I Was Taught To Protect My Virginity At All Costs. Instead, I Decided To Seduce My Town’s Star Athlete.

Nick and I went on a handful of dates over a couple of weeks, but I made it clear to him I was on the accelerated track ― in the AP class ― with sex, as with everything else. He was a bit thrown off by my determination and asked several times if I was sure I was ready. I was acutely aware that it wasn’t so much concern for me as it was his fear that I would freak out on him, like that girl with the really long hair that everybody knows who insists on getting a pixie cut and then, once she gets it, screams and cries on the floor for hours and won’t go to school for weeks. 

I assured him I was not that girl. 

So, we awkwardly embarked on my defrocking. He was kind but hesitant as we went through the motions. I was stumped when he asked if it hurt. I had no idea, and I couldn’t have cared less. I was so excited I couldn’t feel a thing. It was not sexual excitement — I didn’t know what that was — it was the frenzied escape, the release of all that pent-up and forbidden “no” that had been instilled in me. I was not giving my virginity away — it was not a gift, and it was not being taken. I was giddily destroying it, tossing it aside, stomping on it. Like Mr. Walsh’s shirt.

It was over very quickly, and I felt so accomplished. I had done it, this thing that was so huge, so fraught, so shamed and feared and forbidden — and so managed and administered and patrolled and protected. And I waited for the terrible guilt, the ripping away of that supposedly sacred piece of me, the loss of self and soul that would transform me into a foul and useless waste of humanity.

I felt nothing. There was nothing. 

And there would continue to be nothing through several subsequent decades of impersonal, detached sex. Sex with a statement. Sex with an agenda. Sex with a vengeance. Wild sex. Deviant sex. Stupid sex. Good sex. Bad sex. But none of it belonged to me. It never had. 

Sex had been utterly depersonalized with so much baggage and so much moral weight before I could ever understand it, much less claim it. It was never about the meaning or feeling. It was about the act and, as always, the only value was in the performance. The appearance. Just like that shirt. 

The church had been totally wrong about sex and everything that came with it, but, despite everything I tried, I had never been able to figure out how to make it right.