My freshman year bucket list, immortalized with a pencil scavenged off my college’s laundry room floor, was terse: commit to a major and lose my virginity.
I was 18 and hadn’t kissed anyone yet—and that felt mortifying. I had grown up in a Muslim household with a stifling mother who scowled at kissing scenes on television, then was wheeled off to an all-girls boarding school where the only boys I beheld were at sweaty mixers where teachers swung flashlights to expose pubescent fingers skulking their way under girls’ tops. College was my opening to play catch-up, free from chaperoned outings and my bedridden grandmother warning me that any body part a girl bears to the world “will be burned in hell.”
So, in that first semester, I spent countless mornings musing about how my first time would go now that I had the opportunity to make it happen. But while I was dreaming, the girls around me exulted sex lives in the real world—on top bunks, in the backseat of a senior’s car, on a dorm room floor while a pair of roommates took turns—not just in their heads over cafeteria toast. While I didn’t necessarily envy the dorm room floor bit, I admired these girls’ blasé attitudes toward sex and felt antsy to likewise rack up impressive exploits.
But as the semester tapered off into a colorless winter, the sex lives I once admired began to appear quite bleak as well. My best friend was distraught for days because her “perfect” date hadn’t texted her back since they slept together. Another friend anxiously paced about during midterms, waiting on STI results from the clinic. One friend slumped into a depressive episode that led to a Xanax overdose after she was sexually assaulted during a night out. Sex didn’t spare these girls from being stuck in their heads, either. Instead, they spent much time stewing, second-guessing, and spiraling.
Witnessing my friends become mired in sexual regret—as well as reading a deluge of #MeToo headlines the same year—prompted me to rethink the sexual nonchalance my generation had been sold. After all, the high-profile cases of sexual misconduct and the serial exposés of campus rape culture were publicly digested as nothing short of a moral scandal. If forcing sex on someone who doesn’t want it is unconscionable (and it is), then I figured there’s likewise something deeply wrong with young women having sex they might not truly want, but are partaking in because of social scripts.
Sure, we covered consent during orientation, but there’s also a throng of overarching sexual pressures that extended far beyond whether a particular guy is pushy or powerful—such as, if you’re not religious, sex is just what you’re supposed to do. Or, if you like a guy, sex is what you pony up to him en route to him “seeing where things go.” This is true and fine for some people, but the expectation of casual sex is somewhat of reckless notion when you consider that research has found that more than one-third of women feel that it “wasn’t the right time” the first time they had sex.
To ensure I truly wanted the sex I was having, I decided to hold off until it felt unquestionably right—even if it would take years. In response, plenty warned me that I was overthinking it, wasting my youth on a pipe-dream—that there would never be a “right” time and I ought to just rip the bandage off. But in recognizing the palpable social pressure to have sex, I was only steeled in my decision to wait. The temper tantrums of some of the men I went out with affirmed my decision as well.
One guy told me after a make out session that I stopped before it led to sex, that I was wasting my life away “inside a box.” Another, with the waistband of his jeans slung around his ankles, told me it’s “off-putting” to be a virgin at my age. I think what upset these men the most (besides blue balls) is that I transgressed their type-casting: I sported the clothing collection of an on-the-clock stripper, wasn’t averse to doing lines, ushered guys back to my flat for boozy sleepovers, and sometimes took off my underwear—in their minds, I wasn’t the sort of woman who deserved to wait.
This became obvious when I started an OnlyFans account and began selling indecent photos and videos of myself. On podcasts, I confessed that, despite being a sex worker, I’m still a virgin. In response, the comments steamed with presumptuous—mostly male—listeners rebuking me for “obviously lying” or, if they did believe me, rebuffing my virginity as “useless.” What they mean by useless is that I fail to appear as pure anyway, so there’s no point in preserving my virginity. And odds are that these commenters were hard-pressed to imagine why a woman would want to be a virgin beyond optics, because much of their outlook on sexuality is nothing more than a status-signaling accessory—sex with women is mangled into a body count, fitted with bragging rights, nudes sent by a girl is filched into fodder for the boys, time spent with women is flattened to social proof.
Of course, I was never a virgin to pass as pure to men. Truthfully, it turned my stomach any time a guy buttered me up about how much more “self-respect” I have than most girls, while they tried their best to stick it in every orifice in sight. And while countless people consider being on OnlyFans and being a virgin contradictory, the two run quite parallel for me, stemming from the same refusal to live for the sake of my dateability.
Having an OnlyFans is an obvious injury to my footing in the dating marketplace, as handfuls of men have foamed at the mouth to point out. But this has never bothered me—and it’s a shameless double standard that women are expected to care. Men don’t seem particularly concerned about whether their partners, current or future, will mind them watching porn (and some research suggests that half of women do mind)—it’s expected that women quell their jealousy while men steer with theirs.
And despite what the Manosphere might evangelize about men desiring virgins, in my experience, it docks you points in dating—that is, unless you’re willing to surrender it over to your date at the snap of his fingers. Once, an out-of-season athlete flew me out to a tiny town he was coaching some camp in. He’d taken me out for a few dinners already and assured me he wouldn’t be upset if I didn’t have sex with him during this trip. He did, however, crow that he’s deflowered over a dozen girls – “no pressure though.” By the fourth night of my trip—and countless unsuccessful attempts on his end to have sex with me, including giving me capfuls of GHB—he became livid. He mouthed off at me, fully erect, that I’m a tease, a freak, that no guy will ever want me for anything other than sex because I’m an “OnlyFans whore.” I figured he was probably not the best candidate for my first time.
He and others are enraged by the idea of an OnlyFans Virgin because it rattles their Madonna-whore complex: the belief that women are either respectable and marriageable (a Madonna), or not respectable and fuckable (a whore). The faith in this system is why the Manosphere often proselytizes that particular women—older, experienced, educated, well-traveled, mothers, or those with seasoned social media presences—are ‘recreational use only,’ and why some insist that, while almost all men will jerk off to a porn star, they would never marry one. Because the whore is esteemed as nothing more than a sexual release valve, many men believe she is, definitionally, not allowed to say no. It’s why when Sommer Ray called out a man for watching her while she worked out, she faced massive backlash, hot-blooded men declaring that she had no right to shoo away a lurker since she sexualizes herself on her social media accounts. It’s why, when Jonathan Leder allegedly forged Emily Ratajkowski’s signature on a consent form and released a book of revealing photographs he shot of her, he shrugged off the model’s accusations by implying it’s not possible for a woman like her to be a victim: “You do know who we are talking about, right?” he told New York Magazine. “This is the girl that… bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?” (Ratajkowski accused Leder of sexual assault, which he has denied.) When the public classifies a woman as a whore, she is shut out from the workings of consent. Thus, when an OnlyFans girl chooses to remain a virgin, it can enrage the people who buy into the belief that a woman like me has forfeited the right to say no.
But it’s not just women who sell sex who are taught to believe they can’t say no. My best friend in college, the one who was ghosted after sex, told me over dining hall frozen yogurt that she wished she was still a virgin because she “didn’t even realize it was an option.” It sounds more stupid than it is—after all, waiting isn’t really marketed to liberal women. Choice feminism ought to present this choice, though: that waiting to have sex is an option, even if you’re not religious, conservative, or a virgin. Otherwise, young women might find recourse in an increasingly in vogue trad movement, which preys on disillusioned young women with nice-sounding, but fundamentally masochistic, speeches of meaningful sex.
Besides the trad movement’s adjacency to red-pill and alt-right camps, traditionalism is an awful spokesperson for abstinence because it sells celibacy in a way that trades off on sexual consent—by giving it a strict sell-by date (marriage) and customer (husband). Imbuing celibacy with this fixed purpose prevents young women from figuring out for themselves how they want to treat sex, absent external pressure, and instead introduces the utmost amount of external pressure (god, hell) to steer women into having sex in an inflexible manner. Thus, traditionalism does not counter a climate of sexual pressure, but compounds it.
Perhaps she wants to have sex after she finishes school or has experienced a few relationships. Perhaps she wants to have sex when she’s married. Perhaps she wants to have sex on the floor of a dorm room while two guys take turns on her. So long as she wants to do it.
Six months ago, at age 26, I had sex for the first time. It lasted about a minute—I tapped out because it was painful. But, I was pleased with my decision because it was the first time that it felt right to have sex. If I had done it before then, it would’ve been for the wrong reasons. If I did it at 18, it would’ve been to impress some friends, or to check off an item on my bucket list. If I had done it at 20, it would’ve been because I felt I owed it to my boyfriend. If I had done it at 22, it would’ve been because I hoped it would lead to the sort of relationship I wanted with a guy who was about to move. If I had done it at 24, it would’ve been because people made me feel too old to be a virgin.
When I first began waiting, I didn’t fully understand what exactly I was waiting for. But as I came across people who plumbed, probed, and picked apart my virginity, it clarified to me why I wasn’t waiting. I wasn’t waiting because I wanted to prove I was pure or persuade guys I was an eligible marital prospect. I was waiting because, controversially, anybody can say no—even a whore.