A Death to the Commodity of Virginity

It is my father’s birthday and there are dark puddles of blood all over my parent’s bed, messy splotches seeping into the petal-pink sheets that my mother pulls and burns and heats flat and smooth before forcing them onto the mattress. They are stretched tight and thin, tortured into perfection and obedience just like everything else in the house, just like my body currently spread over the mattress on top of them.

I don’t know enough to be embarrassed or ashamed of the blood yet. After all Mr. Walsh had hammered home that men’s sexual desire and demand is righteously insatiable—a God-given drive that must be cheerfully, instantly, constantly satisfied by their chosen women or else the shame and responsibility of their straying—and the outsourcing to another woman, or prostitute—will be justifiably, directly laid at the feet of she-who-will-not-put-out.

Since periods are completely natural—happening to everyone with a uterus, taking up nearly one week of each month—and they virtually guarantee a pregnancy-free romp, I assume period-sex is as common as jello at a church potluck. The idea that men would want—or would even be able—to skip that week doesn’t even remotely occur to me. I am still blissfully naïve to the millions of ways women can learn to feel bad about the millions of ways their natural bodies can fall short of men’s sexual expectations. Those desires they have that you can’t fill—through no fault of your own—but for which you will be judged and held responsible anyway.

I will learn all of that later.

Right now Nick and I are awkwardly Jackson Pollocking our way through my defrocking. We have only been together—if you can call it that—for a couple weeks but I made sure he knew I was on the accelerated track—in the AP class—with sex, as with everything else. Not surprisingly, he did not object.

For someone who could tally fewer kisses than fingers at that point, I had learned to give a blowjob amazingly fast. I was fascinated by the process. Nick expressed surprise that I swallowed. I had no idea what he meant and was mystified that somehow there was another option. I also didn’t realize there was a reciprocal event until Nick mentions that he and his football buddies didn’t give oral sex, it’s gross. I’m not sure what he means by any of that but I do take to heart that there is something apparently unsavory about my female parts. So oral sex for me is thus immediately taken off the option list. Plus, I am not into wild experimentation or variety right now. I have a rigidly narrow focus: a one-point agenda. And here I am, on the cusp of graduating!

Nick is sweetly wary as we warm up, asking multiple times if I am quite sure this is what I want. He is clearly afraid I will freak out on him, like that girl everybody knows with the really long hair who theatrically insists on getting a pixie cut and then afterward screams and cries in a ball on the floor for hours and won’t go to school for weeks. I laugh and assure him I am not that girl, nor will I imprint on him like a baby duckling, insisting that God has made him my husband.

And so we proceed a bit mechanically. He is gentle and slow. Kind but still hesitant. Does he feel an overwhelming responsibility to make sure my first time is good? It never occurs to me that his hesitancy might be him hoping, waiting, inviting me to participate in some manner. I know I am supposed to enjoy it, which I try self-consciously to express, but to actually display agency or action, to express any needs or desires of my own—is way above my pay grade.

I have never spent so much time in my parents’ room—it is not forbidden necessarily but definitely not inviting—and I realize looking around that it is a bewilderingly girlish, feminine space with a cabbage-rose comforter and curved white furniture. I cannot picture my father in this room. I shudder, shake my head clear—I do not want my thoughts to go there.

For someone who has learned to secretly, covertly plan everything in life, being in their bedroom hadn’t crossed my mind. It just happened that my parents suddenly took their only joint, kidless trip in my memory—together to California to celebrate Dad’s birthday—and it worked out to be a crime of opportunity.

I am brought back to the task at hand when Nick asks if it hurts. I am stumped. I have no idea, honestly, and I couldn’t care less if it hurts. I am so excited that I can’t feel a thing. It is not sexual excitement—I don’t know what that is. It is the frenzied god-awful escape, the release of all that pent-up and forbidden “No” after so many years of choking on it.

I am not giving my virginity away: it is not a gift and it is not being taken. I am giddily destroying it, tossing it aside, throwing it out. Determinedly, viciously ridding myself of it once and for all. It is the opening of decades worth of sex without desire or love: sex with a statement, sex with an agenda, sex with vengeance. The stupefyingly simple act was not just a rite of passage; it was the rage in me that would take years to work out. But again, I won’t know that until later either.

We finish with his orgasm.

I feel so accomplished.

Lying back in the crimson-saturated embrace of permapress pink cotton, I wait for guilt. I wait for that huge emotional love connection that is supposed to immediately form when I’ve “given myself away,” to feel that piece they always warned would be ripped from my wholeness with each unholy union, leaving me in moral and emotional tatters.

I wait for something, anything.

Nothing.

We are silent.

But it wasn’t about the experience or the feelings anyway.

It was about the act, just as with everything else in my life: the only meaning was in the performance, the achievement. And I had DONE IT. This act, this THING that was so huge, so fraught, so storied, so shamed and feared and forbidden—so managed and administered and ruled. It didn’t belong to me, there was nothing personal about it. It had been utterly depersonalized for years on end with so much management, so much baggage, so much moral weight and infinite rules.

And so I am simply, wildly proud of myself for having no feeling attached whatsoever.

I win.

I start giggling.

Nick looks concerned. He is undoubtedly head-gaming the teen sex-romp-movie playbook. Is the girl about to go psycho? Should he leave quickly? Is she laughing at him?

No. She is not.

She is thinking about how the Israelites used to heap their sins on the head of a goat and then slit its throat in sacrifice on the Temple alter. And she is laughing that she herself has taken that great and most precious sacrificial commodity she has—the chastity and kept-ness of a Christian woman—and she has slaughtered it in her parents’ bed, enlisting a heathen to help her bleed it out.

The bed sure ended up looking like someone died in there.

And that was one way to look at it.

Adapted with permission from Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows, by Melssa Duge Spiers.