Content warning for sex/masturbation.
I’m 20 years old and I’ve been preoccupied on some level about my virginity since I was 16 and my best friend “lost” hers. We grew up together and she was always the rst one to have pretty much every ““rst time” between the two of us. Now I see how different we are and what my strengths are, but when I was younger, I would compare myself to her a lot and see myself as a failure sometimes. I saw being a virgin at 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 as a failure. I felt pressured to “lose my virginity” to someone (and I still do) by my friends and by all the unsaid things that were implied when family members would tell me one day I’d nd the right guy (then the right girl, when I came out as gay). It preoccupied me to the point where I got nervous when my little sister joked about my zodiac sign’s double entendre in French (Virgo is “vierge” in French, which also means “virgin”). When I was 18, I went to an lgbtq+ summer camp and participated in an activity where we voluntarily self-identiied with sentences called out by a facilitator in front of the whole camp
p.7