confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.
When I was little, my mom sat me down to have a modest chat about the birds and the bees.
The birds: boys will do anything to try and get sex; and the bees: that if I let them, it will ruin my life.
Boys will lie to you, cheat on you, cheat with you, kidnap, rape, torture, and kill to have sex. And thus, it is crucial that I never be alone with a boy because sheitan (the devil) will enter the room, and that I shriek for help if he ever asks me to take off my pants. Because if I let him, I will bleed, be pumped with diseases, get fat, bear an ugly baby, be kicked out of school, end up sleeping outside a gas station, get addicted to drugs that will make my eyes nicotine-yellow and my skin peel off like a potato, and nobody will ever marry me.
“Then once you die, you’ll think it’s all over,” my mom continued, “because you’ll have a sweet moment of rest. But then you’ll awake again, at once, in a pit of fire. Forever.”
My mother gave this gospel to me many times. I asked why she never bugged my brothers with the same spiel, who’d slump on the couch watching Jersey Shore, eating mangoes she cut up into cubes for them.
“Farha, it’s different for boys,” she’d say.
I always hated religion. I hated having to sit in the muggy, AC-less mosque, constantly tucking my soggy baby bangs into my hijab. I hated having to wake up before sunrise to gulp down a handful of dates before fasting for the day. Mostly, I hated being laundry-listed all the things I couldn’t do: no beer, no marshmallows, no short shorts, no pepperoni pizza, no BigMacs, no poker, no sex.
I didn’t believe in god. At least not the one that my mom did– not the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women. So I didn’t mind breaking my parents’ rules. I’d sneak bottles of Barefoot into my parents’ dry household to guzzle in the garage, and pack a mini skirt into my Jansport when I left the house.
Breaking the ‘no premarital sex’ rule was always up next on my queue.
‘Purity’ was the most offensive word in the book to me. I loathed religious obsession with female chastity, and I felt particularly nauseous from the guys around me who’d drool over my virginity, and say “I bet it’s tight,” or who’d mask their fetish with a soft-soaping “you have more self-respect than a lot of girls these days,” while they themselves tried to stick it in every orifice in sight. I was fatigued of guys eager to wax judgmental about “sluts,” while feening to run through them.
That rules for thee, but not for me attitude has been the throughline of every purity culture, always. During the Middle Ages, female virginity was the condition for matrimony, meanwhile marriageable men slept with and raped droves of women, tagged as whores.
The idea of purity is filthier than any conceivable female body count. Today there is still a bankable and barbaric demand for female virginity. Some women purchase fake hymens that snap and ‘bleed’ when penetrated1– others sneak razors onto their honeymoon, to knick their skin while their newlyweds fuck them, to convince them of a punctured hymen.2 Torn hymens aren’t even a sign of having had sex- many women snap them doing things like horse-back riding.3
If these sorts of gimmicks seem needless, consider that in 2002, a 16 year old girl in London was forced by her father to take a virginity test. After she failed the test, he broke down the door of the bathroom that she barricaded herself in, stabbed her 17 times, and slit her throat. Two days before he killed her, he had received a letter from his community, calling his daughter a “slut” for having a boyfriend.4
Five thousand girls and women are brutally killed each year by their own family, in the name of purity.5 Another 200 million have been genitally mutilated to ensure their chastity.6
Purity culture’s fetish for violence is worldwide– in 2011, female protestors in Egypt were arrested, photographed naked, and subject to virginity tests. Those who failed were charged as prostitutes, beaten, and electrocuted.7
In the United States, a NYC judge ordered a 15 year old rape victim to be virginity tested to try and discern whether she’d been sexually active prior to the rape– the judge treated lack of chastity to denote a lack of innocence.8
Also within the US, some women fall victim to the ‘husband stitch’-- a vile procedure in which a doctor sutures a woman’s vagina after she gives birth with an extra, needless stitch to please her husband with a vulva that will “feel like a virgin again.”9 This is typically performed without her knowledge, and at odds with her well-being– she is now prone to infection, sexual desensitization, and pelvic floor disorders. So don’t ever be duped into believing the West doesn’t practice female genital mutilation.
Purity is not a virtue, but a faux-moral veneer for bloody tyranny over girls and women, at every seam of society.
There is absolutely zero medical basis for virginity.10 Even at the social level, people butt horns over what disqualifies a girl from being considered a virgin. At best, it’s based on a visceral feeling to an act described rather than spelling out any logical, let alone biological, substrate.
Those who value female virginity, I considered the dullest of the pack. Sometimes I’d stumble into vapid and viral Facebook posts telling men that ‘u would’nt buy a coke or bag of chips thats not sealed. only marry a virgin !!” These posts just made me eager to have sex as soon as possible, to cull these illiterates out of my marriage pool.
Sex-positivity had my heart– a stock of feminism that browbeat the pillaging thirst for female virginity out of the culture, in favor of women’s sexual liberation. It’s the idealistic daughter of the sexual revolution, which abandoned that sex ought to be crammed into the confines of marriage, and instead backs any and all of women’s sexual desires, and upholds individual choices based on “consent” as the cardinal checkpoint of whether a sexual encounter is ethical or not.11
I felt charmed by sex-positivity because it hatched up a zeitgeist for girls to be slutty. And teenage me, tired of being trammeled by the second pair of clothes I slung to my back when I left the house, was in. I knew we were in desperate need for a total reconstruction of women’s sexual status in society. And the social re-defining of “slut”-- a term in a letter that prodded the London man to slaughter his own daughter, seemed a decent place to start.
In a post-sex revolution world, where 90% of women have premarital sex,12 and by a sex-positive lens, where that decision is seen as emancipatory, there can be no categorical difference between wife & whore, pure & impure, or innocent & guilty. The sexual revolution basically crowned women who fuck as the winners of the culture war, and thus, there can be no penalization of women who have premarital sex– not in the courts, nor the dating market.
Sex-positivity pledged to scrub women clean of the scarlet letters that uniquely adorned them, and never men, as well as to scrub them of the fake red blood of hymen kits, the drops of blood from honeymoon-razors, and of the blood shed during honor killings. What’s not to love? Of course, I was sex-positive.
When I went to college, I was excited to finally have sex. I just had to pick someone. Though it didn’t make much of a difference. After-all, sex-positivity told me that it was no big deal: “The concept of virginity was created by men who thought their penises were so important it changes who a woman is.”13
So I figured I shouldn’t mull over who my first partner is– it’s not any more important than whether I get mayo or mustard.
My friends told me that the first time will feel like hell. But that you needed to get it over with, to reach the good part. It’s all about ripping the bandaid off.
I had a bit of sex-choice paralysis, so I told my friends they could play cupid.
One morning in the dining hall, my friend pointed out a pretty boy at the breakfast bar, dolloping nutella and whipped cream into the waffle iron. Before I could protest, she flitted over to him. They chatted then looked over at me, while I stared back dumbly.
She skipped back grinning, and told me it was done. I got a new request on Snapchat from a backwards baseball-cap wearing bitmoji. I accepted and it asked me “wyd tn:)” We looked back at him, and saw the waffle iron getting smoky and laughed.
That night, my roommate slathered me in Gillette, and shaved me from ankles to armpits, while I leaned naked against the sink, feeling crabby. I didn’t mind being hairy, but she told me it would turn the guy off. I thought of all the sex-positivity art I’d see online: girls lush in body hair, fat rolls and pimples. But now here I was being primped and plucked for two hours.
Sex was shifting from a cloying idea to now a tangible act, sobered up by my bare butt getting goosebumps on our porcelain sink. I leered at myself in the mirror, globbed in shaving cream. I looked like the whipped cream-nutella that hissed inside the waffle iron.
“I don’t even have Netflix. What do I put on?” I asked my friend. She laughed and said, “it doesn’t fucking matter. Just make sure he pulls out.”
He came over to my dorm room, and we flumped onto my bed. We shared a leftover bottle of Svedka and a warm quart of cranberry juice that I forgot to put back into my mini fridge. His hand was on my bald thigh, and his face an inch away from mine. I sort of just gawked at him, trying to think of actors he looks like. I thought it’d make him feel less alien to me. I also kept suppressing the urge to sneeze. I wondered if I should just come clean about being a virgin to him. To explain my nerves. My roommate had told me not to. That it’d be a turn-off. Plus, I told myself, virginity isn’t real. He asked me what my major was. I told him that I was undecided. “That’s cool,” he said. Then he started kissing me.
The next morning, my friends peered into my room to find me alone in bed, spooning my Ocean Spray. One scoffed, saying they always leave before morning. She then asked how it was. I confessed that I didn’t go through with it– that I had a bad feeling about it. The other groaned, bemoaning that she weedwacked my Indian legs for nothing.
The semester petered out, and my friends felt miffed that I had yet to rip the bandaid off. They nagged me that I was missing out on the college experience. Not totally wrong. Between sex week, to condoms in campus vending machines, to morning-after parties, sex felt like the meat patty of college life. And so I did feel like I was missing out for a while.
My friends would huddle together, high on gummies, swapping sex stories, and I had nothing flavorful to bring to the potluck. No sordid anal story that would make the girls’ jaws drop, nor an off-color ménage à trois scoop to make anyone snort.
And as my friends’ sex lives fattened up, I noticed they were infantilizing me more and more for still being a virgin. They’d introduce me at lawn parties as their innocent little baby. I found it more endearing than belittling, but it still attested to me that I must be lacking in self-development by not fucking someone if my friends perceive a growing gap between our maturity levels each time they add another notch to their belt. Under a purity culture, being sexually ‘innocent,’ would’ve been the difference between freedom or a dagger in your gullet. But at my hook-up rife college campus, the term was little more than patronizing.
I wanted to rip the bandaid off. At least on paper. But each time the chance unsheathed itself via a cute boy and a case of White Claws, I felt racked by a brick-heavy gut feeling to tap out. I was pissed at my gut. I thought it was harboring religious residue from my childhood.
Did all those stupid Facebook posts get to me? Am I just trying to preserve my coke-fizz?
On our last Thirsty Thursday of the year, my friends and I pregamed at a cocktail bar, wearing handkerchiefs as shirts, and our faces ruddy in contour powder. “If you don’t fuck someone this weekend, you’re going to be a virgin sophomore,” my friend said to me, slurping on her espresso martini.
I was already tipsy off mine. I told her that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. That I didn’t see the point anymore.
“The point in what? Are you depressed?” she asked, annoyed.
“I don’t see the point in fucking anybody right now,” I said.
“What’s the point in going your whole college life without having any fun?” she asked.
But frankly, I wasn’t seeing much “fun” in the sex lives around me. Instead it looked like a spate of sore experiences that carried on way past ripping the bandaid off.
One September, my friend met up for sushi with a guy from her lecture, who would watch Breaking Bad on mute. She was typically quite shy, which bugged her on dates. 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 go together next week to some lousy, fall fair our college-town threw every year, with a bouncy house and a hot-dog stand. She was delighted. She slipped into the bathroom, tiddly on sake and banter, and sent a snapchat saying “he’s perfect oml.”
The next day, she and I camped out at the campus panera bread, to dig into our first batch of semester assignments. She peered from over her laptop to tell me she had sex with the 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.”
“He might be busy– the semester just started.”
She shook her head.
“No. I could tell he wasn’t going to reply.”
“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 hook-up to him.”
Another friend and I took the same math class, and we buckled down in a study room during midterms to cram. She was distracted. I asked what was wrong, and she confessed that her throat’s been stinging and so she’s been waiting on a call back from the clinic.
They finally rang. Her face flushed, as the nurse on the other line told her that she was positive for chlamydia and gonorrhea. She hung up and dialed her fuck-buddy.
“Why are you calling me?” he said.
She blurted out her results to him, and asked if he had been tested. He got prickly, and snapped at her that she must’ve gotten it from another dude. She whimpered that she’s only been sleeping with him.
“Don’t believe you,” he replied, then hung up.
It seemed obvious to us from his tone that he seemed to know she got it from him, but was too cowardly to admit it.
One Halloweekend, a pair of my friends dressed up as an angel and devil to go frat-hopping– we’ll call them Alice and Virginia. Alice was feeling down, because the guy she was infatuated with– and sleeping with– hadn’t texted her back all weekend. So Virginia poured them a few extra coke and rums than usual before heading downtown, keen on having an enjoyable night.
Sloshed on jungle juice, they stumbled from dingy frat basement to dingier frat basement, their costumes sodden from spilt drinks. Alice compulsively checked her notifications between every sip. Nothing.
After a few hours, Virginia could hardly stand. Alice was exhausted too, so she led them onto the metro. Virginia puked onto her seat. Once they reached their stop, Virginia was struggling to stand. Alice tried to help her out, but Virginia continued to collapse. The driver barked that he was going to call UPD if she didn’t get up off the aisle, and Alice whined that she was trying her best. A male student grabbed onto Virginia’s arm to help, and Alice thanked him. He scooped Virginia into his arms while Alice escorted them to the dorms. Virginia murmured some nonsensical flirts to him, while he carried her.
Once in their room, Virginia lost a fight with her bed ladder, and cried that she couldn’t climb up. Bus-guy and Alice dragged her pillows and blankets down onto the floor for her.
Alice’s phone buzzed and to her delight, it was her crush. ‘Wyd.’ Giddy and wasted, she asked bus-guy who carried Virginia, if he could take it from here because she wanted to go meet up with somebody. He said, ‘Of course. I’ll take care of her.’ Alice thanked him, then scampered across campus into the arms of a guy, who’d end up telling her a week later that he’s not looking for anything serious.
That morning, Alice woke up in her fuck-buddy’s bed to a cracked phone and a dozen missed calls from Virginia as well as a slew all-caps, where-are-you texts.
After Alice left their room last night, Virginia passed out, and woke up bare on the dorm room floor, to the man from the bus inside of her. She shrieked and hit him, and he fled.
She went to the emergency room and was tested for rape. A proceeding then took place and the male student was expelled from the university.
A few months later, I met these two girls and we became close friends. Virginia was doing sessions with the campus therapist, but she fell into a Xanax-induced stupor. One day, she collapsed onto the dining room floor during an OD, for which she was hospitalized.
When she returned to school, we heard her crying in the bathroom. We opened the door and she was slitting her wrists.
Virginia took time off to go down south to her mom’s house. But she didn’t have the heart at the time to tell her mother what was causing her depression. She felt alone at home, with her trauma. So she decided to come back to campus to have a better sense of support.
We’d all chill in the suite, having at many times a really normal college experience. Laughing, playing cards, smoking. But sometimes, she’d start to cry.
One day, while we were all in the suite, Virginia turned to her roommate, Alice, and said, “You abandoned me.” Alice began to cry as well and said she thought she was interested in the guy from the bus, because she was being flirty 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 hook up). How was I supposed to know this was different?”
While my female friends’ sexual experiences often felt like a horror movie, my guy friends’ sex lives resounded more like a man-child comedy.
The perils of college sex for them ranged from groaning that their friends-with-benefits asked them to be exclusive– so now they have to script a text that feigns emotional care– to regretting banging one girl because they just found out she has a ‘way hotter friend,’ to bemoaning that they had to wash their sheets at 1 am because they were cumming on her tits, ‘but she fucking moved.’
For every guy friend I had that lamented a college girl being a defective cum rag, I witnessed a female friend in distress over a guy who ghosted them, cheated on or with them, recklessly transmitted an STI, or assaulted them.
These stories aren’t anomalies, but reflective of a sexual wringer that young women are routinely put through–
My friend who was ghosted after sushi, sake, and sex joins the large number of women abandoned by men after a hook-up.14 Ghosting is so baked into the dating scene that most people think it’s the normal way to end a relationship.15 Combine this with the fact that 76% of women have experienced love-bombing16– an extreme display of insincere affection with the intent to manipulate you–and you have a culture that normalizes a cocktail of psychologically distressing women both before and after sex.
My friend who was reeling during exam season over her STI results, also did not 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 in order to get sex.17
And my friend who was raped, joins the one in four women who are sexually assaulted during their time at college.18
When you start school, they corral the entire freshman body for the classic sexual consent seminar.
Consent ought to be enthusiastic and verbal. Ask your partner repeatedly if they are okay and comfortable.
The students nod along, in a zombified manner, then RAs toss packets of M&Ms to those who win a round of consent Kahoot!. Class dismissed.
Sex-positivity crowns consent as the chief litmus of a moral or immoral sexual interaction: if enthusiastic consent is achieved, then nothing is off the table at any age. So long as a girl gives a zealous ‘yes,’ then there should be no moral qualms about a teen starting a cam-girl account the minute she blows out her candles on her 18th birthday, nor clamor over high schoolers being choked, slapped, and whipped by their boyfriends who saw it on the hub. All enthusiastic ‘yes’s’ are to be toasted to as fetes of female empowerment, bursted from the shackles of purity culture.
I agreed with all of this as an armchair theory– until I actually went to college and observed this supposed liberation up and running. I then felt that the varnished sex positivity that I had once deified was now just a wimpish man behind the curtain– because the only red-light it hoisted of ‘consent,’ didn’t adequately thwart any of the wreckage in front of me.
For instance, take my friend’s sushi date– he didn’t violate ‘consent’ by plying her with sweet-nothings and empty plans of future dates to only scamper off before she woke up, without so much the decency to tuck her back in. In fact, she did give an enthusiastic yes. She was thrilled to sleep with someone she connected with so much. And yet he did use her, in a way that the consent-model tolerates. Under the current cultural canon, fuckboys can run rampant, without guilt or much judgment, because sex-positivity has issued them clearance so long as they simply collect an enthusiastic yes (and make them cum). And what I realized in college is that it’s not that hard to get a teenage girl enthusiastic about saying yes, to an adept player bluffing what she wants to hear . And so, young women’s emotions become a playground for guys to experiment on– to lovebomb, manipulate, lie to, ghost, cheat with, cheat on, to drown in alcohol – in order to reach that pitiful touchstone of ‘yes!’
And the man who raped my friend obviously did break consent. But anyone with a half-working brain could admit that something more horrific took place that night than just my friend not saying ‘yes!’ A male student felt gratified putting himself inside an unconscious woman that laid on the floor of a dorm room. If I were to ask you what the problem with necrophilia is, you could probably muster up a better answer than just ‘the corpse didn’t give an enthusiastic yes.’ Instead, you’d probably point out the sort of derangement that would compel a man to have sex with a woman, conscious or unconscious, at any cost.
I began to finally understand where my crazy mother was coming from.
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 eighteen, and Alice was grappling with the same sort of precarious sexual landscape as Virginia– while her best friend was being raped by a man who showed no care to whether she was even breathing, Alice stumbled across campus, so drunk, she tripped and cracked her phone, all to see a guy that she very much wanted to sleep with.
How could she have known Virginia was too drunk? To an onlooker, it’s obvious– Virginia vomited, could barely stand, was on the verge of knocking out, and just met the guy. But to Alice, these handicaps were just staples of hooking up. “I often pass out right after having sex with a guy,” she’d tell me earnestly.
Though she’d wail over what she let happen to Virginia, Alice felt that she was placed in an unwinnable position.
She’s not entirely wrong.
The average age a girl has sex for the first time is 18 years old.19 And the age she binge drinks for the first time is the same: 18.20 The college girl is thus, burdened to explore her sexuality at the same time as navigating the world’s most popular date rape drug– booze.21
When 60% of students have drunk to the point of blacking out,22 and 80% of students have had a one night stand,23 drunk sex might appear as a rite of passage. And though 85% of students agree that sex with someone too drunk to consent is rape,24 most college students have had sex under the influence.25 There is also no consensus on what alcohol level deprives an individual of the ability to consent– not at the legal level nor the social level. Forums even get into a frenzy over the morals of men having sex with their drunk wives.26 If all of the internet, let alone the law, can’t figure it out, how is it fair to task an 18 year old girl, learning about alcohol and sex for the first time, to be the arbiter of drunken consent?
Witnessing what my friends went through, as well as living through my own batch of lackluster dates, I wondered if I should just wait to have sex.
The idea felt odd. And boring. I wasn’t religious, nor did I have my sights set on a diamond ring. So I wasn’t scared of hell, nor a future puritanical husband. “What are you waiting for?” people would ask me. I’d ask myself as well. I didn’t have the gall to admit that I was sort of waiting on my gut to tell me when. It felt like a cop-out. I knew gut feelings were wonky moral compasses– afterall, that semester we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in class, and learning how Huck’s gut feeling of guilt for abetting a runaway slave is shaped by the social mores he’s been exposed to. That was also the year the media littered the term “implicit bias” in basically every headline,27 to unmask rampant racism and sexism in institutions. Suffice it to say, gut feelings were not in season.
My friends told me I’m probably just sexually repressed– that maybe I was molested as a child, and ought to take shrooms to unlock it. Or that I’m just stiff or an overthinker, so I ought to chug a vat of vodka, keep a tub of lube on hand, and zone out while I rip the bandaid off.
And the thing they told me the most, was that there was never going to be a right time.
A lot of people are baffled by my choice to opt out. Everyone from acquaintances to podcast hosts will ask me, “What’s the point?” because my internet image already discredits my purity in their eyes, rendering my virginity ‘useless.’ Or they’ll mention that at my geriatric age of 24 years old, the attractiveness of my V card is slim to none. Finally, they’ll tell me that there’s no need for me to be a virgin, because guys don’t care about virginity anymore– “So long as your body count is under ten, you’re good.”
I’ve also witnessed podcasters debate in front of me whether my virginity is something they’re turned on to or not.
Podcaster 1: “I wouldn’t date a virgin. That’s like fucking a baby.”
Podcaster 2: “So you want to date a girl that’s already ran through? You’re a fucking cuck.”
Podcaster 1: “Think about it. If you’re a coach, do you want Lebron on your team…or a guy who’s never touched a basketball.”
As amusing as it is to be compared to babies and bench players, something a lot of people (men and women alike) struggle to consider is, there might be a reason for a girl to opt out of having sex outside of the male gaze. I know that “virgin” has been reduced to little more than a lucrative porn category in the west, or the season one status of a teenage girl in TV by which she comes of age through fucking / or sets herself apart as “not like most girls,” or a crest that religious people wear— but none of these archetypes have a monopoly on not putting out. And the boring but true answer is that I’m a virgin because it hasn’t been the right time for me. (Yes, even at my old age— much later than the sexy age of a teen virgin on the hub about to be railed, or a precocious nymphet in knee highs, starring in some perv’s wet dream / indie film.)
Now estranged from the sex-positivity I once adored, I do believe there is a right and wrong time to have sex. I also believe that your sexual footprint does affect you, for better or for worse. And I think a lot of girls are having sex at the wrong time. All these beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the principles of sex-positivity, which beats out any notion of right or wrong sex, other than via the consent-yardstick.
Putting parameters on sex doesn’t sound chic at all. And nobody more than me, dazzled by the glitz of sex-positivity, would have loved it if any and all sorts of sex boded well for women’s well-being. I reveled in the thought of ripping the bandaid off without a care in the world, and shamelessly hopping into bed with whoever. But once in bed, the idea felt wrong– and according to research, that feeling isn’t crazy.
Sex-positivity teaches girls that their value is not defined by their virginity and that their first time doesn’t change them– sadly, they’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Yes, virginity doesn’t define your moral worth, but your first time does matter. And though I hate to quote my mother, it is different for men and women: studies show that while a man’s first time has zero effect on his future interest levels in sex, a woman with a disappointing first time will tend to view sex negatively moving forward. That first time sets a blueprint for women for the sort of treatment they believe they deserve.28 And a culture that winds up girls to ‘rip the bandaid off,’ because it’s ‘no big deal,’ sets them up to then have lowered morale, poor body image, and a heightened chance of facing intimate partner violence– if you give into your first time partly due to pressure, your brain can train itself to put up with brutish behavior.
And so it’s no wonder why 45% of American women regret how they lost their virginity.29 Beyond melancholy over the first time, a third of girls regret their most recent college hookup, 17% of women regret their most recent sexual experience, and 14% regret a sexual experience from that year.30
But we can’t talk about female sexual regret, without first discussing its abusive father: sexual coercion.
71% of teenage girls report feeling pressured by a romantic partner to have sex.31 78% of college girls experience sexual coercion,32 and 35% feel pressure to have sex their freshman year.33 And so the culture of high school and college, rather than serving as a fulfilling springboard for female development, tends to serve more as grounds for mass sexual arm-twisting.
Girls are routinely subject to not only sexual pressure, but pressure to engage in aggressive sex as well, as her dating pool is brimming with guys who get off to sexual violence. Boys first get exposed to porn at 13 years old,34 and by the next year, half of them have sought out rape, sadomasochism, or other extreme content.35 By college, a guy’s favorite category is BDSM, gangbangs, or anal.36 And so it’s not a coincidence that college girls report being pressured by their partners into choking, slapping, anal, threesomes, facials, age-play, and rape-play.37
High school and college aged girls are also at increased risk of STDs as that age group comprises half of total diagnoses,38 heightened by the fact that a solid portion of their dating pool is willing to recklessly transmit in pursuit of fucking them.
Beyond the physical damage, girls are more likely than guys to take on a higher cognitive toll from disappointing sexual experiences than men are. Stressful situationships, being ghosted, wondering where he is, if he’s sleeping with someone else, why he lost interest– all these factors tend to mentally overload girls and set them up for worse academic performance and a weakened economic future– this is particularly the case in teens and young women, who aren’t cognitively complete yet.39
The sex-landscape for young women is less of a lively carnival where girls are trying their hand at a flurry of fun games and rides with a big smile on their face, the way sex-positivity paints it, and instead more of a dismal conveyor belt where young women are set up to be emotionally and physically mistreated.
A proper feminist should make prescriptions not off some optimistic blank-slate, but from these basic phenomena: girls are more agreeable, more susceptible to manipulation, cognitive-sexual overload, and sexual blueprinting. They are more likely to be pressured into the receiving end of violent porn fantasies, lied to about STDs, addled by sexual regret, and victim to partner violence.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to this epidemic and eggs on young women to carelessly leap into bed with guys in the name of female liberation, is grooming girls with a flashy, pink glove.
Same goes for pop culture nudging girls to fuck guys, and if it ends disappointingly, to just insincerely mimic the callousness of their male partners, by spurting “he had a small dick,” or “he’s a fuckboy that can’t even fuck,” or bragging that “he couldn’t make me cum.” Or more annoyingly, pop feminism (the culture of ‘girl’s girls’) coaxes you to ask yourself: girl, did you even like him…or the IDEA of him?! because it’s more culturally comfortable for girls to gaslight themselves into thinking they never had valuable desires for true intimacy from the boy that hurt them, and instead that their pain is a symptom of schizophrenic romanticization, or a void they need to work to heal. Rewrite your feelings as imaginative or a cry for inner healing— anything to not deal with the butt-naked truth that our sexual landscape fails young women.
In Islam, Khulwa– the seclusion of an unrelated man and woman– is to be avoided. “Whenever a man and a woman are alone in one place, their third will be the Shaitan (devil).” To prevent the devil from entering the room, a chaperone typically attends dates in the Muslim community.40 I considered this practice to be incredibly belittling, and reducing people to their most primal forms. But I’ve grown to reconsider the pros and cons of such a practice– I don’t believe in the devil, but I do believe in the non-paranormal demon that is sexual coercion, which terrorizes young women at a large scale. And while I don’t believe that the modern woman ought to have a bodyguard come third wheel on her trysts, secularism does leave open a gap of protection, in which girls are left vulnerable to pushy, male sexual appetite.
When you have a population of guys so desperate to have sex, with methods ranging from manipulative to violent, operating on a pool of young women who are already being sought as sexual prey at every corner, sex-positivity should be working overtime to put itself between those two parties, by reminding girls to say No, when an androcentric society has vested interest in getting them to say yes.
Instead, sex-positive feminism sometimes ends up just lubing women up for coercive sexual acts. For instance, a pop-feminist guide to BDSM labels it as, by nature, a freeing act: “consciously going out of the way to seek out erotic experiences that are definitely not mainstream [is] inherently feminist.”41 When our culture frames an “open-minded attitude towards sexual exploration as inherently feminist,”42 then what weight does consent really have? In other words, why would the progressive, teenage girl say ‘no,’ when she’s being told it’s inherently feminist to say ‘yes’?
Pop feminism tends to just glamorize women not thinking through their sexual decisions in favor of that glamorous yet quixotic pursuit of fucking like a man. Publications that cater to young women tell them that “consciously waiting to have sex will ruin the chemistry and excitement around sex. Sex isn’t supposed to be a planned activity. Sex is supposed to be fun, adventurous, and unexpected.”42
Given the stats on sexual pressure and regret, it’s frustrating that a lot of female-targeted outlets don’t aim to cull women out of the conveyor belt, and instead line them up like ducks.
“Can’t decide when’s the right time to have sex with someone new? Well as soon as you start having those kinds of thoughts, it’s time.”43 The advice is so brazenly wrong, it’s insidious. Pop feminism’s response to women on the fence about having sex is to just shove them over onto the side of fucking.
If a guy tells a girl who’s hesitant about sleeping with him, to just do it– we’d consider him rapey. But when a pretty, pink media outlet tells girls the same thing, it’s considered liberating. This sort of media inculcation is actually more coercive & impedes on one’s ability to give informed consent more than an in person date– years of ingesting media that’s goading you to not overthink sex has more effect on your psyche and decision making than a single pushy, frat guy on a random Tuesday night.
Instead of working against the culture of rampant sexual coercion, pop feminism basically just serves as a bottom-bitch.
Take for instance the culture of girls being pressured into anal sex. Research shows that it’s mostly guys who push girls to try it because they watched it in porn.44 Girls tend to report it as painful, but when you poll teen attitudes on what the issue is, they spit out the talking point that the harmed girls were just “unable to relax.”45 A sex-positive feminist might notice the steps of this culture: male producers lining a profit by churning out damaging depictions of anal sex to a male audience, guys wiring themselves to get off to it at a young age, them then pressuring their female partners into it, to which they endure a good deal of pain– and then perhaps set a prescription such as: hey guys, don’t ask your female partner to do anal. Only perhaps pursue it if she brings it up first, to correct against girls going along with it to pacify their porn-addled fuck-buddies.
But no, popular outlets don’t do this. Instead Teen Vogue ran a guide to anal sex, headered with a pastel pink diagram of the rectum, and included the meaningless caveat of “if you’re not comfortable reading about anal sex, that’s perfectly OK too! No pressure at all!”46 evading the obvious fact that teen girls are already being pressured into anal & other sexual acts to begin with. And now, they’ll just feel more pressure since their favorite fashion magazine has co-signed onto their boyfriend’s anal request.
Or consider the crop. The crop is a whip that riders use to hit horses– it’s also a tool that Teen Vogue encourages teens to try out on each other, in their guide to BDSM.
“If you want to use a crop on your partner, you must have a thorough understanding of the boundaries. You have to ask if your partner is fine with it.”47
The formula seems to be, combine an extreme act with an impressionable audience, and sprinkle some plausible deniability via consent.
Enthusiastic consent is a milquetoast litmus. What’s feminist in getting a young girl to say ‘yes’ to anal or BDSM when she’s drowning in peer and partner pressure broiled by violent porn and pop-feminist media inculcation, teaching her that “consciously waiting” is at odds with the design of sex, that sexual pain is just a sign to relax more, and that doing BDSM is “inherently feminist”? Consent as the only checkpoint feels less of a speeding limit to help women, and more of a ‘get out of jail free’ card that lets guys and the culture take advantage of young women for personal gratification.
Perhaps there are certain things that you just shouldn’t ask a teenage girl to put up with, and perhaps beating her with a crop is one of those things. I think we can safely say that we’ve overcorrected in the culture when we’re so afraid of a purity culture that prompts women to sneak razors onto their honeymoon to knick themselves to appease their male partner when we’re witnessing the pendulum swing to teen girls being beaten with animal tools to appease their male partners. The horse-whip seems evidence that we’ve horse-shoed.
There’s a reason our stomachs churn whenever Leonardo DiCaprio and his 20-something year old girlfriend makes headlines. We’re sympathetic to young women susceptible to exploitation that they might not be privy to until later– this is mirrored in the late onset depressive symptoms that victims of statutory rape exhibit later on. I think that likewise, we ought to be cognizant of the ways in which young women are susceptible to sexual coercion, co-signed by older writers in powerful media giants & porn sites alike.
Girls don’t need Cosmo or Teen Vogue to market anal sex and BDSM to them– their pushy boyfriends already do so. Rather, they’re in dire need of being told they can opt out, when and why they ought to opt out sometimes, and how to opt out. Obviously it’s not worth mulling over the past at an individual level, but pop feminism ought to incorporate the epidemic of female sexual regret into their prescriptions to prevent future generations of girls from going through the wringer.
My friend who went out on that sushi date with the guy who didn’t tuck her back in, once told me that she wishes she was a virgin too. I assumed she’d say because she felt like a slut, so the old sex-positivist in me got defensive.
“Why does it matter? Your body count doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“So I could turn down guys. The way you do. Even if they’re already in my bed.” she replied.
I was puzzled.
“You don’t owe them shit. Turn them down anyway.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not so easy. I tell them no. They ask why. I say I don’t want to, they ask 'You're not attracted to me?' If I say, ‘yes but I want to wait,’ they just ask why again.”
Knee-deep in my ideology, I’d think ‘Ah, if only she just was more sex-positive. Then she’d feel empowered to combat any pushy guy on campus.’ I didn’t even realize that it was the same sisyphean have-sex-for-the-sake-of-sex strand of feminism that made her feel like there’s no point in opting out. Yes, she knew about consent, but if there’s no other benchmark for determining whether having sex with someone is a good or bad idea, then why withhold consent? It’s a meaningless loop. Which is why she’d cave with a little bit of pressure from guys, despite an intuitive feeling not to– because the culture doesn’t give any weight to that gut feeling, other than something to surmount in favor of sexual fun.
An interesting stat is that girls who attend religious services are less likely to be pressured into sex than their secular counterparts.48 Obviously there’s a slew of reasons for why this is the case, such as a different dating pool. But one of the reasons is simply that religion serves as a force-shield against external pressures. While secular society is being taught to override their gut feeling and live in the moment, religious girls have a hard set of rules and morals for themselves. In other words, if the same pushy guy were to keep asking them Why?? She could say “for God” as her lifeline.
My friend was basically saying she wishes she was a virgin because it operates as a similar lifeline. She’s partly right. Telling guys I’m a virgin has definitely come in handy, when they don’t respect my No, and think that I’m just playing hard to get (a large amount still think that, regardless though). But I wish that my friend didn’t have to feel like her body count had to be zero, for her decision to opt out to be worth something.
Secular women are grappling for a lifeline that’s not in reach– for instance, non-religious women in their twenties are most likely to report being pressured into anal sex.
Further, my friend told me 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— given that almost half of American women regret how they lost their virginity, it’s safe to say girls are not being properly informed of their choices and are instead being crammed onto a normative, pushy timeline of sexual milestones which wrack them with turmoil.
Sex-positivity did a bang-up job in shredding purity culture to pieces and divorcing a woman’s sexual biography from her value, but the culture has done an awful job at reminding the modern woman that she can reserve the option to wait or opt out. Instead, our mores treat religious conservatism as being baked into abstinence, and only give it the limelight to crucify it: “Find out how abstinence may contribute to rape culture”49 “Find out how crisis pregnancy centers are reportedly teaching abstinence to scare young people.”50 Which is a shame. Because choice feminism is moot, if opting out is an invisible choice for non-religious women.
Popular feminism should offer the lifeline that religion offers to girls– a protective factor against external pressures. A dead-end No instead of a paved route towards a never ending road of Why? from guys and a modernist culture at large. Yes, religion’s protection of female chastity tends to be aimed for ill reasons, and oftentimes turns a blind eye to marital rape / sexual violation of “impure” women, but the beauty of separation of church and state, is that we can cherrypick the effective components of religious teachings to mainstream into cultural prescriptions.
When I tell people that I’m opting out of having sex, I get told a lot of things. That I’m prudish, wasting my “prime,” overthinking it, a control-freak, or even pathological. I once told a friend that I wish to wait until I feel that my life is more sorted out; that I want a cleaner direction for myself before getting into bed with someone, to decide for myself first how I even want to treat sex. He laughed and said my thought pattern was insane.
“Farha, it’s not marriage. It’s just sex.”
Plenty of girls have heard a boy tell them that he’s just not ‘ready’ for a relationship. What he means by that is he wants to prioritize his personal and career goals first, not compromising on his freedom, or that he does not feel emotionally ready.51
Opting out of a relationship is considered culturally normal behavior. Nobody would dub this young man stiff, pathological, or missing out on life, for this ordering list. But in a post-sexual revolution society, where women who fuck ought to not be pathologized as broken or whores, a zero-sum game has taken place in which women who don’t wish to fuck are pathologized. They are considered emotionally immature, socially inept, sexually repressed, and sometimes advised to undergo psychological counseling.52 I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been offered some neat trick to try and surmount my sexual reluctance, whether it be ingesting shrooms, oysters, ginseng, vodka, watching more porn, talking to a shrink, trying out reiki, taking E, or downing capfuls of GHB (the date-rape drug).
A truly feminist project would carve out a space for a girl’s gut feeling, rather than drowning it in alcohol or oyster juice.
Your value is not instilled in your body count. Any guy who tells you otherwise, should be dead fish in your dating pool. But you still have the option to wait or opt out of fucking– even if you’re not religious, even if you’re not conservative, even if you’re not a virgin.
Your gut is a decent compass. It’s not worth fucking someone if it feels wrong, because it’s just the water we swim in, or because you hope it’ll lead to the sort of relationship you want.
There is no expiration on your virginity or celibacy. You’re not missing out by opting out of sex during high school or college, and much of the glamor around frivolous sex is artificial or an armchair theory. The guy who bought you drinks, the guy who took you out to a dozen restaurants, the guy who brought you over into his bed to watch Netflix, or even your boyfriend– is not entitled to fucking you.
You don’t have to rip the bandaid off. Not to appease your friends, or a pushy hook-up. You don’t have to pony up sex to a guy who frames it as just something people just do, while he considers whether or not he wants to take things more seriously with you. A horny guy has vested interest in convincing you it’s strange, meaningless, or even wrong for you to opt out of sex– I’ve many times been on the receiving end of some intense vitriol from angry guys with more concern for their blue balls than my well-being– and it’s all just made me more steadfast in my decision to opt out. The pushier a guy is to fuck you, should be more reason for you not to.
You can withhold sex for as long as you want, and there’s nothing inherently strange about graduating high school or college as a virgin. You’re not wasting your youth.
You can opt out until you feel more emotionally settled with your life, or to prioritize other pursuits. Though the liberal elite which stacks up the writing rooms of these pop feminist and progressive outlets love to tell young women to just start fucking, they themselves live rather sex-negative lifestyles: while attending their top-tier alma maters, they are “too busy studying to get laid,” and even onward they don’t indulge much sexual variety. They hold steadfast onto their sexual modesty while churning out content that encourages otherwise. You don’t have to be a sexual guinea pig for liberal writers preaching sex-positivity as an aesthetic idea, while they themselves opt out and live a rather sex-negative lifestyle in favor of self-development53— and while you become addled by emotional & physical turmoil.
You can opt out, in a way that’s completely congruent with a feminist praxis and in a way that doesn’t reinforce purity obsession.
I get DMs from women telling me they’re “older” virgins (they’re in their 20s) and they tend to feel a bit embarrassed about it, and so they enjoy seeing my content discussing it. 12% of women 20-24 haven’t had sex, which isn’t an incredibly small number.54 There ought to be some sort of progressive cultural currency around being abstinent– and more than just a 50 Shades fantasy of dominating an innocent girl.
Once I told my mom that I wish she explained her lessons in a different way. That instead of just telling me it’s haram for girls to have sex, that she could’ve just explained to me that it might be in my best interest to hold off, God aside. She replied and said, “It is in your best interest to wait. Because if you don’t, you’ll go to hell.”
Endnotes:
“The New Virginity” by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian (2008)
“Virginity Testing and Women’s Rights: Contested Narratives of Reproductive and Sexual Rights” by Shereen El Feki, Global Commission on HIV and the Law (2011)
“Gynecologic Care for Adolescents and Teens” by Catherine E. Forcier, MD (2011)
“The Cult of Virginity Just Won’t Let Go” by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic (2021)
UNODC. (2019). Global study on homicide: Gender-related killing of women and girls.
World Health Organization. (2023). Female genital mutilation. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/female-genital-mutilation
CNN, “Egyptian general admits ‘virginity tests’ conducted on protestors,” by Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Salma Abdelaziz (2011)
Fuller Project Report: "A Test With No Answer: Why Are American Doctors Performing Virginity Tests?" (The Fuller Project).
“The ‘Husband Stitch’ during Episiotomy Repair is a Disturbing Reality for Many New Mothers.” The Independent (2018).
UN. “Virginity Testing’: A Human Rights Violation, with No Scientific Basis – UN.” (2018)
Carol Queen. “The Necessary Revolution: Sex-Positive Feminism in the Post-Barnard Era” (2008)
Lawrence B Finer. “Premarital Sex is Nearly Among Americans, And Has Been For Decades.” (2007)
The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism
Navarro, R., et al. “Psychological Correlates of Ghosting and Breadcrumbing Experiences: A Preliminary Study among Adults” (2020)
John Anderer. “Love in 2023: Ghosting ‘New Normal’ for Ending Relationships, Research Shows” (2023)
Amanda Gionet. “The Love Bombing Survey.” (2022)
Terri Fisher, Michele Alexander. “Women’s Sexual Behaviors May Be Closer to Men’s Than Previously Thought.” (2003)
David Cantor. Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct. (2015)
Guttmacher Institute. Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use Among Teenagers in the United States (2017)
CDC. “Vital Signs: Binge Drinking Among Women and High School Girls” (2013)
The Recovery Village. “What are Date Rape Drugs? Definition, Types, and Effects” (2023)
American Psychological Association. “New Insights on College Drinking.”
ibid
PPFA Consent Survey Results Summary (2015)
BMC Public Health
Grasscity Forums: Taking advantage of drunk women and men, Talk About Marriage: Girls Night Out – Jealous again
Kirsten Morehouse. “All human social groups are human, but some are more human than others: A comprehensive investigation of the implicit association of ‘Human’ to US racial/ethnic groups.” (2023)
University of Tennessee at Knoxville. (2013). “First time” may predict lifelong sexual satisfaction.
Psychology Today: “Can Your Sexual Debut Predict Your Future?”
Theresa DiDonato. “10 Things We’ve Learned About Hookups and Regret” (2014), Susan Kolod. “Is Hookup Regret More Common in Women?” (2014)
Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research. “The Complex Consequences of Sexting for Teens.” Psychology Today (2022)
“Gender.” Psychology Today
Raychelle Cassada Lohmann. “Teens and Porn.” Psychology Today
Leslie Reed. “Boys and Porn: Researchers Find Age of First Exposure Linked to Sexist Attitudes.” Nebraska Today. (2017)
Amanda Giordano. “What to Know About Adolescent Pornography Exposure.” Psychology Today, 2022
ibid
Ibid
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2024)
Kristen Monaco. “Sexual Violence Takes a Toll on Teens’ Mental Health.” (2022), Sarah Hunter Murray. “6 Things That Determine if a First Sexual Experience Is Pleasurable.” (2021)
IslamOnline. “Definition of Khulwa / Seclusion.”, Riyad Us-Saliheen (Gardens of the Righteous). “Prohibition of Meeting a non-Mahram Woman in Seclusion.”
Rachel Sanoff. “What BDSM Can Teach Us About Feminism” HelloGiggles (2017)
Terra Marquette. “Waiting To Have Sex Is Not Going To Get You The Relationship You Want” Elite Daily (2016)
ibid
Bahar Gholipour. “Teen Anal Sex Study: 6 Unexpected Findings.” Live Science (2014)
Cicely Marston. “Anal heterosex among young people and implications for health promotion: a qualitative study in the UK.” (2014)
Gigi Engle. “Anal Sex: Safety, How tos, Tips, and More.” Teen Vogue (2019)
Gigi Engle. “Consent and BDSM: What You Should Know” Teen Vogue (2017)
Brent Miller, Barbara Monson, Michael Nortion. “Adolescent Sexual Behavior: An Examination of Family and Peer Group Influence.” Religious Studies Center, Brighan Young University. (2024)
Gina Florio. “Why Some People Hide Sexual Assault After Abstinence-Only Education” Teen Vogue (2017)
Brooke Bunce, Brittney McNamara. “Crisis Pregnancy Centers Reportedly Teaching Abstinence-Only Sex Ed in Public Schools.” Teen Vogue. (2018)
Brian Nox. “A Man Will ONLY Say ‘Not Ready for a Relationship’ When…” (2024), “A Conscious Rethink.” “5 Common Meanings When He Says He’s ‘Not Ready’ for a Relationship” (2024)
Elizabeth Grace Matthew “Review: The sexual revolution has hurt both men and women. Where do we go from here?” America Magazine (2022), Deborah Anapol. “What Ever Happened to the Sexual Revolution” (2012)
Jonathon Last. “Liberal Elites Value Marriage, Monogamy, Career.” (2017)
US Department of Health & Human Services, CDC. “National Survey of Family Growth, 2015-2019.”
It's no small feat to blend social data with personal stories and you did so beautifully. The expectation of our sex lives is as unrealistic as what we're suppose to weigh on a bathroom scale. Yet, even as someone who picks the media apart, I still find myself weighing who I am against other woman. I don't find it healing to know I'm not alone. What I find healing is hearing someone say, "this is me and I'm not apologizing...for any of it". That is the magic of what you're doing. Actual feminism isn't statements... its bending reality, it's dislodging all the explanations we assume we need to make about the parts of ourselves that make people uncomfortable. For years I've been holding misogynist discomfort with the people around me as a form of connection, but that discomfort doesn't belong to me. When we let it go of that borrowed discomfort, we invite a thousand other women to let go. So thank you... for the invitation.
Thank you so much for writing this Farah, I'm a brown-girl starting college this fall and to keep it short this really touched me and was beautifully written. I hope you know what an impact your words have.