There's a first time for everything

When we learn to ride a bike, we are not worried people will think less of us.

If we start playing baseball, we don’t expect our first team to be our one and only.

After our first night in a college dorm room, we don’t assume we’ll wake up reborn.

These standards seem ridiculous until we apply them to the taboo topic of sex.  

Young adults are often made to feel that their first time is possibly the most important thing we will do.

It is viewed as one of the most monumental moments in our lifetime.

It is what will make you a woman.

It is the universal bar mitzvah.

Deep down, we know these ideas are stupid.

Unfortunately, we are trained to ignore our B.S. detectors by a society that is just as confused as we are.

Last year Jaclyn Friedman, preeminent feminist and author, came to IU and discussed the commodity model of sex, in which

virginity is treated like a precious diamond.  

It is an economic application of heterosexual sex, where women are the suppliers and men are the demanders.

It is up to the women to protect their magic

southerly parts until a gentleman offers the proper price: marriage.

The women are considered worthless if they “give it away” before this price is met.

For men, this can mean that masculinity is determined by how good they are at getting women to have sex with them at below market value.

Indiana public schools have completely bought into this model because they receive federal funding to teach abstinence-only sex education, which isn’t sex education at all. Sex intimidation would be a more appropriate name.

I remember in one class, a teacher asked everyone to squeeze out a tube of toothpaste onto a paper plate.

When the plate was all gooey and minty fresh, she asked if we could put the toothpaste back in the tube. Of course, we couldn’t.

“That’s what happens when you lose your virginity,” she said. “You can never get it back.”

Unlike any other activity, if you have sex for the first time at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you will be ruined forever.  

Sex, like toothpaste, is something you want to squeeze out of the tube right the first time.

Even though most people do not stringently follow the commodity model, it is evident in our everyday interactions.

This is the model that causes women to strategize about how soon into a relationship they can have sex without losing their status as “girlfriend material.”

It is this model that causes men to lie about their sexual experience to avoid being stigmatized as effeminate or gay.

By applying economic models to our sex lives, we cheapen ourselves.

We become things rather than people, and one kind of experience comes to define our worth.  

If you like someone, who cares how shiny and new they keep their diamond?

­— casefarr@indiana.edu