Virginity is a social construct and “losing” it shouldn’t hurt

When sexual pain becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

Content Warning: sex, penetration, physical/psychological pain 

We need to challenge the rhetoric of pain surrounding first-time penetrative sex. Not because it’s incorrect, but because treating pain like an inevitable fact turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we need to be careful about our assumptions relative to sex and how we transfer these assumptions onto younger generations.  

Virginity is fundamentally a problematic concept, but when we anticipate pain during the process of “losing” it, we normalize pain for those on the receiving end of penetrative sex. In doing so, we accept the sacrifice of these bodies for the greater good of others. We tell these bodies they matter less. By characterizing pain as an expectation, we relegate specific bodies to paying a price for pleasure. 

When we indoctrinate discourse with imagery of sex as rupture, as breakage, as popping, and when we tell young people your first time will hurt, we characterize pain as a promise and justify this pain as the price that must be paid. Articulating such pain as the norm is a dominant discourse that saturates our media culture. The stereotypical formula for virginity loss involves vaginal penetration by a penis and emphasizes a brief moment of agonizing, sharp, and searing pain, followed by a blissful and utopian pleasure undeniably worth the preceding physical suffering—and this is a pleasure extending for the rest of the sexual encounter and throughout all subsequent sexual encounters.  

This oversimplification is so pervasive that it has altered the framework through which we understand sex. It is common to interrogate the happily-ever-after ushered in by a sexual encounter, but less common to interrogate the idea that painful sex once guarantees painless sex ever after. This notion is problematic because it promotes the perception that a brief agonizing moment buys a lifetime of blissful sex, but also because it presumes that sex is necessarily painful in the first place.  

The human body is composed of muscles, and muscles can expand—when they are properly stretched, relaxed, and, when sex is involved, lubricated. Whenever the body is involved, the physical is interconnected with the psychological, sometimes in unexpected ways. Psychological anxiety surrounding the expectation of pain can manifest physically, in tensed muscles. When this happens, it causes pain—a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Anxiety about the promise of pain is only one of many potential reasons sex might feel painful, and multiple reasons can occur simultaneously. But when we normalize sexual pain, we teach people not to question its presence for any reason. In doing so, we then reduce the potential for objection or resistance because many people do not realize that things could be any different. By normalizing pain, we create a discursive trap that prevents change before it is given the chance to manifest, and this is how the myth of “normal pain” during penetrative sex continues to be perpetuated in society. We need to change how we think about sex and how we talk about sex—we shouldn’t just assume it will hurt, we should work to make sure it doesn’t.