Addressing the stigma of being a virgin at uni

You can see it in the discussions of body counts, in humble bragging and patronising reassurances. In awkward laughs and casual hints dropped. It has to be said: there’s an ever-present stigma of virginity at university, and it’s pretty damn harmful. Its main manifestation is considering others or yourself as less worthy or less desirable than others if you or they haven’t yet had sex. It can be conscious or unconscious, often the latter, and grants a halo of superiority, of exclusivity, to those who have.

Which in some ways is strange, because physiologically, sex is nothing. It’s like eating or breathing or scuba diving or buying Palmolive aloe vera soap, it’s just something people do. It’s not defining, there’s no test you can do to prove you’re a virgin or not. But of course, psycho-sociologically it’s a gigantic anxiety-inducing social-status-determining monster.

It stems from the age-old religious association of virgins with purity and untaintedness (in the vast majority of cases for women; it is unsurprisingly steeped in patriarchalism and sexism too). Nowadays as we grow up, sex is forbidden and naughty, behind-the-scenes only, so when we asyoung adults do get in the sheets we are rewarded with a sense of breaking the rules, of being brave and different.

The result of this stigma is primarily feelings of shame, low self-confidence and self-doubt. It also leads to a poor experience of sex, because if you do it as soon as possible, with a person you don’t want to do it with, when you don’t actually want to do it, all to be able to say you have done it, no way is it going to be enjoyable. It also leaves people feeling isolated when they can’t contribute to conversations and feel left out of jokes.

I think this phenomenon is all the more worse at uni, especially in first year, because all of a sudden you have a big mix of people with all kinds of backgrounds, experiences and expectations, so inevitably there will be comparisons and therefore judgement. There are also so many unfamiliar things going on when you start uni, from new friendship groups to academic pressure, which could make you even more vulnerable to self-criticism.

The way we talk about virginity doesn’t help either; you lose it, you take it away, and you are defined by a whole noun based only upon whether you’ve done one single activity. With the concept of virginity, having sex gives you a whole new status, enforcing the idea of a big change, a before and an after. With the value we place on it, no wonder it has so much power over us.

As a solution, I propose to normalise and neutralise. If we talk about sex more and accept it as a standard part of life, maybe the thought of it won’t be so tantalising and people won’t feel like they’re missing out. Likewise, we need to force ourselves to not let it change our opinion of others, to not let it change our opinion of ourselves. Make a concerted effort to change your mindset, because if you keep following this same social construct that everybody else follows, you’ll be unhappy if you haven’t had sex and you’ll still be unhappy when you do. There you have some tough love for good lovemaking.