This week, 39-year-old Insecure star Yvonne Orji spoke again about her virginity and waiting until marriage, and of course, the internet was buzzing with opinions.
As someone who was also a virgin longer than most, I still remember what that power felt like. The pride I felt in missing out. The honor I felt in denying myself the most basic thing. Knowing what I know, another life later, it is a path that I would not choose for my then-self again. It only served to disjoint me from who I was and taught me that discipline was less about the outcome and more about the bragging rights.
ACTRESS YVONNE ORJI ON BEING A VIRGIN AT 39: After the #Insecure actress surprised Chelsea Handler about her personal life during a podcast interview, #TheView co-hosts weigh in. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/bWoJ8GbI90
— The View (@TheView) November 8, 2023
My human aesthetic and beliefs are in stark contrast to the horny, sexually repressed, late teen, early twenty-something-year-old, religious goodie-two-shoes I once was. My life, including my sex life, revolved around this tall, dark, handsome man who wore Birkenstocks and a robe. He was a real crowd-pleaser whose primary professions were carpentry and kindness, but he also moonlighted as a vintner and was an excellent fisherman.
Who doesn’t love a guy with multiple streams of income, completely untaxed, I might add?
Every night and every morning, I got on my knees for him and tried not to concentrate too hard on which version of my prayers was more effective, the one I said out loud so that God could hear it or the one when I talked to him in my head, hoping he wouldn’t be able to hear the bad thoughts just a few doors over. Trying in earnest to be sincere, I would remix the last prayer just a tad bit so that God nor I would get bored of me selfishly asking for the same things, including help with not having sex.
It’s a funny thing to continuously ask something outside of you to keep you from—you, especially when that’s the same entity that struck you with desires that you didn’t ask for but had to prove your love and loyalty to him in order to fight; sounds toxic.
It was pretty obvious in college that I was a virgin. I’m not sure if it was my unhinged personality or the fact that I talked about being one often; I often talked about sex as well, and I was kind of obsessed with it. I knew masturbation was amazing and if the real thing was better, then I couldn’t wait, well, even though I was. No one questioned that I wasn’t having any. It was just the general consensus that my hyperactivity would subside once I got dick jokes on them.
IT. DID. NOT.
There was this safety about my virginity. It protected me and allowed me an ignorant comfort around boys because I was too naïve to know that my virginity only kept them from thinking about f-cking me out loud. Virginity was power, the purest part of my personality and I prayed every night to keep it. The 40-some-odd list of reasons to keep it, pinned to my wall, lording over me with guidance, presiding over my tongue’s hushed pleading during prayer and my hushed moans during make-out sessions with my first college boyfriend, sessions that often saw the flame of two virginal lovers playing dangerously close to the fire, each time inching closer to warmth.
We will call him *Mark.
Mark was a really nice person and I don’t even think it was the religious upbringing. It was just who he was. We met very early on in our freshman year. He was doing his best to be a devout Jehovah’s Witness, which included not having sex. We had that in common; we finally had someone with whom we could share the loneliness that was a side effect of virginity. I was non-denominational but fervently searching, and after about a year of dating him, I soon became an unbaptized Witness, which was not a far stretch seeing as how I would go to the Kingdom Hall with my mother’s closest friend. And though my mother was an atheist, I had other family members and a roommate who were Witnesses. Even though it seemed like a natural progression, our relationship was still not out in the open. The congregation that I attended was filled with young adults because it was right near a university. Witnesses are big on accountability, and with that accountability comes punishment, and with that punishment comes loss of privileges and those losses were loud and harsh. For the most heinous infractions, one could be disfellowshipped, which is announced in front of the entire congregation that you have essentially been excommunicated, including by family members.
There were other less severe forms of punishment but most of them involved some sort of silence, either from you or from those around you. That silence smothered us horny young adults who tried our hardest to hold on to virginities or at least hide the stench of sex well enough not to get in trouble. Mark and I barely managed, and the guilt we felt after each time we came too close to making love, started to break us. After dating for about a year and a half, he became distant; there was another girl. Mark became silent to me, which broke my heart, and when I noticed he became silent at the meetings, I was broken even more.
He had sex…without me.
I used my body as revenge, even if just subconsciously. The first person who had ever gone down on me was his friend, which caused a whirlwind in the congregation because he was not only the Presiding Overseer’s son (which is a big deal), but in a desire to be accountable to Jehovah, I told. It was not something either of us sought out, we had been close friends, too, and his mother was like a second mother to me, so I was at their home often. Many chips fell in their family after that. Many of which caused me more guilt. Shortly after, my ‘official’ virginity was tossed away, unromantically in a haze of events I prefer not to recount. My power was gone, my purity sullied, my novelty made old. My interaction with sex thereafter was based on curiosity, depression (because that first heartbreak is not mentioned anywhere in the manual) and lacking knowledge that even if I liked someone, I could still say ‘no’ and that sex did not mean they liked me back. I was lost and never found myself in the eyes of any of those boys. I had no model for how long I should wait, and more often than not, I was searching for romance in the carnal lust department. I just wanted to feel the love that religion told me sex was reserved for, even if it wasn’t the full version.
I still went to the JW meetings for a while. Mark and I would often cross paths in a wind of confusion and sadness. About a year or so later, I began dating *Frank. I had a crush on Frank before I ever even met Mark. Frank and Mark were different in many ways, but most specifically, Frank was mean as f-ck. He was the first person I had had sex with consistently, and for me, that felt a lot like love, no matter the countless tears, pregnancies that were not mine, or bruises which came later down the line. But at the time, I found myself daydreaming about the wrong man in those meetings and felt hypocritical serving two masters, God’s desires and my own, so those times became fewer and farther between. I was not as well versed in pretending as the kids who had been Witnesses their whole lives, and I surely was not ready to get married just because I couldn’t hold my pants like so many others chose to do. I was scarred anyway. Older women in the congregation found ways to pick at my self-esteem because they were afraid someone else might find me attractive. Part of confessing your sins, so to speak, involved going to the elders, who were all men. As a 19-year-old, having to talk to men who were old enough to be my father about my budding sex life is a cruelty that gets to masquerade as care and concern when religion is involved.
Sometimes sex was the only time I felt love, especially with Frank, even when his cruelty often permeated the bedroom. In those moments of love, I could not understand how a God so loving would make that, out of all the things to make, a sin. It took me a very long time to have a healthy relationship with sex, and I am still not sure that I have mastered it. Even before and after Frank, the residue of puritanical beliefs still found me oscillating between the roles of virgin and vixen with each new lover because I did not want to be a bad lay but I didn’t want to be too good of one, also. Sex in my twenties felt transactional, simply because I liked someone, or simply because I really liked that they liked me, I would not deny their access to me, even when I know I didn’t want it yet or at all. It was my payment for them making me feel good about myself.
Having the ability to “come to my senses,” multiple times during sex makes it very nice, but does create a ginormous blind spot.
A few years ago, I realized I was never really having sex for my pleasure, that the sex was about the man’s pleasure and that my orgasms were just very happy accidents. I needed to be having sex that centered my pleasure just as much, but purity standards will still have you thinking years later that you are not deserving of it, no matter how good it feels, no matter how badly you want it. That, mixed with exploring yourself through others, is a breeding ground for insecurities and an unhealthy relationship with your own body, with your own self.
Y’all get wet without any arousal?!?!? I’m not sure if I’m impressed or if you should check your pH?
— Kyla Jenée Lacey (@Kyla_Lacey) October 5, 2023
Mark and I remain friends. We reconnected again a time or two eons ago as old friends, but it was never the same. I think we both wish we would have shared that with each other. I think waiting to have sex for some hypothetical fantasy was a terrible gamble when I could have experienced that my first time with someone I truly loved and was good to me. Maybe that would have prevented some of my warped experiences with sex down the line, maybe not, but I think the odds would have been better. An unhealthy relationship with sex will have you allowing bad people to make you feel good and that’s a recipe for disaster. I am okay with forgoing sex if that is my only option, but I am still not okay with forgoing sex because I really enjoy it under optimal circumstances. Those are based on how I feel about the person, how they make me feel, and if I feel we have a valuable connection, whether that’s knowing them for a week or a year.
A religion that sees women’s bodies as unclean is never really going to see them as pure.
Sex is how we exist; it is who we are. Making someone feel guilty for having healthy sexual desires is akin to making someone feel guilty for wanting water. It is literally beneficial for our health. Conversely, sex is the only thing that can give life and take it away. That is why having a healthy relationship with it is so important. If all sin is sin, then Christianity would have you believe that sex is the same in the eyes of God as murder, that even an act of love is as bad as an act of hate.
