A straight and supposedly queer- friendly friend of mine recently told me that if I had only had sex with a girl I was still a virgin. Coz girl-on-girl sex does not really “count”. I’m really insecure and her comment made me feel pretty sad, what do you think about this Constance?
love licketty lesbo
Licketty, your Friend is flat out wrong. Wrong, but unfortunately a pretty common product of heteronormative sex talk which most of us are exposed to. Many of us have been told ‘p into v = sex’ all our lives, and it’s pretty important that this shit gets corrected.
‘Sex’ should be any consensual sexual encounter you chose to refer to as such. Virginity loss is when you have sex for the first time. If you feel you lost your virginity, then you sure as fuck did, and your friend has no right to say otherwise. Unless she wants you to decide when she did and didn’t have sex.
How would she like it if you decided that time she let that guy at The Big Kumara stick his hand in her pants was sex? She probably wouldn’t love that if she disagreed with you. So in that case, she should quit being a hypocrite because nobody made her the sex police—especially not the lesbian sex police.
Sex for some people, is vaginal penetration with a penis, sex for others is anal penetration with a strap-on, and sex for others is oral sex, etc. etc. Conversely, some people feel that certain sexual acts don’t count as sex
for them. It’s their right to have that opinion, but it’s not their right to push a personal measure of what sex is onto others.
I personally take pretty huge issue with the way female virginity is constructed in most of the world. It’s seen as a gift, a (totally arbitrary) sign of purity, and the hymen (which some women don’t even have) is held up as its measure. Don’t get me wrong, men are often told to wait for the right person and that virginity loss is a big deal, but many women are made to feel like they’re giving something away when they have sex for the first time. If that is how someone feels about their virginity, then again that’s their choice, but it shouldn’t be pushed on everyone. There’s something really fucking wrong with the world if our girl children are made to feel like their greatest worth is tied up in their ‘purity’.
Virginity loss should never be determ- ined by your friend’s super-traditional sense of what sex is and isn’t. Although she is entitled to hold that view for herself, sex is a pretty darn personal thing, and her preferences, measures and opinions are exactly that. Hers not yours.
On the ‘queer friendly’ thing, I also think your friendship might benefit from a discussion around how dismissive her view of sex is to your experiences. Try talking about how sex is a personal measure, and although she’s entitled to her opinion, she cannot force her measure onto you. It also might be worth discussing how feeling that you’re still a ‘virgin’ in her books, effectively means that she thinks you don’t have sex. And that view is not very ‘queer friendly’. What the hell does she think you do when you take a lady home? Hold hands?
Love Constance