Harris O'Maley

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The Problem With Male Virginity

22 year old Elliot Rodger drove his car through a popular night spot in the college town of Santa Barbara and started shooting. Six people were killed and thirteen more were injured before the gunman took his own life.

Virginity in men is vilified being a virgin past a certain point is a sign of faws and weakness but losing one's virginity that's when the world is supposed to open up to you I'm coming of age narrative for men links losing one's virginity to becoming a man

One of the reasons why men tend to freak out about the idea of being a virgin - especially being a virgin past college - is that we've grown up in the shadow of a cultural narrative that we believe to be law.

By telling young men that they are uniquely cursed we tell them whatever they must do to break the spell is justified.
If we want to fix the way we treat male virgins then we need to start with ourselves and the first step is for young men to quit letting ourselves perpetuate this screwed up narrative.

The Standard Virginity Loss Narrative tells us that men are supposed to lose their virginity by a certain age - sometimes by age 18, sometimes by 21. The earlier you lose it, the better off you are (no matter how unhealthy that act may actually be) , but you should be actively trying by high school. According to the Standard Narrative, the ideal time is at some suitably momentous occasion: the 'big game', at prom… by graduation if you possibly can manage it. If you can't manage it in high school, then you need to accomplish it in college… otherwise you're well into Terra Incognita and 40 Year Old Virgin territory and nobody wants to be there because here there be dragons. We get the Standard Virginity Loss Narrative burned into our minds early on, reinforced over and over again by pop-culture until we start to believe it's the TRVTH, carved into stone tablets delivered to us at the base of Mount Sinai. And the hell of it all? It's almost entirely made up.

The narrative is fiction. It's an idealized, heteronormative, suburban middle class ideal that the vast majority of us don't live in. The story turns our sexual development into a performance, just as masculinity is often a performance. When men fail to live up to this entirely arbitrary standard, we feel not just as though we've failed but that we're failures. We're defective. Wrong. And there will be plenty of people eager to reinforce the narrative, to mock us, and tell us that this deviation from the narrative calls our masculinity into question. Just as the gender police are eager to punish people who don't live up to the traditional definitions of manhood.

Own the label, let go of the blame. Find yourself for once in your life. Spend less time focused on getting laid and more time focused on becoming a better person.

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