A little against my better judgment, I spent some time watching a TV discussion show this morning.  Today it was all about young people who take vows of chastity until marriage, and it featured a number of nice,  extremely articulate and fresh-faced young women who were determined to save their virginity until they’d been walked down the aisle by some (presumably very patient) nice, fresh-faced young men.

It got me thinking; is there really any place for good, old-fashioned feminine virtue in the hyper-sexualised 21^st century?

At first glance, I would have delivered a vehement and unhesitating “no”. As a bit of a borderline feminist, I’ve long been of the opinion that women should have the right to sleep with whoever they want, whenever they want, without being judged by the eternal double standard that turns men into heroes but denounces women as slutty.

However, the more I listened to the two girls, the more I was caught by their argument. They weren’t saying that they believed sex was in any way sinful or forbidden, they were just saying that its value had been eroded by constant sexual imagery and its casual portrayal in the media; and that they were just trying to reclaim something that they felt was special and well worth waiting for.

Their passion for the subject was evident, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how articulate and reasonable they seemed in their debating – far more so than I would have been at seventeen if I’d been punted onto a television show and asked to talk about such a sensitive subject.

My concern for the two girls is really this; where in the world are they going to find men that share their values and will be willing to wait for them? I think back to the beginning of my relationship with my now husband, and chucklingly wonder what would have happened the first night we got together if I’d told him that he’d have to marry me if he wanted to get some. I think perhaps the words “bye bye” might have had top billing in that conversation…

What I think needs to be considered is the vast expanse of grey area that exists between going to bed with multiple partners for negative reasons (to make your partner happy, because you’re the last virgin left at high school, because everybody on Eastenders is doing it…), and having no sex whatsoever as part of a blindly inflexible nookie embargo.  

I hung on to my virtue for (I think) longer than average at my high school, and remember well the pressure I felt to not be a virgin any more, as one by one my friends popped their respective cherries and told me all the gory, yet enviable details. Interestingly, I don’t remember anyone ever saying to me that I needed to get it over with, I just remember feeling hopelessly inadequate within myself, next to my more experienced peers.

This in itself was nothing extraordinary, as I spent most of my teenage years finding something or other to feel inadequate about, however it is important to note that the only person putting any serious pressure on me to bin the maidenhead was, ironically, me.

Looking back on it, I’d been in positions several times from the age of 15 onwards where I could have done the deed – most memorably once with a boy I’d had a hopelessly unrequited crush on for years, who cuddled up to me at a sneaky co-ed sleepover I hosted when my parents were away on holiday. What was my reason for saying no? Just an instinctive understanding that the crush was still unrequited, and he’d be off in the morning before I’d had a chance to fish my knickers out from under the inflatable mattress.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was planning to wait for the all-important band of gold to be handed over, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to squander my maidenhood on someone who wasn’t going to attach any particular value to the experience. Ultimately it took me another few years to (if you’ll forgive the expression) suck it up and take the final step towards becoming “a real woman” as one of my other erstwhile potentials had sagely advised me the experience would mean.  

The trick for me was knowing when and how to say “no”, which I fear is a skill that either isn’t taught or isn’t being learned by the reputed 39% of young people who have sex for the first time when one or other partner isn’t equally willing1.

I’m not quite sure where I learned it from myself; certainly not from any of my pitifully uncomfortable guidance teachers, drafted in by Highland Council to explain the “facts of life” to a disturbingly knowledgeable group of Northern teenagers. I think it’s more likely that I picked up on the literary havoc that ill-timed and ill-considered intercourse wreaked on characters like Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Blanche Dubois, and decided that it wasn’t for me.

Thankfully I’m strong of will, and despite some pretty persistent efforts (one unforgettable occasion involved me rolling myself up like a sausage into a Persian rug to escape a particularly wandering pair of hands) I managed to wait to have sex until I felt really ready for it. Even then, I didn’t know the guy very well and it could easily have turned out to be a one night stand – but happily my internal radar had developed just enough to identify when a boy really fancied me and wasn’t just looking for closer acquaintance with the contents of my underwear.  

We dated casually for a week or so afterwards, before my subconscious commitment-phobia kicked in and I sabotaged the relationship by deciding that I was actually in love with an extremely unsuitable and unobtainable arty/drama type bloke that I’d become friendly with the year before.

Ultimately it all seems to come back down to self-worth and self-esteem. What captured my interest about the two girls on the television this morning was their absolute confidence and certainty that they were worth waiting for – which to me was quite refreshing and (dare I say it) a very attractive quality in two such young women.

In retrospect, despite my crippling fears of inadequacy and being left behind, I was pretty sure of my own value from a young age as well. By fifteen I had been propositioned by a boy of twenty that I’d known since my infancy, by sixteen I’d been approached by too many young farmers to count, and yet I still kept saying no because in my heart I knew I was worth more than a bitterly cold fumble outside the back of a Caithness barn dance. The irony is that I didn’t consider my in-built sense of self-worth as anything to be proud of at the time, it was just an annoying obstacle, blocking my way to what I really wanted to become – just like everybody else!

If the statistics are true, and the number of girls having underage sex these days is really one in four2, then we’ve got quite a lot of work to do to convince them that it’s worth hanging on to their virtue for a little longer. I don’t believe for a minute that I was ready for the emotional fallout of a sexual relationship at fourteen or fifteen, no matter how worldly and grown-up I might have felt at the time – and I even shudder a little to think that I was having sex at seventeen, which seems absurdly young to me now, given the dramatic changes I went through in my early to mid twenties.

Perhaps it’s not more and more sex education that teenagers need, perhaps it’s self education. We need to get kids believing that sex is worth the wait and – more importantly – that so are they. It’s anyone’s guess as to how this will be accomplished; but if you ask me, Tess of the D’Urbervilles might not be a bad place to start!