The Argument For Clinging To Your Chastity, From A Feminist Perspective

I was already tipsy off mine, so I confessed that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to have sex anymore. I didn’t see the point.

“The point in what? Are you depressed?” she asked, annoyed. 

I hadn’t planned on preserving my “cherry” for so long. My freshman bucket list jotted in Bic, tucked in my drawer under stained boyshorts and batteries, stated: get a 4.0, lose my virginity, try shrooms. 

I grew up with these jackboot-strict Muslim parents, and if a boy’s name ever popped up on my phone, they’d pucker their wooly brows and screech in their mother tongue. Then I moved away to this antique all-girls boarding school, where we’d only see puffy-faced boys in polos from our brother school at musty mixers where the teachers wagged around flashlights to catch kissers, lighting up boys’ chin boils. 

Starting co-ed college meant it was now time to mount a pretty boy, rip the bandaid off, and have fun like I’d always dreamed – unfettered by my mad parents or a headmistress crone. 

“I don’t see the point in sleeping with anybody right now,” I said at the cocktail bar. 

When fall semester started, I truly did give boys a shot. I downloaded the holy trinity of dating apps – Tinder, Bumble, Hinge – and swiped my index finger sore. I compromised on candle-lit dinners for Netflix-lit ones, on guys with goals for guys with gall, and on gentility for groping – until I finally decided to sit on the bench for a bit to regroup. I told myself this is what I’ve always wanted, that if I just sucked it up a little and swallowed my pride, I’d start to have fun like my friends swore I would. 

“What’s the point in going your whole college life without having any fun?” my friend asked. 

But frankly, I realized that I wasn’t seeing much fun in the girls’ sex lives around me. Instead, I witnessed a string of sore experiences that carried on way past ripping the bandaid off. 

Breaking Bad Guy

One September, my friend grabbed sushi with a guy from her lecture, who would watch Breaking Bad on mute. She was typically quite shy, but her date was warm, attentive, and touched her wrist the right amount of times – so she found herself chatting more than she had in a long time. They split a boat of green tea ice cream with two little spoons, and he suggested they should go together to some lousy fall fair our filthy college town threw every year with a hot-dog stand and rubber wristbands. She was delighted. She slipped into the washroom, tipsy on sake and banter, and sent a Snapchat saying, “he’s perfect oml.” 

The next evening, she and I camped out at the campus cafe to slave over our first slew of semester readings. She peered from over her laptop to tell me she had slept with Breaking Bad guy. 

“How was it?” I asked.

“I thought he liked me, but I don’t think so anymore,” she said. 

“Why?” I asked. 

“I messaged him that I had a good time, but he didn’t reply,” she said. 

“He might be busy – the semester just started.” 

She shook her head. 

“No. I could tell he wasn’t going to reply,” she said. 

“Why?” 

“When he was getting out of bed, I pretended to still be asleep. He pulled the blanket off to get up. But he didn’t cover me back up before leaving. That’s when I realized I was just a hookup to him,” she said. 

No Accountability Guy

Another friend and I were signed up for the same math lecture, so we reserved a tiny study room to cram for midterms. She was distracted. I asked what was wrong, and she confessed that her throat had been stinging, so she was waiting for a call back from the clinic. 

The phone rang. Her face turned pink as the nurse on the line said her tests came back positive for chlamydia and gonorrhea. She hung up and dialed her f*ck-buddy – some boy she met on Tinder, who said he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, though his Snap Map hinted at a different story. 

“Why are you calling me?” he said. 

She blurted out her results to him and asked if he knew he had anything. He snapped at her that she must’ve gotten it from another dude. She whimpered that she’d only been sleeping with him. 

“Don’t believe you,” he said and hung up. 

Based on his prickly tone, we figured he knew it was from him, but he was too wimpish to admit it. 

Bus Guy and Situationship Guy

One Halloweekend, a pair of friends dressed up as an angel and a devil to go frat-hopping– we’ll call them Alice and Virginia. Alice was feeling down, because her situationship hadn’t texted her back all weekend. Virginia poured them a few extra coke and rums than usual before they headed downtown, so her friend could forget about the tool and so they could have a night for the books. 

They stumbled from foul frat basement to fouler frat basement, drunk on bathtub-jungle juice and their costume wings mushy from spilled red cups. Alice compulsively checked her notifications between every sip. Nothing. 

After a few hours, Virginia could hardly stand. Alice was beat too, so she led them onto the metro, where Virginia puked on her seat. When the bus pulled in at the student drop-off, a pickled Virginia tottered around the aisle before tumbling onto the ground. Alice tried to haul her up, but Virginia wouldn’t budge. 

The driver barked that he was going to dial campus police if they didn’t get the hell out of the aisle, that he was late on schedule, that people had places to be. Alice whined that she was trying her best. A male student sprung from his seat and lifted Virginia up by her pits. Alice sighed and thanked him, as he scooped Virginia into his arms. Virginia murmured some nonsense, vomit-drenched flirts to him, while Alice shepherded them to the dorms. 

Once back in their suite, Virginia lost a fight with her bed ladder and bleated that she couldn’t go up. Bus Guy and Alice chuckled and dragged her bunk’s pillows and blankets down onto the floor for her. 

Alice’s phone hummed. It was her situationship: “wyd.” She squealed. Giddy and wasted, she asked Bus Guy if he could take care of Virginia for a bit because she needed to go meet up with someone. “Of course, I’ll take care of her,” he said and got up to fetch her a mug of water. 

Alice thanked him, then darted across the quad into the arms of a guy who’d end up telling her a week later that he’s not looking for anything serious. 

The next morning, Alice woke up to a cracked phone and a dozen missed calls from Virginia. 

After Alice had run from their room last night, Virginia had passed out. She later woke up on the dorm room floor with Bus Guy inside her. She shrieked and hit him, and he fled. 

At the emergency room, Virginia was tested for rape. A proceeding then took place, and Bus Guy was expelled from the university. 

“But we’re drunk most of the time we hookup. How was I supposed to know this was different?”

A few months later, the college gave me a dorm reassignment. I moved across the quad into a better-lit suite with a full bathtub and wider dressers, and met my new roommates Alice and Virginia. We hit it off and became best friends. Virginia was meeting every Tuesday with the campus shrink to talk about her assault, though she claims it did little more than bug her. “I’m so sick of being called strong,” she told me. 

Over the next few weeks, she behaved sort of fuddled – she was giddy in an off way, like she just got her wisdom teeth pulled. One morning we were all chewing on rubbery pancakes at the dining hall before first period, when Virginia dropped her plate and collapsed onto the ground. She was wheeled off to the hospital, where she was treated for a Xanax overdose. 

After she returned to the dorms, we heard her sobbing in our shared bathroom. We shoved open the door, and she was sitting by the tub, cutting herself. 

Virginia took time off to go back to her mom’s house. Her mom knew her daughter was unwell, but Virginia didn’t have the heart to tell her old, sweet-faced mother, who cashed out all her savings to send her to college, what was keeping her up at night. The loneliness in her experience was getting unnerving, so she returned to school to have a support system. 

The suite became a tricky collection of moments. There was laughter, smoking, playing cards – the sort of clean college fun you hope to remember even after marriage and kids. But then there were the times Virginia would bawl her eyes out. 

One time, the three of us were in the suite, and Virginia turned to Alice and said, “You abandoned me.” Alice began to weep and said she thought Virginia liked Bus Guy because she was flirting with him. 

“But I couldn’t even make it onto my bed. You guys had to bring my pillows down. I was so drunk,” Virginia cried. 

“But we’re drunk most of the time we hookup. How was I supposed to know this was different?” Alice replied.

These Stories Aren’t Anomalies

These stories aren’t anomalies, but reflective of the almost inescapable sexual wringer that young women are fed into. My friend who was ghosted after sushi, sake, and sex joins the large number of women abandoned by men after he hooks up with her. Combine this with the fact that 76% of women have experienced love-bombing – a dramatic display of insincere affection aimed to trick the target into trusting them – and you have a culture that serves a cocktail of psychological distress to women both before and after sex. 

My friend who was reeling during midterms over her STI results also didn’t get mixed up with some oddity of an ignoble guy. Over one out of three college-aged guys would consider lying about or omitting their STI results to sleep with a girl. 

And my friend who was raped joins the one in four college girls who fall victim to sexual assault. 

Wisdom Comes with Age

In Muslim cultures, parents will often put together a stack of printed papers with stapled photographs, each detailing a potential suitor’s marriageability for their daughter. If a man duly impresses the family, per his ethnic complexion and pedigree, he may make it all the way to the Nikah (marriage) discussions. During this, the two families of the potential couple gather around in the good living room – the one the kids aren’t allowed in – to discuss dowry and desired number of grandsons, while gulping down chai tea and an assortment of nuts. 

I found this practice absurd. I said to my mom, “Do they hate their daughter so much that they’d rather her live in a miserable marriage than risk the family’s made-up legacy?” 

My mom shook her head. “There is no hatred. The girl would be miserable if the family didn’t help her find a decent boy.” 

“Why can’t she make that decision for herself?” I asked. 

“She is too young,” my mother said. “She will choose the wrong boys. And she won’t be happy, trust me.”

The tradition of family matchmaking rests on the notion that a young woman is too naive, too ripe with emotion, to scope out a boy’s real intentions and make well thought-out decisions on her dating life. When I was 18, I rolled my eyes at this belittlement. Girls don’t need protection, all they need is freedom of choice with zero stigma, I thought, naively. 

Alice told me that she felt she had no way of knowing that Virginia was too drunk to be alone with her rapist. The girls were barely 18, and Alice was grappling with the same risky sex-landscape as Virginia. While her roommate was being raped by a man who showed no concern as to whether she was even breathing, Alice ran across campus, so drunk that she cracked her phone, all to see a guy that she very much wanted to sleep with. 

How could she have known that Virginia was too drunk? To a reader, it’s glaring: Virginia vomited, could hardly stand, was on the verge of passing out, and just met the guy. But to Alice, these handicaps were just staples of sex. “I often pass out right after hooking up with a guy,” she told me earnestly. 

Though she’d wail about what she let happen to her roommate, Alice felt that she was placed in an unwinnable position. She’s not entirely wrong. 

While hookup culture in general sets women up to fail, there’s another less comfortably diagnosed problem that plagues the sex lives of young women: their age. 

The teenage girl is at an age when people are most likely to try to sexually use her, as well as being most likely to let them. 

The average age a girl has sex for the first time is 18 years old. And the age she binge drinks for the first time is the same: 18. The teenage girl is thus tasked with orienting herself to sex at the same age she learns to stomach the world’s most popular date rape drug – booze. 

The teenage girl is also tangled up in the age bracket most targeted for rape and sexual coercion, in addition to being of the age most susceptible to caving to external pressure, as her incomplete prefrontal cortex leaves her starved for the validation of her peers, partners, and the culture. In other words, she’s at an age when people are most likely to try to sexually use her, as well as being most likely to let them. So it’s sadly no shock that 14% of high school girls have been raped. Another 30% of teenage girls are pressured by their romantic partner to have sex. 

Whenever I tell people I’m a virgin, they always ask, “Well, what are you waiting for?” It confuses them greatly because I’m not religious, I’m feminist to a fault, and I’ve never expressed much interest in marriage. I’m waiting until it feels right. 

“There’s never going to be a right time,” they always tell me. 

Hookup Culture and Regret

My friend who went on the sushi date with Breaking Bad guy once told me she wishes she was a virgin too. I was still sex-positive in a pop-feminist way at the time, so I was confused. 

“Why does it matter? Your body count doesn’t mean anything, ” I said.

She told me that she just didn’t realize it was an option, as stupid as that sounds. It’s not stupid at all. 43% of women regret how they lost their virginity. They’ll cite that they felt pressure from their partner to give in. 56% of women report being pressured into sex the first time. The pressure often includes manipulative statements such as, “If you loved me, you would do this” or “Why are you being so difficult about this?” These women will also say they wished they had waited to have sex until they were emotionally ready and could have a sense of agency and control.

A disappointing first time is not just an innocuous blip – it colors a girl’s future experiences of sex to be bleak as well and sets her up to have poor self-regard: body image issues, low self-esteem, and a heightened risk of intimate partner violence. A boy with a disappointing first time will face zero negative effects on his future interest levels of sex.

Some may scoff at the sky-high rates of female sexual regret and insist that the onus is on young women to have a spine and hold their ground, rather than wallowing in a pity party. But the heart of the issue is that nobody is telling young women of their choice to opt out. 

Yes, consent seminars relentlessly train girls that they can say no, but why would she? Teen sex is evergreen in her favorite television shows and movies, which whip up profits off the glitzy draws of youthful romance, while omitting the distressing pitfalls of such affairs. Her boyfriend is hounding her to just do it, because “it’s what couples do,” or tricking her into believing if she doesn’t put out, she doesn’t love him. The pop feminism that wallpapers most social media apps and major websites are egging her on to treat sex with a mind so open, she shouldn’t even think about it. Elite Daily writes, “An open-minded attitude towards sexual exploration [is] inherently feminist, or, consciously waiting to have sex will ruin the chemistry and excitement around sex. Sex isn’t supposed to be a planned activity…[but] fun, adventurous, and unexpected.” 

So where is the material value in teaching girls that they can say no, if there’s zero instruction on why she should say no? The only people prompting girls to say no are perhaps religious folk pushing no-sex-til-marriage, but if she is not sold on God, the way half my generation isn’t, then this line of argumentation is to no avail. 

Girls need to first discover and design their value systems, which typically takes place in their twenties, before having sex.

Girls are groomed to think that the path toward self-discovery is paved with lots and lots of sex. A litany of for-young-women outlets cajole girls to experiment to figure out who they are. Articles such as “Why Sexual Experimentation Is Always A Good Thing” preach that “Experimenting sexually helped me discover who I was. It forced me to not be rigid with anything…I began striking up conversations with people I wouldn’t have otherwise…try new things, new foods and new places because for the first time I was able to admit that I didn’t know what I liked. I was willing to try new things out.” This sort of you don’t know what you like until you try it attitude, applied to sex, treats the inexperienced sexual girl as a picky eater – avoiding experimentation because of childish fear, rather than hard-line values.  

Or, articles such as “7 Guys You’ll Have Sex with in College” say “most of these guys probably won’t give you an orgasm, but at least they’ll give you a story to tell at brunch with your roommates the next day.” This framing adds to the quintessential do it for the plot rationale for girls indulging in futile hookups, minimizing what tends to be life-long emotional (and sometimes physical) distress into something with the levity of a cocktail party story.

Or, the Her Campus site, which publishes articles nudging girls to participate in hookup culture, while condemning the stigma of “sleeping around or hooking up with multiple partners outside of a relationship, which prevents some from fully exploring their sexuality while in college.” 

Or, Teen Vogue, sanitizing BDSM and anal to a teen audience, to see what they like and don’t like, as if it’s as inconsequential as trying on an assortment of fun hats. The only distinction that these publications draw between the gravity of sex and the humdrum act of trying on a hat is the hamfisted obsession with consent. Teen Vogue tells its teen audience, “If you want to use a crop on your partner,” (a crop is a rod used to beat horses), “you must have a thorough understanding of the boundaries. You have to ask if your partner is fine with it.” Or, for its article on anal, “If you’re not comfortable reading about anal sex, that’s perfectly OK too! No pressure at all!” avoiding the glaring reality that teen girls are already being pressured into anal by their boyfriends (and enduring excruciating physical pain from it). These girls will only feel more pressure to suck it up, now that their favorite chic fashion magazine has co-signed onto their boyfriend’s backdoor request.

Girls need to first discover and design their value systems, which typically takes place in their twenties, before having sex. If she does not have a firm grip on herself, she will be sucked up by someone else’s desires, become a ragdoll for some guy’s pornographic desires – be goaded into anal, rape-play, facials, threesomes, and choking – as college girls commonly report being pressured into, mistaking sexual attention for love – and spat back out brined in bitterness towards herself, sex, and men. 

Research shows that having sex for the first time around age 22 to 25 bears the best long-term outcomes. These women are least likely to be saddled by sexual regret, least likely to cave to sexual pressure and manipulation tactics, and least likely to resent men from poor experiences. They possess a stronger sense of psychological maturity and emotional stability, in addition to having a strong sense of self anchored by educational and career accomplishments, and a more fleshed-out value system. In many ways, they properly escaped the sexual wringer. 

Closing Thoughts

I want more girls to be aware of their choice to wait until they are older. It often feels like an invisible option, as the two warring sides of the culture champion either total sex positivity that treats sex as mundane an activity as frying eggs or a religiously anchored waiting-until-marriage dialogue, that perhaps puts too much moral weight on female virginity. I want pop feminism to do a proper job in cautioning girls on the epidemic of sexual regret, particularly as it relates to virginity and sex in high school and college, and not white out these frequent cases with the agenda of pushing a quixotic sexual egalitarianism. 

Are we that terrified of evoking a sort of anti-woman puritanism that we’d rather set up girls to be manipulated, used, and assaulted, so long as they outwardly sleep around like men to support liberal optics of gender erasure? 

It’s time we present girls with their option to wait – not to avoid hell in the afterlife, but to avoid hell in this one. 

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