How did you lose your virginity?

That’s what she goes around asking total strangers, for her project
is to build a compendium of people’s experiences of the first time. DNA talks to the virgin inquisitor.

For several months, Kate Monro had been visiting City Circle, a charity centre in London where Muslims (and non-Muslims too) meet to discuss issues that concern them. But her interest was not in the meetings and debates conducted there. She was in search of what she calls “the holy grail of all interviews”. She wanted to ask a Muslim man or woman how he/she lost his/her virginity. 

When she finally plucked up the courage, reactions ranged from shock to outright rejection. And then, after months, she finally found one: a young girl of 20, who had lost her virginity two years ago to a family friend. “Hers was a sad story. She was holidaying with her family when the incident took place. Her family got to know about it and she was looked down upon,” says Monro. But this would not do. She wanted a Muslim woman who had lost her virginity to her husband.

Five years ago, Monro, an advertising professional, was looking for a creative outlet. A conversation with an old friend led the two middle-aged ladies to ask each other, like young teens — ‘when did you first do it?’ Monro recalls, “I realised then what a great idea it was.” Since then she has been asking people from various ages and communities to describe their ‘first-time’. “When I do get that Muslim lady, she will be able to offer a perspective from a different community about virginity. Also, it will show that despite reservations about each others’ communities and customs, we are similar in the most basic of things.”

So how is the ‘first time’? “Disappointing,” she says. “Almost everyone I interviewed felt this way. People grow up with such fantastic notions of sex. And after the act, it’s usually a ‘what, that’s it?’” Though her book is still in progress, it is her blog, The Virginity Project (virginityproject.typepad.com) that has caught the eye of the international media. Both her blog and her future book have people talking candidly about how they lost their virginity.

Her blog contains many stories, like that of the stay-at-home father of four, whose lawyer wife one day strapped on a dildo and took his ‘anal virginity’. “I was, to put it mildly, petrified… the sight of that missile protruding from her.” Other stories include that of a 16-year-old losing her virginity to her boyfriend in a dirty, dingy garage, while two friends stood guard outside. For her book, she has met a physically disabled man in his 40s, whose hands were extremely short (as long as the elbow-joint of an able-bodied person). Much to Monro’s surprise, he had had various sexual encounters, starting with the most popular girl in school and following her, her best friend. Others include an autistic man, who lost it to a prostitute, a 101-year-old woman who had sex outside wedlock, and a man, married for 15 years but still a virgin. “He feels he might hurt her,” she says. Her most shocking interview remains that of a married man, now in his 50s, who was raped as a child.

What makes Monro’s blog extremely interesting is the way it presents the sexual mores of different generations. There is Mary Stuart, who was born in 1915 and lost her virginity when she was 21. She writes, “I was frightened on my wedding night. I’d never seen anything so funny. In spite of having two brothers I didn’t know what a man looked like. My mother had never told me anything. On the first night, I thought this is much ado about nothing, but then I got to like it.”

Sandra Jones, who was born in 1943 and lost her virginity when she was 20, writes, “Nice girls simply did not do it. If you did do it you were nasty.” When she had sex, she was not married. For birth control, she used a solution of vinegar and water after intercourse (hardly a romantic way to wrap up one’s first-time).

Monro herself lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to a French boy beside a swimming pool, somewhat reflective of a sexually liberated period, after the pill and before AIDS.

Monro’s blog, despite the subject matter at hand, is not the place for fantasists seeking silicone inflated blondes. It is a place of real people, discussing real stories, their joys, pains, disappointments and failures with sex and life. “What is lacking on the internet, and in people’s homes, is honest talk about sex,” says Monro. This is why people read my blog, she adds. As for the people who share their stories, Monro says, “People have a desire to compare their experiences with others. We all want some sort of affirmation to know that we are normal.” No wonder all her interviewees ask Monro if their experiences are like those of other people.

Last week, Ash, who is in his 30s, wrote in. He had sex for the first time. He describes his first kiss: “It was the most intimate moment I’d had in my life. It felt so pleasant and natural; the sensation was unique”. Ash moves around in a wheelchair and cannot move his hands. Let alone sex, before this he has never even been able to relieve his sexual urges, because of the way his hands are. Up until last week, he was miserable and incomplete. His personal assistant had set him up with a friendly and understanding escort.