I love Girls With Slingshots. I love it for its many zany characters, for portraying handicapped people as real people, for talking about sex and relationships as if heteronormative assumptions are not, in fact, all there is to the private lives of a few billion humans.
I love the above strip in particular because Jamie is very experienced, only somehow NOT. And that resonates with me.
Much to the shock of seemingly everyone, I READ about sex and relationships. In fact, I have READ about them EXTENSIVELY for years.
I also -- LE GASP -- am willing to discuss what I know, especially ONLINE.
This is apparently, you know, something that is Just Not Done, especially not by nice girls.
I did all this reading because I was molested as a child. I needed to sort my baggage.
I was raped at the age of twelve and though it was traumatic enough to leave me in shock -- I remember feeling cold afterwards, though it was summer in Georgia -- I didn't lose my virginity at that time. There was no hymen to rupture.
Odds are good that my hymen was ruptured when I was four years old and brilliantly decided to use a ladder-back chair as an actual ladder to try to reach something up on top of a tall piece of furniture and slipped and fell, landing on the top of the chairback with my crotch. I was in horrendous pain after that and my guess is that's why there was no hymen to rupture when I was sexually assaulted eight years later.
In my twenties, as part of therapy, I did a series of nude self portraits and one day while sitting naked in front of a large mirror on the floor trying to decide on a pose, I discovered the remains of my hymen. I got out some biology book or other to double check this and I had a good cry.
This world places so much value on female virginity and the concept of virginity is tied up with this idea of virtue, of being a good girl and we shame girls for being victims of violent assault instead of shaming the men who chose to assault them. And I had taken all that in and deep down inside I thought I had never really been a virgin and had been "born a whore" and here was physical evidence that wasn't true.
I've read about and talked with people about open relationships, BDSM, threesomes, infidelity, sexual assault and all sorts of subjects. I've thought deeply about such things, I've solved a lot of "unsolvable" personal issues and put down tons of old baggage and healed and yadda and I Have Opinions.
All my current baggage is RECENTLY acquired and has nothing to do with having been molested and raped as a child. Meanwhile, every man I meet who is at all interested in hitting on me continues to assume that the details of my unfortunate childhood are major personal demons that he has to figure out how to successfully navigate.
I've also taken a long, strange journey of physical healing from incurable medical crap, which I blog about elsewhere. As part of that long, strange journey, I've been celibate for medical reasons for over eighteen years.
My medical condition significantly impacts all epithelial tissues. The process of healing has physically changed my girl parts, enough that I have no means at all to try to imagine or predict what sex might be like should I ever get laid again, which seems extremely unlikely.
Kind of like Jamie, I'm a virgin.
(No, not a "born again virgin," because I never got to be one in my youth.)
...in talking to a gay girl, I asked her, "When did you think that you had lost your virginity?"...She gave a few different answers and then she said, "You know what I think? I think a girl loses her virginity when she has her first orgasm with a partner." ...we're not going to dismantle the idea of virginity, but what if we could broaden it to think that there's multiple virginities, and what if that was one of them?