The Embarrassed Virgins

I don't even have a boy friend. But I had myself fitted for a diaphragm. I had to feel that in some way I was part of it all.

With this confession, an unhappy 17-year-old college freshman recently tried to express to M.I.T. Psychotherapist Thomas Cottle her confusion about contemporary sexual mores. It is becoming increasingly apparent that she is not unique. In fact, Cottle says, the "new morality," far from being univer sally liberating, has been causing some young people "a special sort of insecurity and hurt." Some are worried that there must be something wrong with them because they have not yet had intercourse. Others are embracing what Columbia University Psychiatrist Joel Moskowitz calls "secondary virginity":

after a period of promiscuity that they find disillusioning, they become scrupulously chaste, saving further sex for marriage or at least for an emotionally close and stable relationship.

Much of the problem stems from the overwhelming pressure to conform.

Englewood, N.J., Child Psychoanalyst Ira Mintz reports the feeling among many young people that they are not yet ready for sex; yet they soon discover that society expects them to embrace the new "freedom." For students, Mintz says, "there is no place to hide, no cur few behind which to take refuge, no rule that can be invoked without loss of face." Both men and women feel the pressure. Gynecologist David Chapin, consultant to a coeducational boarding school near Boston, suspects that when it comes to bragging about sexual exploits, "the girls' locker room has replaced the men's; it is now girls who feel they have to go each other one better."

Joyce Maynard, the author of Look ing Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, fully agrees. When she was a freshman at Yale and had to share her dormitory room with both her assigned roommate and the roommate's boy friend, it was she -- "the one who slept alone, whose only pills were vitamins and aspirin" -- who felt embarrassed. The reason: to many contemporary young people, the virgin is "on the same team with crew cuts and Sensible Orthopedic Shoes and Billy Graham and the Republican Party."

Worse yet, the virgin may be suspected of frigidity or lesbianism, and in deed she may suspect herself of one or the other, just as inexperienced males may question their own potency or masculinity. Having intercourse only intensifies these worries if the first experiences prove disappointing. In fact they often do. Psychiatrist Moskowitz notes that adolescents are saturated with sexual talk and books, and may take as the norm the improbable exploits they see in pornographic films. Thus they develop superhuman expectations. Young girls believe that they should have intoxicating orgasms beginning with their first night in bed with a boy. Even when sex itself is pleasurable, young people are often aware that something is missing. As a young construction worker told Cottle: "Ain't anybody any more knows if he's in love or just turned on."

In Cottle's opinion, there is danger in the magical notion that sex can solve personal and social problems. Some youngsters away from home for the first time imagine that sex can relieve their longing for the closeness of family life. Others, dismayed by the failings of society, use sex to stave off their "terrific fear of disintegration."

Some psychiatrists believe that youngsters are afraid of what they so insistently demand; they really want less rather than more freedom. Psychoanalyst Mintz cites the surprising popularity of the Hare Krishna movement. Before joining the sect, many devotees behaved without sexual restraint; as members they have found what they apparently need: "Under the guise of a religious commitment ... a strict, ascetic society with a built-in set of controls."

Most young people seem to have fewer sexual anxieties than their elders and are by no means ready to embrace a new puritanism. Nevertheless, Moskowitz predicts that before long, students who have been living in sexually permissive dormitories may begin to ask for more rules.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.