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“She just needs a good fuck,” a friend said of Charlotte, Sex and the City’s archetypical romantic. “Why is she waiting for Prince Charming?” asked another.
It was 2006, and my friends and I—all 20-somethings—were huddled around a tiny laptop screen watching reruns of Sex and the City.
It was one of the many times in my life when I wondered if I should admit I was still a virgin. But I didn’t feel like answering the barrage of questions likely to follow. But have you had oral sex? Yes. Anal sex? No. Have you experienced trauma? Probably. Are you asexual? No. Do you have a libido? Yes. Are your expectations too high? High enough. Are you doing it for God? No.
I answered these questions (and many more) until I had sexual intercourse at the age of 41. I wasn’t waiting for marriage, but I was waiting for a mutually loving and committed relationship. I hadn’t yet found what I was looking for (at the right time), and I wasn’t going to let my hormones, alcohol, social pressure, or FOMO make the decision for me. Like many of my single female friends, I had my own issues—namely longing for unavailable men. But I consciously chose not to use sex to validate my self-worth or escape my insecurities. It was my work to do, not the work of any of the many men I’d dated in my 25 years on the dating market.
But peers questioned my agency. I just didn’t fit. As my friend Jennifer Horton—a 67-year-old lesbian raised in Boulder, Colorado, at the height of the hippy era—told me just last month, “The sexual revolution made it harder for women to say no without being judged.” Has growing up in the era of sex-positive feminism made it easier or harder for women to follow their own paths?
I’m not the only one wondering. In a piece published last fall titled “Why Sex-Positive Feminism Is Falling Out of Fashion,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that “sex-positive feminism became a cause of some of the suffering it was meant to remedy.” In Christine Emba’s recent essay “Consent Is Not Enough. We Need a New Sexual Ethic” (an excerpt from her new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation), the Washington Post writer argues that the current sexual climate, in which “there seems to be wide agreement among young adults that sex is good and the more of it we have, the better,” has led to a culture in which consent is a disappointing baseline. Emba argues that kindness should trump consent when it comes to choosing to have sex—that just getting consent is not enough. In a response to Emba’s book, Goldberg takes it further: “What passes for sex positivity is a culture of masochism disguised as hedonism. It’s what you get when you liberate sex without liberating women.”
In theory, sex-positive feminism means being empowered to choose when, where, and with whom to have safe, pleasurable, and consensual sex. The focus is on consciously making a choice—whether it’s having lots of emotionally detached sex or waiting for a particular level of commitment. But as Goldberg and Emba point out, that’s not the way the story always goes. Instead, women are told that empowerment lies in action, not abstinence. There is little room in the modern incarnation of sex-positive feminism for so-called vanilla sexual tastes. Entire sexual orientations have been invented to include individuals who used to be considered average. Take, for example, the demisexual—someone who doesn’t feel a sexual attraction unless there’s an emotional connection. Is that actually unusual? We aren’t all wired to be SATC’s Samanthas, says psychologist and Stanford lecturer Meag-gan O’Reilly: “If we are not careful, we can find ourselves forced to meet sexual standards that are not our own. This diminishes our genuine connectivity with our body, our true needs, and our self-worth.”
“There’s a part of owning your sexuality that means knowing when you want to say, ‘I don’t want to engage in this,’” says Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute. However, in the last few decades, he notes, people whose sexual feelings seemed less than normal have felt immense pressure to engage in sexual relationships or take libido-enhancing hormones. Now, there are more American adults remaining sexually inactive in their early life, as examined in a 2018 Atlantic story. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Survey of Family Growth, 25% of single American women haven’t had a sex partner for two or more years, while more than 10% haven’t had a partner for five or more years.
At 35, I wrote an essay titled “Does My Virginity Have a Shelf Life?” for The New York Times. The piece elicited many attacks, but it also elicited many emails of thanks, from women and men who wrote, “It’s a relief to know I’m not alone.” Recently, I reached out to several of these women to find out where the current sense of sex positivity had left them.
Amy Chauhan, 40, was one of them who waited into her late 30s to lose her virginity. Although she’s a Sikh, she says she wasn’t waiting for God’s blessing. “I was waiting to feel safe. To feel like, I trust this person,” she told me. (“Having partners that you feel a sense of excitement and risk around is great, but that’s also often not sustainable, long-term,” says Garcia.) Amy was criticized for her choices. “There’s this perception that if you’re a virgin, you’re going to be a stage-five clinger,” she says. She made a point of discussing intimacy with men she dated, but when she told the people she was dating that she was still a virgin, they appeared often to bolt. Her perception is backed up by research: A 2016 Kinsey Institute study found people who are sexually inexperienced start to face bias on the dating market once they reach their mid 20s. Potential partners found them flawed. “In decades past, virginity had a certain virtue to it. Now it sort of feels at times more like a scarlet letter,” says Garcia.
In her 30s, Amy began questioning why she was attracting partners who abandoned her. “I felt like I was an alien. I wondered if I was asexual, but I had sexual desire,” she says. Her own view of her body may have influenced the partners she was attracting, she says. When Amy was 12, she got her first period, but it faded away until she got on birth control in college. “That area of my body I felt very disconnected from,” she says. Five years of therapy, she says, helped her reconnect: “I had always felt like there was a defect.” On Amy’s 37th birthday, she lost her virginity to a man with whom she’d forged a long-distance friendship of ten years. That man is now her husband. “Having sex was not his only objective. It wasn’t the way he was going to feel his worth in a relationship with me,” she says.
Ali (44), a pseudonym, is another woman who wrote to me. She is still a virgin and says that while she’s come close to having sex, she’s waiting for marriage. Her Christian faith motivates this choice: “It’s a decision that has constantly evolved as I’ve evolved as a person. It’s not a decision made once and then put in a drawer.” Fear of judgment leads her to keep this decision mainly to herself. “I’m not traumatized. I’m not a fundamentalist Christian: I’m a reasonably well-adjusted person who has made a difficult but fulfilling choice. Me placing value on sex is no reflection on the value you place on sex.” And when friends ask her, “What if you never get married?” Ali says, “I don’t operate in what ifs. I can’t operate in what ifs and maintain my faith.”
In her mid-thirties, Ali realized her decision might affect her fertility. “I got to the point where I was actually content with not having kids,” she says. To those who tell her she’s repressed or damaged, she says her choice is the most counter-cultural thing she’ll ever do. “How could I be any more sex-positive than by placing the value I’ve put on the act?”
Anah (31), a pseudonym, had started trying to have sex with her boyfriend of two years when she was 22. She’d get aroused when fooling around, had no issue with oral sex, but had panic attacks anytime they would try vaginal sex. Safety wasn’t an issue. She was so comfortable with her boyfriend that she had him examine her vagina with a flashlight one day to make sure it was ok. “I was very concerned something was wrong with me,” she recalls. It seemed plausible she might be asexual, so she went to her gynecologist. “I asked her if I could get a blood test and see if my hormones were off. And my gynecologist was just like, ‘Oh, you’re fine. You’ll get there. And once you have it, you’ll desire it.’”
Anah was with her boyfriend for seven years before they split ways—never having had sexual intercourse. She attributes her anxiety around sex to OCD tendencies and her anxious attachment style. “I worry I’m going to do something wrong and then they’re going to leave me,” she says. Last fall, while casually dating a guy she felt really comfortable with, Anah says she was able to have sexual intercourse. “A few years ago, I thought I was an outcast. Now, I’m realizing that sex is different for everyone,” she says.
I also reached out to the woman who had, inadvertently, prompted me to reevaluate my values all those years ago, while watching Sex in the City. “I think one of the worst things for women is that they’ve been divided into, ‘I’m holy sex positive, and I’m up for anything’ or ‘I’m a prude, and I’m saving it for my husband,’” says Candace Bushnell. “There’s so much pressure on women now to have sex and enjoy it.” Agency is the key, she insists. Bushnell planned to have sex for the first time on her 18th birthday, and says it was “the best way to do it.” Following her divorce, she was intentionally celibate for five years. “I was like, I’m taking a break. I don’t want to have sex with somebody and then have expectations. They’re going to disappoint me.”
In July 2019, I flew to Huahine, a tiny island in French Polynesia, to have sex for the first time. I was 41 and he was 46. There was something empowering about being so far away from routine and deliberately choosing who, when, and where that made it easier to explore a new part of me with a man I fully trusted—a man who unconditionally loved me. It was full of meaning and that in itself was orgasmic. Sexual empowerment lies in freely making a choice to act or abstain, not in living up to an expectation set by anyone else.
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