Free Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences by Laura Carpenter Page A

immense cohort of children born between 1946 and 1964—were the chief architects of this transformation. 161 Having grown up in a time of material abundance, members of this generation rarely had to abandon school for work during adolescence (with the ex- ception of the truly poor), and they enjoyed unprecedented leisure time

    and disposable income. Advertisers and consumer-goods manufacturers were quick to capitalize on this fact: the youth market, touting products that emphasized teens’ difference from adults, quickly came into its own.
    By the mid-1960s, U.S. college campuses swelled with record numbers of students. Able to postpone adult responsibilities, influenced by the Beat and Hippie subcultures, and appalled by American involvement in Viet- nam, many White college-age boomers lashed out against what they saw as the complacent conservatism of older generations. Rejecting their par- ents’ cherished sexual norms formed a key strand in their rebellion. Black students likewise took up arms, though their rebellion focused more on the failure of the civil rights movement to deliver racial equality than on parental values per se. 162 Different motivations notwithstanding, White and African American youths’ sexual beliefs and behaviors changed largely in concert.
    Where their parents had drawn a veil of silence around premarital vir- ginity loss, making it seem less common than it was, American youth in the late 1960s advertised their nonvirginity and openly rejected premari- tal chastity as an ideal. They were also willing to lose their virginity with partners they didn’t expect to marry—to engage in what sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon memorably described as pre -premarital sex
    — and at earlier ages on average. 163 Other scholars reflected that, al-
    though approaches to virginity loss had changed, it continued to mark a key social transition, one that had, along with driving and drinking, largely taken the place of such traditional, but increasingly delayed, markers of adulthood as marriage and entry into the paid labor force. 164 Changes around virginity loss were especially dramatic among young women, in part because standards for men were less conservative to begin with, in part because of the development of the Pill and IUD (intra-uter- ine device), and in part because the feminist movement’s demand for com- plete equality enhanced women’s ability and desire to breach traditional sexual standards. 165 Young men, for their part, felt the effects of a new model of masculinity, brought about by the weakening of adult authority and rigid gender norms, which favored a more egalitarian ethos in pro-
    fessional and personal life. 166
    Yet, the sexual double standard did not fade away. In fact, a new ver- sion rapidly crystallized, whereby casual sex was deemed acceptable for men but women were expected to make sex—thus virginity loss—con- tingent on love or at least strong affection, and preferably the title of girl- friend. 167 Many young women complained of being treated as “out of it”

    for delaying virginity loss, but those who wished to maintain “good” rep- utations still found it necessary to proceed with caution. 168 Still, from the late 1970s on, scholars observed a small but growing cadre of teenage girls actively resisting the new double standard, eagerly forsaking virgin- ity loss with a beloved partner for “getting it over with,” as did so many men. 169 Young men found that the freer climate simply made losing vir- ginity more imperative, at earlier ages, than before.
    Racial/ethnic differences in attitudes about virginity and ages at first vaginal sex began a steady diminution in the late 1960s, apparently due to growing racial equality and integration. 170 Social-class differences like- wise narrowed, as middle-class Americans embraced increasingly liberal attitudes about sexuality and gender, and working-class and poor youth gained material incentives to postpone