How Old Were You When You Lost Your Virginity?

How old were you when you lost your virginity, were you dating that person, how long if so, and was there any outside pressure? These are some examples of the questions that were presented to two subjects, a twenty-three year old, single, African-American male and a twenty-one year old, white female in a year old relationship. After thoroughly examining and comparing their answers to the ten question survey prepared by myself, I found out something rather chilling about the ugly reality of peer pressure and how it applies itself so strongly to premarital sex. The true meaning of what sex is really all about, whatever that may be, is very lost, and this terrible problem can almost be single-handedly attributed to the powerful phenomenon of social influence. The loss of this vital implication has triggered a sexually unhealthy, uninformed, and unsatisfied society with increased number of abortions, rapes, and broken hearts. Teenage cohorts can create enormous amounts of unhealthy pressure detrimental to the morale of teenagers causing these young individuals to lose their virginities at extremely early ages, habitually engage in sexual and orally-sexual activities that often occur under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, increasing the regularity of unsafe sexual encounters and unleashing their serious consequences, and the ultimate result is the devastation of a society's appreciation for mature "love-making" with one, and only one partner.

If you will, please allow me to identify the male subject as "John" and the young, female subject as "Jane" for reasons of confidentiality, of course. John's survey, which was first taken, shockingly revealed that his first sexual encounter was the actual loss of his virginity when he was only fourteen years of age, respectively, to a girl which whom he was not even dating, while he was high on marijuana! He continued to tell that he persistently engaged in sex ten times over the following ten days with this same young lady, while also adding other sexual partners to his young, but growing list of what are now about twenty-nine sexual partners. He was much more sexually aggressive immediately after the loss of his virginity; moreover, he even goes as far to say that twenty-nine is just the number of the ones that he can actually remember, implying that he may have had more partners than those of which he can recall, because he could have been either too drunk or too high to even remember them. He claimed that his early sex life was profoundly influenced by the pressure created by other young males competing to have the most sexual partners. During his eight-year sex life he has slept with twenty-nine females which he claims is average; fortunately for him, he has had unprotected sex with only two partners, but of his two partners with whom he had unprotected sex, one had an abortion! He estimates about seventy-five percent of his sexual partners performed unprotected oral sex, and he has received unsafe oral sex from ten different females with whom he did not even have sex with. After the survey this is what John had to say about sex, "Sex is overrated; it was thought to be cool if you were having sex from a competitive stand-point with the boys. As I got older, I wanted to get to know what may be potential sexual partners, but I still wouldn't settle down with a steady girlfriend even if I met the right girl for me. That's a shame, because I'd rather be promiscuous."

Jane's survey answers yielded some striking similarities as far as pressure was concerned, but provided the needed contribution of a different socioeconomic perspective. Jane's very first sexual experience was the loss of her virginity as well, but in contrast, she had been dating her partner for two years prior to the forever-impacting encounter. She was still only fifteen years old when it happened! After only one month, still at the tender age of fifteen, sex became a frequent behavior between the two for the next year and a half straight, at an astounding rate of a consistent four times a week with a partner she says she never loved! She also makes a strong claim that peer pressure had much to do with her developing sexual appetite, saying sternly that other girls her age were losing their virginities around that time, and that really helped justify the need for the deed to be done. Though she waited two long years before adding another sexual partner to her resume, she has had four sexual partners total in her short, six-year sex life, two with whom she performed unprotected oral sex, and four others with whom she did not have sex with but performed unprotected oral sex for. She accredits most of this careless activity to the result of the flippant attitude with which sex is associated with among her peers, claiming that these things happened just because she thought it was what they wanted, and she did not mind doing it! Imagine this awful negligence! She had to have an abortion at the age of seventeen due to the mistake of unprotected sex with her first, and this is what she had to say about sex after the survey was completed, "Sex is greatly abused and misused. Younger people really don't quite understand what sex is all about, and they, for some reason, think that it's cool or something. It should only be an expression of love with someone you love unconditionally, but there's a lot of pressure especially when people are always casually talking about it and joking about it. It seems to be fun or entertaining, definitely not what it's supposed to be. I wish I would have waited until I met my current boyfriend."

Both of the subjects consistently received a mountain of outside pressure throughout their adolescent lifetime and until now to perform sexual acts, and they weakly submitted to the burly demands of a sexually-misunderstanding society. Both went on to say that sex is highly overrated by young teenagers, and they are all often misinformed of the true meaning of love and how sex is incorporated. Losing their virginities at such a young age and customarily engaging in unsafe premarital sexual activity with regularity has greatly injured their current status of sexual morale making them both feel at times ashamed of their sexual pasts. The female definitely seemed to have a much harder time adjusting her perception of what has happened to one that is just or rational, but the male has suffered far more from a lost their desire for passionate "love-making" and has retreated to lust-based sexual appetite. The pressure to engage in sexual encounters provided in large by young adolescents is so remarkably drastic that a blank is drawn when thinking of where to begin to fix this epidemic. If young people are suffering so greatly from the practice of something that is sacred and vital to human survival, something is evidently completely wrong with the cognitions being produced. Teens should allow themselves to first mature physically, and then, mentally before they start having sex or even think about having sex.

Sex can be complicated, and it is definitely all too complicated for teens to maturely understand. The problem is children engage in sex because they think it is "cool." Young men and women are being robbed of their emotional motivation for sex, and society has substituted a need for acceptance. When the time is truly right for that special occasion, the meaning will be lost in the acts of all previous encounters brought on by the enormousness of peer pressure. Sex should be a passionate covenant between two lovers, not a sick version of two teenagers without a conscious. In my study I found that peer pressure is a phenomenon, that it really exists, and that the consequences of unsafe sex can be psychologically paramount. Still an addictive force of nature seems to always prevail in the end, leaving many hurt and many indifferent, but maybe one day we can put this epidemic in our past and get the most out of our sex lives, that is, when we are ready.