Virginity is Fake, So Why is it Still a Rite of Passage?

In the fall of my senior year of high school, I was the starting goalkeeper on the boys’ varsity soccer team. After beating our arch rivals, the topic of sex came up, as it does with teenage boys on a long yellow bus ride that put us on this side of adolescence. Who was a virgin, we asked each other, and who wasn’t?

My teammates were astonished to hear I was still a virgin. They presumed I’d been having sex for the past two years with my long-term girlfriend, with whom I’d just broken up. My ex and I preferred heavy petting and deep conversations, I said. We just didn’t have that type of relationship.

As a deeply repressed closeted trans girl moonlighting as a typical white suburban American boy, what else could I say? What excuse could be as passable as a letterman jacket and a soccer ball ricocheting off my chest?

On that cold Massachusetts night, the back of the bus warmed only with our breaths and bravado, my teammates made a bet not so much with me but about me. Would I lose my virginity before prom?

My face flushed bright red when someone asked the question, and the others jumped in with their answers. I wanted nothing to do with this “bet” and said whatever I needed to say to change the subject. My life was not another late-'90s movie where the jock is in on the plot.

However, the stupid bet haunted me throughout the school year. Every couple of months one of my friends would ask me how I was progressing, and my humiliation came rushing back to me. I felt like Jim from “American Pie.”

The first “American Pie” movie hit theaters in the summer of 1999, ushering in my junior year of high school and Y2K. The plot revolves around a group of high school boys who make a pact that each will lose their virginity before the end of their senior year. The film then tracks the various hijinks and debauchery the boys go through to accomplish their singular goal: penis-in-vagina sex.

I found myself identifying with Jim, played by actor Jason Biggs. Jim has, by far, the most awkward narrative arc. His highlight reel includes having sex with a freshly baked apple pie against the kitchen counter, then trying and failing to sleep with a beautiful foreign exchange student (we’ll get to how poorly that scene aged), and finally fucking his band geek prom date. She only accepted his invitation because Jim would be an easy lay—a “sure thing,” ceding some agency to a woman in the movie.

Like Jim, I had no sense of execution. The first time a girl ever let me stick my hands down her pants, I couldn’t even find her vagina. Not her clitoris, like all the jokes and memes say—I couldn’t find her goddamn VAGINA.

At one point late in the movie, the peer pressure gets to Jim and he sort of explodes. “I am so sick and tired of all this bullshit pressure,” he tells his friends. “I've never even had sex and already I can't stand it. I hate sex! And I’m not going to stand around here busting my balls over something that, quite frankly, isn’t that damn important.”

Same, Jim, same.

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