He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. I was impressed by his advanced age and how shocking it would be if I told people he was my boyfriend, but even I knew that this was not enough grist for a relationship. I can’t remember if he took me to dinner or to hear music, but I’m sure I had to be home by eleven, and that our conversation was stilted and humorless. Once, I gave my number-or, I should say, my mother’s number-to a bassist with black hair who was twenty-seven. The experience was so underwhelming, so strikingly devoid of the blissful, painful, or intensely emotional sensations I’d been promised, I wondered what was wrong with everyone for imbuing intercourse with so much import. We would go to crummy dives in the East Village to drink beer, listen to awful bands, and flirt with grown men. So, when I was fifteen, I started going to bars with a pack of girls who went to Catholic school in Manhattan and knew how to get fake IDs. If I was going to be lovelorn, at least I would have liked the consolation of being able to brag that I’d had sex. It was all we could do to get past second base.Īfter Josh broke my heart, my great regret was not that I had lost my virginity to him, but that I hadn’t. Josh, I knew, was as confused about what this entailed as I was. The thing I badly wanted wasn’t sex but to be rid of my virginity, the last vestige of a childhood spent trusting and respecting adults, seeking their approval. We found each other attractive, but we were so young neither of us had ever experienced clear erotic desire. We did not have a lot of lust to guide us. On the occasions when we found ourselves alone in bedrooms or on couches, our bravado dissipated and we became children again, unsure of what was expected of us. Josh and I were unstoppable in our pursuit of ’60s-inflected accessories and experiences, but we were timid about sex. It did not occur to me that I got the ideas for my outfits from photographs of my mother taken at a time when she looked happy to be with my father. When Josh and I started going out I felt that I had been delivered from my isolation, my uncoolness, and my family. Both of our sets of parents were slowly but surely separating, and both Josh and I were paradoxically desperate to assert our independence from them by mimicking the very expressions of rebellion they had taught us. He hung out on the steps in front of our high school with other boys who smoked cigarettes and, occasionally, joints in the bushes. Josh had dark blue eyes and long, curly brown hair, which was (prematurely) streaked with silver. I had a beautiful boyfriend when I was fourteen, with whom I was thoroughly infatuated. Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. I needed to do things that would make people gasp. With sex as with drugs, my interest in the entity itself was far less potent a motivator than my fervent desire to transform myself from tiny dork into Janis Joplin. But the acid was a classic bad trip, during which I thought I heard the breathing of dead people. Well, the pot, actually, was great-unless you are reading this and you are twelve, in which case it was awful. It’s not that these things were necessarily fun. Losing my virginity was the next logical step. I realized, as I was going through puberty (early), the necessity of shifting my focus from doing things that would impress my parents and teachers to engaging in behavior that would strike my peers as cool. The upside of being a verbal kid is that adults often think you are bright, but children have another name for such a person: nerd. I loved talking and words and once I could write them down I was a step closer to becoming myself. The first-and only impressive-expression of my precociousness was when I insisted on learning to read in nursery school. (I was pretty much the only person interested in this reputation.) But mostly, I had a reputation to uphold. By early adolescence I had become so accustomed to being told I was mature, it seemed obvious to me that this next benchmark had to be hit early in order to maintain my identity. As an only child, I spent most of my youth around adults, which made me sound sort of like one. When I was fourteen years old, I decided it was time to lose my virginity. Ariel Levy on the rush to lose her virginity at fourteen, recalling: “Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity.
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