9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important subject, April 7, 2007
This review is from: The First Time: Women Speak Out About "Losing Their Virginity" (Hardcover)
At the time this book came out (1993), there really wasn't a lot of literature available about this important rite of passage for women. In spite of a wealth of books on sexual topics, there had been precious few written about the initiation into sexual activity and what it really meant to women. In the course of writing this book, Ms. Bouris sent out a thousand questionnaires and got back over 150, from women from all walks of life (though in spite of having tried to get a broad racial mix, only 9% of the respondents were African-American, 3% Asian, and 3% Hispanic, with the remaining 85% white). The women were of a wide variety of ages, professions, geographic locations, and religions, but the one thing they had in common was the experience of first sexual activity. The mean, median, and mode age was seventeen (the oldest was 26), and though a number of the women reported having their first and only experience with their husbands, only three were actually wedding-night virgins, in spite of the outright lie and historical revisionism some people bandy about, how almost all women allegedly saved themselves for marriage until the women's liberation movement started in the late Sixties. Also contrary to the fantasy depicted on tv, the movies, and in romance novels, most first times were not ideal, romantic, or earth-shattering.
The book is divided up into the categories "Wedding Nights--or Almost," "Pressure from All Directions," "A Conscious Choice," "Just Get It Over With," "Violation in All Its Forms," "Women Loving Women," and "The Romantic Minority." Many of the women who responded to the questionnaire were pressured into having sex, had insensitive partners, lost their virginity as a result of childhood sexual abuse or date-rape, didn't anticipate how their bodies and minds would respond even if they had planned their first encounter and had thought they were ready physically and emotionally, had sex just because they felt they were the last virgins left at their age or because they didn't want to have an awkward self-conscious painful clueless first time with someone they truly loved, wanting to get it over with with no one special, and had bad first times because they were too embarrassed or ignorant to communicate with their partners about their needs and wants. Very few had the ideal romantic first time, married or not, depicted in romance novels and the movies. You never find a movie or romance novel where the first time is painful, fumbled, awkward, regretted, or anything less than beautiful, perfect, and fireworks going off in the background. And yet for all of the sad stories about young women who had their first sexual experience before they were ready or had their right to decide when to become sexually active stolen from them by child molesters or rapists, there are also positive stories. We also have a great chapter on lesbian first times (including some women whose first times were with men but felt their more significant sexual awakening came from being with other women); it's high time society dropped the notion that one can only lose one's virginity as a result of heterosexual intercourse. I highly doubt that a woman who has been with another woman for 20 years and had several female lovers before that would still consider herself to be a virgin just because she'd never slept with a man.
The book concludes with a chapter on the term "losing your virginity." For awhile now I haven't really been fond of the term, but couldn't really pinpoint just why till reading this book. It's a feudal patriarchal anachronism, centered on women and the control of their sexuality. How often do people talk about men losing their virginity? It's a holdover from an era when women were property and it would be considered grounds for divorce or a lowered dowry if the bride were found to not be a virgin, and when people believed that the absense of blood automatically meant a woman was not a virgin. And many women don't feel they lost anything when they became sexually active; rather, they gained something powerful and special. The term also focuses on the physical event and not the emotional change that occurs, and reinforces the ridiculous double standard many people still have about women's sexuality, wherein women are expected to be virgins until marriage, not considered marriage material if they're not, yet men are expected to bring all of their prior sexual experience to the marriage and aren't considered real men if they haven't slept around. Who are they supposed to get all of this experience with if "good girls" aren't supposed to be having premarital sex?
The book concludes with a discussion on what we can learn from these shared stories, such as how to better teach the younger female generation more positive things about their own sexuality, how readers who may still be uninitiated can guarantee having the type of ideal first time that those in the "Romantic Minority" chapter did, the concept of fulfilling sex without heterosexual intercourse, and teaching both boys and girls about responsible consensual sex. This book is actually a very good tool for promoting waiting until one is ready (whether or not one is married when it happens), far more effective than any preachy moralising or inaccurate scare-tactics and lies used in the "abstinence-only" programs so in vogue now, programs which foster that same type of unhealthy and unrealistic either-or paradigm of sexuality that many of these young women had to deal with and ended up making unwise decisions because of it. It's a shame such an important book is out of print.
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