less the experience
Kate Atherton
When I was nineteen I felt like SHIT about being a virgin still. I had no real REASON to be a virgin still. I didn't want to stay pure for marriage, I was not afraid to engage in sex (frankly I was more afraid of getting my ears pierced at the time). I was nervous to kiss someone or physically engage for the first time but I was, and AM, nervous about a lot of things including the aforementioned ear piercing.
I am a virgin, and not conventionally HAVING Sex nor do I feel, by society's standards 'sexy'. Growing up, seeing shows like 'Popular,' 'Dawson's Creek' and 'The OC' where everyone is just naturally pairing up parties made me feel alienated.
I was never once in a situation where I even came close to a kiss. Watching teen movies of the eighties like 'Breakfast Club' or 'Sixteen Candles' I would feel such shame and other-ness, like the stereotypical 'NERD' written into every fictional high school of that era.
I always thought it would happen naturally. As a fairly attractive, interesting young person who had, more or less, had crushers her whole life....I would FIND someone. Of course I'd need to know them a little bit first but I fully expected that in college....nope, didn't happen in college....or shortly thereafter....still not.... I saw everyone in TV, movies, literature and my life 'doing it' and I felt like an outsider not having come even close and freakier still, kind of not wanting to.
This was a different 'not wanting to' feeling I felt in my mid to late twenties than when I was a kid and I was deeply scared of introducing a boy to my parents or figuring out where in the world I would get contraceptives. Now it was a sort of not caring about it, deep down in my gut. I realized I didn't HAVE to want intimacy the conventional and oft overplayed way.
I didn't have to cry myself to sleep after not going to a dance (as in the film 'Alice Adams') or set up a party to play 'seven minutes in heaven' (a la TV’s 'Full House'). If I couldn't find anyone I wanted to have sex with who also wanted to have sex with me then I couldn't find anyone and that was that.
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back to feb. 2020 - more
Real inclusivity in sex education, as in anything else, is about saying that your feelings, your experiences (or lack thereof) and your sexuality is valid. Not only valid, it’s YOURS. No one else’s.
My friends often say to me in those moments when I'm feeling low or left out or ignorant that just because I haven't had a relationship doesn't mean I don't KNOW about human relationships. Here are some fictional portrayals of this phenomenon that gave me some solace and someone on the screen or the page to relate to. The Netflix show 'Sex Education' does an incredible job of this ; portraying REAL teenagers who both rush into sex headfirst and, by choice and by their knowledge of their own temperament, do not.
Movies such as the musical 'Gypsy' about a girl perpetually seeking to be a woman (and then a classy stripper) out from under the thumb of her mother and 'Impromptu' a biopic about the composer Chopin and his clash with his very sexual partner Georges Sand. 'X-men' and 'Pushing Daisies' have protagonists who are in love but cannot touch each other (for supernatural reasons). 'Miss Don't Touch Me', a graphic novel dear to my heart by Kerascoet and Hubert is the story of a chaste dominatrix in a brothel and ANY media about Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, who valued her power, position and autonomy over marriage and sexual relationships always struck a chord with me.
It is easy to feel on the outside of any shared experience you have not had, and I have not resigned myself to not having sex for life but I do at least feel now, at long last, like my sexual non-experience is legitimate, not shameful and a non-issue, if I decide it is.
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Kate Atherton is an illustrator and human being living in Cleveland, Ohio.
back to feb. 2020 - more
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