Virgin (9 page)

“Huh,” I replied. “I don’t know. Lara thinks I give off desperate vibes. That’s what our argument was really about,” I admitted. “And that night out? I made her come with me to find someone to lose my virginity to. I’ve kind of sworn to myself that I’ll lose my virginity by graduation so I can take a chlamydia test like a normal person.”

Emma snorted with laughter. “Wait? You want chlamydia?”

It was my turn to look at her like she was crazy. “Obviously not. I just want to be eligible to do the test.”

She looked at me in bewilderment. “You’re going to have to explain.”

I fidgeted uncomfortably in my seat. I had never really explained to anyone why I was so desperate to lose my virginity. My girlfriends from school kind of understood it because at one point they’d been in the same position. Even if it was a while ago.

“Well, I guess . . . it feels like ever since we hit sixteen—or actually, thirteen for my friend Lara—that everyone started this whole thing about losing their virginity,” I said. “It was like, I don’t know, a competition. Then all the conversations were about sex, and I couldn’t join in. I felt so . . . out of it. Now everyone’s having one-night stands and getting with their friends with benefits. And again, I’m the only one who can’t join in. It’s lonely . . . and honestly? I want to fit in.”

“Ellie,” she said, touching my arm with concern. “I’m really sorry if I ever made you feel like that by going on and on about sex.”

“No,” I cried out, hitting her arm. “You’re my friend and I love hearing your sex stories. You show me what I’m missing and what my life will be like one day.” I grinned.

She looked worried. “It’s . . . not always as glamorous as it sounds, though. I know girls like me who have had abortions, and then girls who actually
got
chlamydia but realized too late and now they’re infertile. Seriously, El, how come you want to do this chlamydia test so desperately?”

“It’s a symbol,” I explained. “You can only do the chlamydia test once you’ve had sex, right? And the majority of university students have had sex, which I’m missing out on with every day that goes by, so for me to be like everyone else and be able to relate to my friends’ stories, I need to have sex and do the test. It represents the dream.”

“Chlamydia?”

“No,
sex.
I’ve heard it’s meant to be pretty good.” I smiled with a faux-nonchalant shrug.

She laughed. “Okay, well, I love a challenge so you’ve come to the right place. I’ll help you lose your virginity and we can vlog about it.”

My eyes widened in alarm. “Um, I’m not blogging about my virginity to the world.”

“Why not?” she suggested reasonably. “You’re the one who wanted to help other people like you. I bet there are loads of twenty-one-year-old virgins who don’t want to feel alone. We can discuss pubes too . . .”

“Oh God, pubes.” I groaned. “I forgot about them. I need to figure out what to do with mine before we start vlogging about my virginity and vagina to the world.”

“Well, why don’t you just try a Brazilian wax for now?” she suggested. “I reckon that would be the easiest option, and they still leave a large-ish chunk of hair down the middle, so it doesn’t feel pre-teenage.”

“But it just seems so painful,” I moaned, wincing at the thought of a beautician ripping the hairs out of my bush.

“No pain, no gain, Ellie. Now, about this vlog of ours . . .”

We sat on Emma’s zebra-print bed, surrounded by copies of
Cosmo
and educational pamphlets about sex she’d bulk-grabbed from the doctor’s office. I’d refused to go back in and had waited outside next to the bin where I’d chucked the brown envelope.

“So, shall we just call it a vlog?” asked Emma as she looked up from her notepad. “Like, vlog.com?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, why not? It’s a vaginal, virginal blog. A vlog. It doesn’t have many SEO words in the website, though—like, no one is ever going to Google the word
vlog
. Unless it means something weird in Czech.”

“SEO?” she asked blankly.

“Search engine optimization. It’s like, you want to have really Googleable words all over your site so people can find it when they search for it,” I explained.

“How do you know that?”

I flushed slightly. “What? Everyone knows that. I’m not some kind of tech geek.”

“Well, if you are, I’m fucking impressed. And definitely glad one of us knows something about setting up websites. So, what’s the vlog going to focus on?”

I lay back onto her mass of cushions and sighed. “I don’t know. It needs to be, like, a grown-up, modern, accessible and very graphic version of the problem pages from teenage magazines.”

“Oh my God, do you mean the ones that closed down?” she asked excitedly. “I loved those, like
Mizz
,
Sugar
,
Just Seventeen
and stuff.”

“Tell me about it. We used to read them out at lunchtime at school. They had the best agony aunt things and ‘confession’ series. We used to read aloud the problems people wrote in about and laugh at how cringeworthy they were—while secretly feeling glad whenever the agony aunt assured them they were normal. Or maybe I was the only one who secretly thought that,” I added as an afterthought. “Did you?”

She laughed. “Yes, obviously. I was always convinced I had a wizard’s sleeve.”

“A what?”

“It’s, like, a bucket vagina?” She looked at my blank face and sighed. “It’s basically where you have a ‘loose’ vagina and it’s not that tight. I thought my flap bits were too long as well.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I never thought of that.”

“Neither did I,” she admitted. “Until all the local boys started using the words as insults and it got round that Lucy Palmer had a wizard’s sleeve. Then I freaked out that I had one too. And honestly, I think maybe my flaps
are
bigger than most people’s.”

“Em, this is perfect,” I cried out.

“It really isn’t. Smaller ones look nicer,” she said.

“Noooo. I mean, this is great material for a blog post—or vlog post, sorry. We don’t want to make it just a blog for sexually confused virgins; we want to make it a vaginal blog, for anyone who’s ever panicked about the state of their vagina, or anything related to it. Stuff like this about the shape of it and other things to reassure people they’re normal and not alone.”

Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, definitely. And that line you just said about being panicked over your vag has got to be our tagline.”

“Ooh, it can go in our About Us.”

“Yeah! But, just to clarify, we can still do some posts about you being a virgin, right? I feel like all the other twenty-one-year-old virgins out there need to know they’re not alone.” Her face momentarily clouded with worry. “You don’t think the virgins in their late twenties will feel neglected, do you?”

“Nah, all the advice we’re going to give out is pretty universal, right? Like, when it comes to the shape of your vagina, age doesn’t really matter.”

“Okay, so does this mean you’ll do it? You’ll vlog about your virginity?”

I let out a dry laugh. “Who knew my virginity would become so in demand? But okay. I’ll do some virginity posts. Can we also do some on pubes though? And awkward body hair?”

“What a surprise that you want to do a post on pubes.” She grinned. “But yes, obviously. It’s funny, I always got a Brazilian and didn’t really think too much about it until I met you. But, you’re right, like, why am I getting a Brazilian? Did I naturally think, oh why don’t I just wax off my entire vagina and leave a thin strip in the middle? It’s not exactly natural, is it? It’s . . . well, it’s a bit porn star.”

I nodded vigorously. “I know. I blame porn for giving us this crisis. Why can’t it just be like the seventies when it was normal to have a bush? It’s going to be so expensive to get waxes all the time.”

“Yes, and men will never know the pain we go through,” she said darkly. “It definitely has a lot to do with porn and I guess the whole Hollywood industry thing too. Like, all the glam people in films have pubeless vaginas.”

“Exactly,” I cried out. “And, even worse, lingerie ads. They always have pictures of women in lacy underwear with nothing but skin showing underneath. I mean, when I was, like, thirteen, I assumed that’s how all women naturally were and that I was a complete freak for having this growing mass of hair.”

She laughed. “No way! I had that exact thought when I watched my first porno. Although, to be fair, as much as I blame porn for doing this to us, it definitely came in useful in Year Eight.”

“For what?” I asked curiously.

“Well, to know what a penis looked like,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you not do that? I thought everyone did. I mean, how are you going to know how to give a blow job if you don’t research it?”

I had a flashback of my Bite Job and nodded. “I totally feel your pain. I wish I’d thought to look at porn—I really fucked up when I first tried.”

“Trust me, you weren’t the only one,” she consoled.

“You bit him too?” I blurted out.

She burst out laughing. “That’s amazing. It’s definitely going in the vlog. I didn’t bite my guy but I’d heard you were meant to cup the balls with your hands while you did it, and I definitely cupped way harder than you’re meant to. In fact, I squeezed them so hard he almost fainted and lost his boner immediately.”

I laughed but made a mental note to be careful about cupping balls.

“I know . . . thirteen-year-old me was very embarrassing,” she said. “In fact, I remember when I was even younger and people used to talk about blow jobs. I had no idea what they were. I actually thought that a blow job meant you had to blow into a guy’s penis to make it bigger . . .”

Emma was thirteen when she gave her first blow job? A full four years younger than I was, and she’d clearly managed to do it more than once. I really had been a late bloomer.

“Well, as always, I can beat you on the embarrassing scales,” I replied. “When I first heard about a blow job I thought it meant blow-drying a guy’s pubes.”

Emma howled with laughter and rolled back onto the cushions next to me. “Ellie, that’s . . . that’s so . . . Just, why would you even think that?!”

“No one ever told me what it was,” I said. “I just used my very literal intuition. In the same way I did with most sexual stuff. It’s just not the sort of knowledge you can get from romcoms or wherever.”

“Fuck romcoms,” she said with such forceful assurance that I gulped on the green tea I was sipping. “They’re all lies, and I’m so bored of the whole scenario where the pretty girl gets burned by a guy, then gets a personality, a makeover and some confidence and then he comes crawling back. That’s not realistic.”

I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! Where’s the rejection and the humiliation? That’s the stuff I can relate to, not amazing book deals that come out of nowhere and random trips to Hollywood. Chick lit these days is just as bad.”

“I know, right?” she replied passionately. “Okay, I like to read
Bridget Jones
as much as the next person, and I used to love the
Shopaholic
books, but what is with the sickening happy endings? And these perfect men—where the fuck did they come from?”

“Yeah, and did you ever read those teenage novels? The ones about snogging and first boyfriends . . . I mean,
seriously.
These girls just know exactly what to do with a guy—their only dilemma is whether to lose their virginity or not—and they seem to never have a shortage of whom to pick. I mean, my friends and I were discussing in major detail how to give hand jobs while these fictional girls magically knew exactly what to do.”

Emma laughed. “You’re so right. This is all going to be such great material for the vlog. It doesn’t even feel like work—although it will look so productive on our CVs. Except maybe we should do it anonymously. What do you think?”

“There is no way I can put that on my CV,” I said firmly. “Anon is definitely the way forward.”

“What if we just use our initials? So you can be EK and I’ll be EM.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “That’s doable.”

“Cool, so shall we get back to CEO words?”

I shook my head at her. “SEO words. Let’s just keep it simple. I’m thinking we set it up and pick a standard template for the layout. Then we can just do a post whenever and add more stuff as we go along. Sound good?”

“Sounds perfect,” she said, and grinned.

The Virgin Entry

Welcome to our vlog.

If you’ve clicked on our About Us, you will know that a vlog is a blog for people with vaginas, or anyone who wants to read about them. But before we start delving into the depths of our vaginas, we should introduce ourselves. We are—anonymously, because we’re discussing our sex lives (or lack thereof)—EK and EM.

EK is a twenty-one-year-old virgin who isn’t sure why she hasn’t lost her V-plates yet and desperately wants to. She is not religious, she’s not waiting till she is married, she’s not waiting for The One, she’s not expecting her deflowerer to propose immediately and she’s not frigid. She is just unlucky.

EM is twenty-four years old and the opposite of a virgin. She proudly calls herself a slut and is on a campaign to rid the S-word of its negative connotations and make it unisex: i.e., “Oh my God, they’re such sluts. Cool.”

There you have it. One of us is a virgin and one of us is a slut. The two are not mutually exclusive and regardless of our experiences, we both have very similar views on the world of sex, virginity and vaginas. Ultimately, we’re both just twenty-first-century girls who grew up with
Cosmo
,
Vogue
, TV, Facebook and romcoms. We are part of the generation that has been seriously fucked up by media, but also the generation of women who have more opportunities than our mums and g’mas ever did.

So. This vlog is here for anyone who has ever felt temporarily panicked about anything related to a vagina. It is a website, a forum, a social network where you can see what we have to say about taboo topics that no magazine would dare to publish. We are not afraid to say what needs to be said. In the most graphic way we can think of.

So if ever you have felt confused/alone/upset/stressed/angry/worried because of something remotely sexual, we’re your girls. Whatever you’ve felt? We’ve felt worse.