The bizarre virgin/whore Venn diagram inspired Superintern Ellice to find some other virgin-themed graphics, these created by Indexed. Some of our older virgin readers might have something to say about this one:
April 5, 2010
The virgin/whore dichotomy - as fever line
2 comments:
*sigh* As a researcher into young people - well, under 30s - and sexuality, the assumptions in the second graph frustrate me (and a lot of other young people, if the people I hear from are any indication). The "average" experience might be to lose your virginity at 16-17, but there are a lot of people who do so much older than that, and plenty of them are far from social and sexual misfits.
Virgins aren't the only people I speak to, of course, but one group I'm particularly interested in are what I call "circumstantial virgins", people who haven't had sex not because they definitively don't want to, or because they definitively "can't get it" (most people can if they put themselves in the right situation), but because they haven't yet met the right person or found a relationship in which they do want to have sex. It's perfectly possible for this to stretch into the 20s and beyond.
Part of the problem, I think, is the myth that sex is constantly and easily available and that everyone is having it all the time. Closely related to - and far more common than - circumstantial virgins are circumstantial celibates: people who have had sex before, but haven't in a while (sometimes years) because they haven't been in a situation that facilitates it. There are many people who don't have sex outside relationships, and those who do tend to have it much moe episodically than media representations would suggest.
Thanks so much for your comment, Rachel. I think many of the blog's readers would agree with you on that. Several of our First Person essays come from people who feel like social outcasts because they're still virgins at 28, 25, even 23.
It's absolutely not true that EVERYONE is having sex ALL the time, despite what popular culture would have us believe.
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