Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences by Laura Carpenter Page A

curiosity.” Though attractive to women, he had kissed his hometown sweetheart, Helen, only once, “a silly peck on the check.” 89 His roommate, Carl Peters, is a charming reprobate by con- trast. A “good-looking, sophisticated lad” from a nouveau-riche family,

    Carl bedecks his side of their room with “photographs of the ‘harem’” and freely admits, “I drink and gamble and pet.” 90 When Carl implies “by sly innuendos that there wasn’t anything that he hadn’t done,” Hugh feels “a slight disapproval—and considerable envy.” 91 Yet, he is relieved to find out that Carl, too, is a virgin.
    But it isn’t long before Carl loses his virginity, one drunken night on summer vacation. Hugh finds him “neither better nor worse for his ex- perience,” and thus increasingly questions his own “very strict” sexual standards. 92 But he’s not sure what path to follow. Some of his classmates applaud men like Carl and “hate to admit they’re pure,” while others speak ill of “dirty” fellows who “chase around with rats” (cheap women) or even disapprove of petting altogether. 9 3 Hugh wavers, neither wanting to be a virgin when he marries nor wishing to have sex without love. Over time, he learns to flirt and pet with sophisticated girls and falls in love with Cynthia Day, blithely ignoring warnings that “Cynthia runs with a fast crowd.” 94 After a heady evening of dancing and drink at the Sanford junior prom, Cynthia asks Hugh to “take me somewhere.” 95 They are in- terrupted before they can have sex, and Cynthia subsequently ends the re- lationship, fearing that they are motivated by “sex attraction” rather than love. A year later, despite the possibility that Cynthia has lost her virgin- ity with another man, still-virgin Hugh considers her worthy of a mar- riage proposal (which she declines).
    Mainstream American beliefs about virginity loss had clearly changed since the days of Sister Carrie. By the mid-1920s, Victorian standards no longer governed the sexual lives of White middle-class youth, although the precise details of the new sexual regime remained open to debate. Middle-class youth were embracing the hitherto working-class practices of dating, extensive sexual intimacy before marriage, and a weakened double standard. 96 Conventional morality still favored premarital virgin- ity, especially for women. But nonvirgin women like Cynthia Day were no longer automatically labeled immoral or unmarriageable; and the growing equation of masculinity with sexual prowess prompted more than a few middle-class men to follow their working-class brothers in re- jecting premarital virginity as a personal ideal and using “boastful talk of sex conquests” to “confirm their masculinity among other men.” 97 The moral definitions of virginity loss that prevailed during the Victorian era had fallen by the wayside, in favor of primarily physiological definitions equating virginity loss with first vaginal sex. 98

    Underlying these new approaches to virginity loss were the growing consensus that marital love ought to be erotic and that women were sex- ual by nature. The socioeconomic changes of the late 1800s had, along with the suffragist and social-purity movements, greatly expanded edu- cation opportunities for women of all social classes and brought White middle-class women into the paid labor force in record numbers. At the same time (and not unrelated), fertility among native-born Whites plum- meted, aided by the popularization of birth control. 99 Perceiving the White American family to be in crisis, many turn-of-the-century social critics recommended a new type of marriage, emphasizing personal ful- fillment over family formation and perpetuated by bonds of companion- ship and erotic affection. 100 Positing “a satisfying sex life” as “essential for” rather than antithetical to “a satisfying marital union” would not, in turn, have been possible if middle-class Americans