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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Seven: Opening Night
Ironically, given that America is often seen (and likes to see itself) as the vanguard of all things sexual, America lags far behind many other countries in terms of developing a pragmatic, egalitarian, nonjudgmental way of thinking about virginity loss. Dr. Laura Carpenter’s provocative study of virginity-loss narratives in American and German magazines targeted at teenagers, for example, discovered that while German and American teenagers tend to lose their virginity at a very similar age (16-17 years old), and German and American societies are fairly similar in many socioeconomic ways, German magazines were dramatically more likely to describe virginity loss in a neutral or positive light.
In her study, Carpenter compares German teen magazine Bravo! to a similar American publication, Seventeen. Many of the virginity ideas and ideals espoused in these two magazines, both in the feature articles written by adult writers and the first-person accounts written by teen readers, were similar. Carpenter discovered, for example, that both magazines espoused the ideal that sex should take place in the context of a caring relationship and should be something that a couple works up to gradually, rather than something to be plunged into with someone who one doesn't know well.
But the similarities in the magazines’ outlooks on virginity ended there. Carpenter found there was an overwhelming difference between the virginity-loss stories being told by Germans to Germans and those told by Americans to Americans. Both magazines dealt with issues like pain and bleeding, nerves, performance anxiety, peer pressure, contraception, and the potential threat of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, but Bravo! consistently conveyed a vision of first-time sex that was generally encouraging and reassuring, while Seventeen repeatedly transmitted the impression that first-time sex was nearly inevitably traumatic and undesirable. Fewer than 10% of the virginity-loss narratives in Bravo!, whether written by teens or by adult editorial staff, were negative in character, while a staggering 66.7% of those in Seventeen described undesirable, unpleasant experiences and outcomes. Fewer than 20% of the Seventeen narratives could be characterized as being either positive or mixed, while nearly 90% of the German magazine’s loss-of-virginity coverage fell into those categories.
To the degree that mass media mirrors the mind of its public, this is a startling revelation. For Americans and Germans alike, it is a loud reminder that while we may all be part of the great morass labeled Western culture, we don’t necessarily think alike. Values and experiences that are assumed to be universal are often anything but, even among cultures whose members share a great deal in terms of demographics and background.
The German-American comparison is all the more noteworthy when we consider what the articles in teen magazines have to do with the experiences of real teenagers. Part of the raison d'etre of such stories, after all, is to provide a shared point of reference, a communal store of awareness of how people are expected to think and behave.
When we compare the kinds of virginity-loss stories our cultures seem to prefer with the kinds of sexual outcomes the people living in those cultures actually experience, we see some highly interesting things. Most prominently, we see that that gloom-and-doom stories of first-time sex—stories that would seem likely to serve as cautionary tales--do little to ensure that young people will have sound and responsible approaches to sex. A less judgmental, more affirming and pragmatic approach, on the other hand, appears to help increase personally and clinically positive outcomes. The Bravo! magazine examples Carpenter studied included contraceptive use about 20% more frequently than the Seventeen examples. When they did, they tended to describe birth control use not as a disagreeable necessity, but as a sensible and unexceptional commonplace. Surely the German attitude toward first-time sex shown in the pages of Bravo! is not the only thing that explains the fact that Germany’s teen pregnancy rate is (as of 2004) only one-fifth that of the USA. But it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt. Given the prominence that virginity-loss stories have in shaping social reality for young adults, we can only wonder what might happen in the USA and other countries with high teen birthrates if we were simply to change the stories we tell about our first times.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames