Seems to me that “Reader” and Dr. H. have got the tail wagging the dog: the real issue is more social than sexual. Friendship, trust, intimacy are the core, IMHO, while the act of coitus is secondary or tertiary. I find it bizarre that people put so much emphasis on intercourse; it’s a shibboleth of sorts. It is absolutely not true that if you have had it once, everything is necessarily all right and you are “normal.”
I suspect Dr. H. and most folks here believe the best advice they can give “Reader” is to get his head screwed on straight, and then go…you get my meaning. It’s a “Help This Poor Deprived Soul Get Some” campaign. That strikes me as obvious to him, too, and boy, will that ever put the pressure on — and decrease his chances of having a halfway reasonable first experience, should he have the opportunity!!
There is, in other words, something disturbingly inhumane in the way “Reader’s” question has been answered. Looked at in a lawyerly way, Dr. H’s words are narrowly correct, of course, and she’s not overt about the message she sends. But there is something off-color about it. “Fix yourself, Buddy, and then go get your hat blocked so you can be one of the men, too.”
Whether “Reader” needs professional help should not turn on his virginity, in other words. It should turn on his pain. The fact that he wonders about himself is not a pure indication that he needs any help: the pressure to have that first sexual experience is itself dehumanizing, and he’s passing judgment on himself at least partly on that basis. He’s a victim of the double-whammy of machismo and vicious female scorn for “losers.”
I say “Reader” needs to deal with the assualt he suffered, and forget about some primitive tribal rite of passage that he skipped. Get at the pain and ease it first, then take life as it comes, sex or no sex. Virginity should mean nothing. Unfortunately in our culture it’s a curse, or a pathogenic condition, or sign of failure as a human being — “virtually everybody has it by late twenties.” “Reader” is being stigmatized here, subtly but distinctly. He doesn’t need a hot date, he needs a little genuine compassion and he certainly does not need anyone validating his doubts about his status in a society that has its values upside down.
