Losing your virginity
Having sex for the first time or being alive for the first time, which is more important?
I love to defy expectations so don’t think for a minute I’m going to talk about what you think I’m going to talk about.
I wrote a story yesterday about self love as an antidote to depression, but that was only part of it. It’s quite sad that the way you connect with another is oftentimes through a struggle and not through the sheer force of love and compassion. It’s not that misery loves company—misery cannot know of love—it’s that we have all trained ourselves to be more comfortable sharing bad things rather than good things.
In the basic sense I lost my virginity the same way everybody else does, by having sex with my girlfriend at the time. But I would actually go back and say that wasn’t really the case even though the circumstances were in alignment with the definition. There was still innocence and there was still purity and all of those other traits people associate with virginity, but most of all it just wasn’t an occasion that merited such a provocative label.
If I was going to pick a date where I did lose my virginity it would be today, the 20th of May in 2017, in London. It had absolutely nothing to do with sex, but with embracing existence and the fire of life.
In fact, I’m going to stop myself and say this whole idea of virginity and loss is utter bullshit. Sex as we know it can be all kinds of things: it can be slow and sensual or hard and fast or kinky and dirty or profound and meditative. It’s a wild, animalistic interaction between many souls, or even just one. Sex with just one person is called masturbation, which makes it sound less like sex even though it very much is sex. In fact, I think that is more beautiful in one sense because if you’re really going for it then you are so in love with yourself. Reproduction of the species be damned, you are enjoying yourself. Fuck yes.
The one thing sex isn’t is loss. Sex that results in the loss of something is better known as assault or rape because you just don’t reach an orgasm and think, “aw fuck, I’m currently losing my innocence and purity,” unless your partner was particularly bad at it and you weren’t satisfied.
For me, having sex for the first time was not a momentous occasion. It was special but not because I could stop calling myself a virgin. It wasn’t loss but a gain, a growth: to have that with my then-girlfriend meant that we trusted each other enough to open ourselves up that way. We could remove our clothes in front of each other and see ourselves out there and fully naked; we could interact in such an intimate and physical way and we had the trust and support in place to nurture that. When two people do that together the nature of the connection changes (for better or worse) and for us it was symbolic of how comfortable we were enjoying our sensuality in each other’s presence. This doesn’t diminish the sex itself, because that in itself is still a beautiful thing, but it prioritises the depth of the connection you have over the momentary pleasure.
One of the great wonders of the world is the unclothed human body. It is the subject of art and of worship much more than it is sexual. There are Greek statues of naked men standing tall and strong with their proudly small penises, naked men holding hands, kissing… and there are countless paintings of women in different situations: women displaying their breasts, holding babies in them, turning backwards and emphasising the curvature of their bodies. Of course I would admire the woman more because I’m a man, but these are beautiful expressions of who we are and what we are capable of, and all the things we can see admire in our physical forms. This is love, not war.
I’m beating around the bush with my real point. This past week I felt like I experienced that virginity again, and the result of sacrificing it. There was no sex involved in the traditional sense, only the tantric sense. To have sex and to connect in the tantric sense is to become one with yourself and the universe. If you think that sounds like spiritual new age woo-woo then I compel you to spend an hour or two with yourself and get in touch with your inner man and your inner woman, and how they interact. You will go far beyond watching porn and satisfying an urge, you will be feeling sensations in your body you never knew existed. It is a very deep meditation on your true self and it is profoundly intimate and beautiful, and you may very well forget about reaching your orgasm as you explore the hidden wonders of your own body. Your body, like the statue and the painting, is your own work of art; it knows things your mind doesn’t and it seriously deserves your intimacy.
If you think that sounds graphic and that I’m oversharing, it isn’t. It’s a source of inspiration and joy and there is so much more to it than what you might imagine on the primal, sexual level, and I encourage you to learn about the chakra system to see why exactly that is. For the rest of my day I have existed in a place of incredible love and pleasure, where I could enjoy myself with no mental torment lurking in the shadows, and tell the people I love how much I do love them, how fucking awesome they are. I could reach out and do things I was once super scared about doing, I could have an intense conversation with a taxi driver and end it with a namaste. This energy is transcendental and transformational and if you are expressing such a deep pleasure for yourself, it will absolutely help others feel such bliss themselves.
That’s what life should be about, right? Enjoying our bliss. And why the fuck do you want your virginity if losing it gives you all of that?
❤️ॐ
