The 30-year-old virgins

It was once a badge of honor. But to the surprising number of adult women today who have not had sex, virginity is nothing but a curse.

By Yael Kohen

Read more: Sex, Dating, Life

Sept. 6, 2006 | When Amanda was 26 years old she found herself in a familiar but awkward situation: She was still a virgin and the guy she had been dating for three months didn't know it. She wasn't ready to sleep with him yet, but she was close, real close. One night they were at his house, making out on the couch, when he asked her, "When's the last time you had sex?" The question was blunt and unexpected. She didn't know how to answer, and she didn't really want to. "One year? Two years?" She didn't respond. "Don't tell me you're a virgin?" he blurted as he abruptly pulled away. "No offense, but most people do that in high school," he told her. He acted like a victim, she says four years later, telling her that none of his friends would ever sleep with a virgin, that he'd already slept with two and would never do it again. About a week later they went to the movies together, and afterward, he walked her to the car. She leaned in to kiss him and he backed away, "like I was some disgusting object."

"It made me scared to date, scared to talk to guys. It was like, 'Oh my God, they're all going to do this,'" she says. She still tried, occasionally, and after about a year she met another guy, someone else from work. But then he also didn't know she was a virgin, and one night when they were practically naked together in bed it happened again, almost in the exact same way. He asked her about former lovers, and while she laughs nervously now as she retells the story, it wasn't funny then. It reminded her of the last time and she started to cry. But this guy was actually nice about it, telling her things like "That guy was such an asshole" and "You should say you just haven't found the right guy; be more self-confident." It made her feel better, and when he left he said he'd call her the next day. But he didn't call until the following week and things went downhill from there. "He never really said it was because I was a virgin," Amanda says. "But that was the point when everything shifted."

Some people may think Amanda is unique, maybe even a freak. But the fact is, there are a surprising number of women -- smart, savvy and attractive women -- who still haven't lost their virginity into their 20s or 30s. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 7 percent of unmarried women between ages 25 and 29 have never had sex; neither have 5 percent between 30 and 34 and 4.3 percent between 35 and 39. It's hard to say how many of these women are actually waiting until marriage, but it's safe to assume that quite a few aren't. This month Jane magazine is sponsoring a contest to get a 29-year-old virgin laid, a cheap publicity stunt that misses the bigger point: Why does a "funny, gorgeous" virgin need to place what is essentially an ad for sex at all? There was time when virginity was a prize, a treasure to be guarded and a badge of honor, but now, it seems that for the modern career woman virginity is nothing but a curse. What's worse, the longer she waits the harder it is to find a guy -- not just the right guy, but any guy -- to do the honors. Which prompts the question, Has the sexual revolution ironically made it impossible for a mature woman to get laid for the first time?

These days virginity is for kids, something to outgrow during the experimental teenage years. Of course, being a virgin late in the game is nothing new; but in a hypersexualized culture, in which teenage girls are starting to have sex at progressively younger ages and spin the bottle seems to have been replaced by the blow job, to be a virgin in her mid- to late 20s suddenly seems extreme. (According to the CDC report, 44.4 percent of girls between 15 and 19 had sex by the time they were 17, compared with 35.5 percent of women more than 20 years older who lost their virginity at the same age.) Sure, we have young people who are encouraged to wait until marriage no matter when that might be. We have born-again virgins restoring their hymens with plastic surgery, teenagers with promise rings and a government that promotes abstinence education. But most of those people are religious conservatives who are pretty much doing what they always did. The phenomenon of involuntary virgins, on the other hand, exists underground in liberal America, where sophisticated career women are supposed to have active sex lives and gyms offer pole dancing and stripping classes as a kind of aerobics. Where the proliferation of online dating fosters a culture of freewheeling, uncommitted hookups. Where anyone who isn't doing it is too unhip to know better. "The culture is getting more and more permission to be sexual at any age," says Shirley Zussman, a sex therapist in New York. "It's almost a directive from the culture: movies, books, magazines, TV programs. Everybody is saying "Look, this is what's going on. What about you?"

At parties, especially college parties, conversations tend to revolve around sex, and about the last thing any virgin wants is for her sexuality to be the hot topic or, worse, to risk the chance that someone in the group will talk down to her, as if all she knows about sex is the birds and the bees. Laura, a virgin until she was 25, remembers parties where friends and strangers would trade personal sex stories. "You're kind of sitting there like, 'All right, I've got nothing to contribute.' So I would just physically remove myself. Leave, walk around and hopefully people wouldn't notice." When she was just 23, Laura went to a New Year's Eve party where a discussion about sex quickly turned into a contest: Who has slept with the most people? Who has slept with the oldest person? Who was the youngest when he or she first had sex? And so on. So Laura went to wash the dishes. "I remember thinking, 'What an idiot. I'm washing dishes at a party because I don't want to be involved in this conversation.'" But it was probably for the best. "I remember one of the guys saying, 'Man, if I was 24 and a virgin I think I'd go crazy. I think I'd die.' Then some other guy said, 'You know the Unabomber was a virgin," and I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, they think I'm going to turn into a sociopath because I haven't had sex at the age of 23.'"

Next page: So what ever happened to the idea that a man's ultimate fantasy is to deflower a virgin?