolic because the porn actress is definitely not a virgin, we’re pretty certain that most modern brides aren’t either, and given our shaky definition of the V-word, we might not even consider some purity pledgers to be totally chaste. But it’s the fetishization of all three that really fascinates me. For whose benefit is it this being played out?



From Australian journalist Rachel Hills' Musings of an Inappropriate Woman about mainstream media coverage of virginity and female sexuality:



Therese: There’s still a lot of alarmist hand-wringing about so-called ‘hookup culture,’ the evils of young women having casual sex, and the death of relationships. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with it. I think most of us find ourselves in all sorts of sexual situations in our lives, some good, some bad. Instead of talking about how many partners someone has had, it’s more important to talk about consent, doing things because you want to, not because you’ve been coerced, or you think all your friends are doing it so you have to as well. I’ve read that about 1/3 of college students identify as virgins, which is a far cry from the media portrayal of college as one big scary female-soul-crushing orgy.



And from Kyna Morgan's blog about women filmmakers Her Film who asked about the origins of the film from a personal perspective:



Therese: I was planning my own wedding at the time of the shooting, and was getting a little freaked out by all the chastity-based wedding rituals and coded wedding accessories. What would it mean for me to embrace the white dress, don a veil, and be ‘given away’? What would that say about my own sexual autonomy and identity? It echoes the narration of I Was a Teenage Feminist where I refer to myself as “a woman who feels incredible pressure to conform to an ideal that I don’t even buy into. Is it possible to be who I want to be without judgment, or apology or compromise?”



And this post written by Melanie Klein at Feminist Fatale on why the film is important amidst our culture's contradictory messages about sex:



Melanie: These manufactured, one-dimensional images of heterosexual sexuality constantly shoved down my throat (no pun intended). Running parallel to the cultural obsession with sex (and nude or near-nude ladies that grace countless magazine covers, billboards and populate advertisements), is the obsession with female virginity (so much so that many women opt to have their virginity restored via plastic surgery).

Clearly, with all this sex out there, the important issues regarding sex and sexuality are glossed over and given little media coverage. What remains in the public eye remains a vapid, one-dimensional image of sexuality and a perpetual reinforcement of the good girl/ bad girl (madonna/whore dichotomy)



[With thanks to superintern/editor Sara for her help!]

We're still here, just a bit busy!

Things at Trixie HQ have been rather hectic now that we're officially into editing mode. So, we haven't been posting that much but hope to again very soon!



In the meantime, we're still highlighting the good, bad and appalling of virginity news across the globe on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow our the Twitter feed in the right column of this page.



We'd love your submissions to our First Person series about sexual debuts and deferrals. Just send us an email and we'll let you know what we need. Or check out the format here. And last but not least, feel free to browse some of our favorite post categories: Older Virgins, Hymenology and Virgin Mary Sightings.



Got story ideas or want to guest post? Email us!

Can we say 'Thank You' again?

Just wanted to make sure you saw our video homage to all our awesome Kickstarter donors. Thanks to you all, we ended up raising over $13,000 towards the editing of our documentary "How To Lose Your Virginity." The list of donors is here and we're now hard at work making the most of those hard-earned dollars in the edit room.

And speaking of Kickstarter, I'm going to be on a panel talking about how to have a successful campaign (did you know only 60% of projects reach their funding goals?) More details to come on this NYC event.