TW: This article contains a description of sexual assault.
In a recent appearance on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast, Lizzo shared a surprising revelation: that she didn’t lose her virginity until after she won her first Grammy, i.e. when she was in her 30s. “I was a late bloomer,” she said. “I lied about it for a long time. I promised myself when I was younger that I wouldn’t have sex until I won a Grammy.”
Although Lizzo’s pact with herself is unique and pretty impressive — if most of us made the same promise, we’d simply never have sex — her experience of being a virgin into her university years and beyond will be distinctly familiar for those in the same position. “I feel a weight off my chest right now,” she said of sharing the story after so many years (she had sex in the months after the 2020 Grammys, at which she won three awards), explaining that she used to lie about it when the topic came up.
“I was in a friend group of girls [at university],” she recalled. “We were all girling one night and [one of them] was just like, ‘Wait, Lizzo, are you a virgin?’ I remember being like, no! I said, ‘I love the D’. I said that. It was so fucking embarrassing.”
If you’re a woman who hit puberty somewhere between Heath Ledger murdering a Frankie Vally classic (10 Things I Hate About You) and Jesse Metcalfe playing a game of basketball in a pink thong (John Tucker Must Die), chances are, like Lizzo, your perception of virginity isn’t a particularly healthy one. In most coming-of-age romcoms, having sex for the first time is seen as a teenage rite of passage, with school-age virgins being the low-hanging fruit school bullies feast on before football practice. Think Emma Stone’s 17-year-old Olive in Easy A or the endlessly memeable, “You’re a virgin who can’t drive” one-liner from Clueless.
Then cast your mind back to your school or even uni days: that ‘virgin Mary’ nickname that ping-ponged around or the spotlight on the single friend during a Smirnoff Ice-fuelled game of Never Have I Ever. The truth is, whether it be via screen or at school, we’ve all been taught that virginity is a ticking time bomb that needs to be disposed of as soon as possible, which can leave those left hanging on at risk of being silenced, shamed, or victims of something even more sinister.
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Despite our revolutionary openness on one end of the sexual spectrum — hello Naked Attraction — virginity just isn’t something we’re comfortable talking about (as evidenced by Channel 4’s Virgin Island last year). “Virginity is hardly ever talked about in popular culture — unless it’s in a way that mocks it like with The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” says Radhika Sanghani, author of Virgin and Thirty Things I Love About Myself. “Virginity is seen as quite taboo and private — in a way that funny sex stories or casual references to sex just aren’t.”
Sex and relationship coach Charlene Douglas echoes this sentiment: “Society teaches us that our first sexual experience should fall on or a short time after our 16th birthday. If that doesn’t happen, a sense of shame can creep in, along with thoughts that there’s something wrong with us.”
And the stats seem to back this up. According to a study by Durex’s Face of Global Sex report, the average age women lose their virginity in the UK is 18.3. But this isn’t the full story. As per a recent report, one in eight 26-year-olds are still virgins, and Gen Z is, famously, having less sex than any generation before. This is a global phenomenon, too. The national Youth Risk Behaviour Survey (YRBS) found that between 1991 and 2017, the number of high school students having sex in the US dropped from 54% to 40%. As per The Australia Talks survey, Australian Gen Zers are about as sexually active as pensioners. And a 2025 review found that around half of Japanese people remain sexually inexperienced through their mid-20s.
And so, this opens the floodgates to a couple of pressing questions: Why do we view virginity as shameful? And how do we end the stigma around it?
Is the concept of ‘virginity’ even still relevant?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘virginity’ is defined as ‘the state of never having had sex’. In reality, it’s a little more complicated. As sex therapist Jodie Slee explains: “Virginity is usually referred to in terms of penetrative, P-in-V sex which makes it patriarchal, cis-normative, and frankly unhelpful. You could be a lesbian who’s had sex with 100 people and still be classed as a ‘virgin’ by society.”
Regardless of its official definition, the abstract concept of virginity has real-world consequences. Throughout most of the 20th century, women growing up in the public eye have been on the receiving end of the male fixation on, and fetishisation of, virginity. The 80s saw the mass hysteria surrounding Lady Di’s chastity, with column inches in the 90s dedicated as much to Britney’s hymen as her music. Even as recently as the 2010s, countless Reddit threads debated when Taylor Swift lost her virginity.
Sadly, the cultural conventions around female virginity which are set by these headlines can have real consequences. For Jamie*, who lost her virginity at 26, the taboo established in the media contributed to feeling fetishised, used, and discarded by her first sexual partner. “He put me on a pedestal because of my ‘innocence’,” she recalls. “I felt wanted and sexy for the first time, and he played on that. The moment he knew he could have me, my sparkle began to fade for him.”
Virginity and shame
In an ideal world, older virgins would feel comfortable talking about their wants, needs, and concerns. They’d be supported by their peers and professionals and wouldn’t feel a social pressure to have sex before they were ready. Unfortunately, for many of the women I spoke to for this piece — who had sex for the first time in their 20s, rather than in their teens, when most of their peers did — this isn’t the case.
Monika*, 24, hid the fact she was a virgin from her friends and partner and had sex for the first time last year. She recalls being shamed and misunderstood for her sexual choices and outlook, something which contributed to the self-imposed secrecy around her virginity. “I’m demisexual and made the choice to wait for someone special, but a lot of people don’t understand that. I was called a prude because I was single. Imagine that, times ten, if I told them I was a virgin.”
Similarly, 27-year-old Catriona*, who had sex for the first time aged 22, speaks of feeling like the odd one out among her peers. “I couldn’t contribute to conversations about sex and dating with my friends. I think they felt sorry for me at times.”
Shut out from these conversations around sex, dating, and intimacy between friends, women like Monika and Catriona are deprived of an informal sexual education that can help prepare them for the realities of sex, or even create an open dialogue around the fetishisation that other women like Jamie experience. The situation is all the more stark when we consider that the official sexual education we receive in schools, detached as it often is from real life, just isn’t prepared to deal with either of these topics.
How sex education lets everyone down, especially virgins
We can all agree that the sex ed curriculum just isn’t up to scratch. As Slee puts it: “People don’t receive ‘sex education’, they receive ‘procreation education’, which has very little to do with sexual pleasure or consent. Nobody teaches us what it may actually be like or how to have it in a relaxed and enjoyable way.”
The real-life consequences of school sex education failings are that generation after generation of women have been thrust into the world without a roadmap for how to navigate sexual encounters, listen to their bodies, or know what healthy, consensual sex looks like. In the case of older female virgins who, like Monika or Catriona, might not be included in peer-led conversations about sex, the situation can be even more damaging.
Due to this lack of knowledge, these women are particularly vulnerable to unequal power dynamics. This may be particularly an issue within heterosexual relationships between these older female virgins and more ‘experienced’ men. Due to differing expectations around intimacy, there may be a lack of sensitive and informed communication if the couple ultimately does have sex — and the woman may even be open to exploitation and breaches of consent.
This was the case for Jasmine*, 27, who had sex for the first time this year. According to her, a lack of education ultimately left her with little control over the experience — she didn’t know what to expect physically or emotionally, so depended on her partner to guide her through the process. “I felt comfortable with the man I’d chosen to sleep with and put a lot of trust in him to show me the ropes as he was a lot more experienced,” she says. Tragically, the faith Jasmine placed in her partner was abused and she became a victim of stealthing. “He took advantage of that trust and ended up inside me without a condom. He knew that was something I wasn’t comfortable with as we’d discussed it before, but he did it anyway.”
After this experience, Jasmine believes that more should be done to give women of any age a 360-degree education when it comes to sex. “Knowing the mechanics of what happens might not have stopped what happened to me, but the more information we as women have, the more chance we have of regaining control, even of just our own narratives, when it comes to being intimate. Guilt and shame shouldn’t be part of the equation.”
This education, she says, could start with something as simple as a non-judgemental conversation with a friend, but, on a wider scale, could take the form of public campaigns or more inclusive depictions of sex in film and TV.
Is there hope for the future?
The tiniest of consolations is that — at least where the individuals I spoke to were concerned — today’s youth doesn’t feel quite the same shame and stigma around virginity which many of us currently in our 20s and 30s were brought up with.
Chloe*, 18, is yet to lose her virginity and plans to wait until she feels the time is right. From her experience, the playground teasing that once ran rife is a thing of the past. “Boys don’t really pick on me for being a virgin. They know I could have sex if I wanted to, so it’s a pretty useless joke.”
So what needs to change to keep women safe now and in the future? Above all else, we must firstly be irrefutable in our message that sexual assault, regardless of circumstance, or experience level, is never our fault. And we must listen to survivors when they say knowledge and open conversations around virginity and sex are vital.
This is something Radhika also advocates for between friends and sexual partners. This extends to sex itself, where she believes that a more open and ongoing style of dialogue could help to keep women safer and more able to advocate for their needs and comfort during their first time. “The biggest thing [during first-time sex] is communication — just keep checking in, and asking a woman how she feels. Sex doesn’t have to be this madly romantic spontaneous thing. For me, true romance is being caring and kind, and talking about it all beforehand is exactly that.”
Then it’s back to basics. School sex ed needs to have a more interpersonal focus and not only cover topics like LGBTQIA+ sexualities and consent, but explore teens how to have safe sex with someone for the first time. We need to radically reshape the curriculum to open up a dialogue around unequal power dynamics and expectations, as well as considerations around developing the emotional intelligence to support someone — physically and emotionally — after they’ve had sex for the first time.
After all, sex should be fun, but we also need to make sure all parties are fully equipped to understand the trust and respect which any sexual encounter should be based off of. As Chloe so succinctly sums it up: “Having sex is about responsibility. It’s about two people agreeing on what’s going to happen beforehand and playing by those rules.”
This article was originally published in 2022, and has been updated.
