Abstract
Secondary virginity—a sexually-initiated person’s deliberate decision to refrain from intimate encounters for a set period of time and to refer to that decision as a kind of virginity (rather than “mere” abstinence)—has largely eluded sociological scrutiny, despite its increasing popularity as a concept and practice among American youth. This study explores beliefs and experiences regarding secondary virginity, drawing on qualitative interviews with 61 socially diverse women and men, of whom four were avowed secondary virgins, five likened their experiences to a second virginity/virginity loss, and 16 had phenomenologically similar experiences which they did not frame in terms of virginity. Respondents who endorsed the concept of secondary virginity were disproportionately White conservative Christian women born after 1972. Secondary virginity reveals the social construction of gendered sexuality and the heterosexual imaginary as it reinforces privilege along gender, racial, religious, and sexual dimensions.
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Notes
The earliest reference to secondary virginity I found during my systematic reading of the historical literature and searches of library databases and other authors’ bibliographies comes from a 1973 Time article quoting psychologist Joel Moskowitz on women who postpone second acts of vaginal sex.
Bromley and Britten (1938) observed, but did not name, a similar phenomenon among women in the early 1930s.
Recognizing virginity and its loss as social constructions, I allowed participants to determine whether or not they should be viewed as a “virgin” or “non-virgin” (or neither, though no one chose that designation). This represents a dramatic departure from studies that place participants in “virgin” and “non-virgin” categories based on whether they have engaged in a particular act (typically vaginal intercourse) as opposed to the individual’s own subjective understanding.
Although sexuality identity is often (especially in popular parlance) used as a synonym for sexual orientation, the term also refers to a person’s sense of “What kind of sexual being am I?”
Certain constraints apply, of course. For example, it is difficult, though not impossible, to construct a gender identity that diverges from one’s biological sex (as pre-operative transgender men and women do) (Budgeon 2003).
Even so, numerous reformers endeavored to “save” such women, typically through employment in “respectable” occupations, as opposed to prostitution, one of the few options then available for unmarried women whose birth families did not support them (Nathanson 1991).
Ideals notwithstanding, from the 1920s onward, many women had sex with men they intended to marry (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988).
Loewenson et al. (2004) reported higher rates of secondary abstinence among boys than girls (3.3 and 2.0%, respectively); however, they did not limit that category to those actively committed to abstinence.
I have categorized Protestants as “mainline” (e.g., Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran) and “conservative” (e.g., Assemblies of God, Southern Baptist) according to the schema employed by Laumann et al. (1994).
Several raised the issue before I inquired. I neglected to ask one respondent, a 21-year-old, heterosexual, White, middle class, practicing Lutheran woman; she did not bring it up herself.
Three of the 29 dismissed the possibility of second virginity on both physiological and experiential bases.
Because most people who believed that virginity could be regained explicitly stated that this was not true of physiological virginity, I assume that virtually everyone who did not explicitly distinguish physiological virginity from mental, emotional, spiritual, or experiential virginity, believed that it is impossible to regain virginity in a strictly physical sense.
Surgical restoration of the hymen is not uncommon in societies where women’s premarital virginity is highly valued (e.g., Egypt, Turkey, Mexico) (see González-López 2005; Kandela 1996; Skene et al. 1994); it was performed by U.S. physicians as late as the early twentieth century (Brumberg 1997). On artificial hymens historically, see Gwilliam (1996).
Notably, both resistance to the idea of secondary virginity and the conviction that virginity can be lost through non-physical means resemble Victorian beliefs about (women’s) virtue and its fragile nature.
Another three men and one woman involuntarily refrained from further sexual encounters because their first partners refused to continue having sex with them. Even young people who want to engage in sexual activity often do so only sporadically when they first become sexually active (Laumann et al. 1994), typically as a result of limited opportunities. This was the case for 12 participants in my study.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Mary Bernstein, Robin L. Leidner, Constance A. Nathanson, and the editor-in-chief and anonymous reviewers for their assistance at various stages of this project.
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Carpenter, L.M. Like a Virgin…Again?: Secondary Virginity as an Ongoing Gendered Social Construction. Sexuality & Culture 15, 115–140 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-010-9085-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-010-9085-7