The First Time: Women Speak Out About "Losing Their Virginity"

By Karen Bouris

Book Overview

Firsthand accounts, by women, of the loss of virginity--including both positive and negative perceptions--provide valuable tools for parents to open doors of communication to promote healthy... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 094323350X
• ISBN13: 9780943233505
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Conari Pr
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

An important subject

At the time this book came out (1993), there really wasn't a lot of literature available about this important rite of passage for women. In spite of a wealth of books on sexual topics, there had been precious few written about the initiation into sexual activity and what it really meant to women. In the course of writing this book, Ms. Bouris sent out a thousand questionnaires and got back over 150, from women from all walks of life (though in spite of having tried to get a broad racial mix, only 9% of the respondents were African-American, 3% Asian, and 3% Hispanic, with the remaining 85% white). The women were of a wide variety of ages, professions, geographic locations, and religions, but the one thing they had in common was the experience of first sexual activity. The mean, median, and mode age was seventeen (the oldest was 26), and though a number of the women reported having their first and only experience with their husbands, only three were actually wedding-night virgins, in spite of the outright lie and historical revisionism some people bandy about, how almost all women allegedly saved themselves for marriage until the women's liberation movement started in the late Sixties. Also contrary to the fantasy depicted on tv, the movies, and in romance novels, most first times were not ideal, romantic, or earth-shattering. The book is divided up into the categories "Wedding Nights--or Almost," "Pressure from All Directions," "A Conscious Choice," "Just Get It Over With," "Violation in All Its Forms," "Women Loving Women," and "The Romantic Minority." Many of the women who responded to the questionnaire were pressured into having sex, had insensitive partners, lost their virginity as a result of childhood sexual abuse or date-rape, didn't anticipate how their bodies and minds would respond even if they had planned their first encounter and had thought they were ready physically and emotionally, had sex just because they felt they were the last virgins left at their age or because they didn't want to have an awkward self-conscious painful clueless first time with someone they truly loved, wanting to get it over with with no one special, and had bad first times because they were too embarrassed or ignorant to communicate with their partners about their needs and wants. Very few had the ideal romantic first time, married or not, depicted in romance novels and the movies. You never find a movie or romance novel where the first time is painful, fumbled, awkward, regretted, or anything less than beautiful, perfect, and fireworks going off in the background. And yet for all of the sad stories about young women who had their first sexual experience before they were ready or had their right to decide when to become sexually active stolen from them by child molesters or rapists, there are also positive stories. We also have a great chapter on lesbian first times (including some women whose first times were with men but felt their more signific