Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham
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which I did, in my eight-by-ten-foot room on the “quiet floor” of East Hall. Procuring wine entailed mounting my bike and riding seven subzero miles to a package store in nearby Lorain that didn’t ID, so it ended up being beer and cheese and a big box of Carr’s assorted party crackers. Jonah was “casually” invited in a group email that made me sound a lot more relaxed (“Hey y’all, sometimes on a Thursday night I just need to chill. DON’T YOU?”) than I actually was. And he came, and he stayed, even after all my guests had packed up and gone. That’s when I knew that we would at least go to sloppy second base. We talked, at first animatedly and then in the nervous half exclamations that substitute for kissing when everyone is too shy. Finally, I told him that my dad painted huge pictures of penises for a job. When he asked if we could see them online, I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and went for it. I removed my shirt almost immediately, as I had with the pilot, which seemed to impress him. Continuing in the key of bold, I hopped up to get the condom from the “freshman survival pack” we had been given (even though I was a sophomore, and even though I was pretty sure if the apocalypse did come we were going to need a lot more than fake Ray-Bans, a granola bar, and some mini-Band-Aids).
Meanwhile, across campus, my friend Audrey was in a private hell of her own creation. She had been in a war with her roommate all semester, a voluptuous, Ren Faire–loving Philadelphian who was the lust object of every LARPer and black-metal aficionado on campus. Audrey just wanted some quiet time to read The New Republic and iChat with her boyfriend in Virginia, while her roommate was now dating a kid who had tried to cook meth in the dorm kitchen, warranting an emergency visit from men in hazmat suits. Audrey asked that her roommate not keep her NuvaRing birth control in the minifridge, which the girl took as an unforgivable affront to her honor.
Before coming out to my beer-and-cheese soiree, Audrey had left her roommate a note: “If you could please have quieter sex as we approach our midterms, I’d really appreciate it.” Her roommate’s response was to burn Audrey’s note, scatter the ashes across the floor, and leave a note of her own: “U R a frigid bitch. Get the sand out of UR vagina.”
Audrey ran back to my room, hoping for a sleepover. She was sobbing, terrified that the burnt note was just a precursor to serious bodily harm, and also pretty sure I was alone, finishing the cheese, so she flung my door open without knocking—only to find Jonah on top of me. She immediately understood the magnitude of the occasion and, through her tears, cried, “Mazel tov!”
I didn’t tell Jonah I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” I was sure I had already broken my hymen in high school while crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in pursuit of a cat that didn’t want to be rescued. Still, it hurt more than I’d expected and in a different way, too—duller, less like a stab wound and more like a headache. He was nervous, and, in a nod to gender equality, neither of us came. Afterward we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a good person, whatever that even means.
I awoke the next morning, just like I did every morning, and proceeded to do all my normal things: I called my mother, drank three cups of orange juice, ate half a block of the sharp cheddar that had been sitting out since the night before, and listened to girl-with-guitar music. I looked at pictures of cute things on the Internet and inspected my bikini line for exciting ingrown hairs. I checked my email, folded my sweaters, then unfolded all the sweaters in the process of trying to decide which sweater to wear. That night, lying down felt the same, and sleep came easily. No floodgate had been opened. No vault of true womanhood unlocked. She remained, and she was me.
Jonah and I only had sex once. The next day, he stopped by to say that he thought we’d done it too soon, and we should take a few weeks to get to know each other better. Then he asked me to be his girlfriend, put on my hot-pink bicycle helmet, and proclaimed it was “the going-steady helmet,” giving me a manic thumbs-up. I “dated” him for twelve hours, then ended it in the laundry room of his dormitory. Over Christmas break, he sent me a Facebook message that read, simply: “Your Hot.”
Sex was clearly easier to have than I had given it credit for. It occurred to me that I had, for the past few years, set my sights on boys who weren’t interested in me, and this was because I wasn’t ready. Despite all the movies about wayward prep-school girls I liked to watch, my high school years had been devoted to loving my pets, writing poems about back-alley love, and surrendering my body only to my own fantasies. And I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet. I was sure that, once I let someone penetrate me, my world would change in some indescribable yet fundamental way. I would never be able to hug my parents with the same innocence, and being alone with myself would have a different tenor. How could I ever experience true solitude again when I’d had someone poking around my insides?
How permanent virginity feels, and then how inconsequential. After Jonah, I could barely remember the sensation of lack, the embarrassment, and the feelings of urgency. I remember passing the punk girl arm in arm with her boyfriend senior year, and we didn’t even exchange a survivor’s nod. She was likely having sex every night, her ample bosom heaving in time to some hard-core music, our bond erased by experience. We weren’t part of any club anymore, just part of the world. Good for her.
Only later did sex and identity become one. I wrote that virginity-loss scene almost word for word in my first film, Creative Nonfiction, minus the part where Audrey busted down the door, afraid for her life. When I performed that sex scene, my first, I felt more changed than I had by the actual experience of having sex with Jonah. Like that was just sex, but this was my work.
1 Name changed to protect the truly innocent.
FOR A LONG TIME, I wasn’t sure if I liked sex. I liked everything that led up to it: the guessing, the tentative, loaded interactions, the stilted conversation on the cold walks home, looking at myself in the mirror in someone else’s closet-sized bathroom. I liked the glimpse it gave me into my partner’s subconscious, which was maybe the only time I actually believed anyone besides me even existed. I liked the part where I got the sense that someone else could, maybe even did, desire me. But sex itself was a mystery. Nothing quite fit. Intercourse felt, often, like shoving a loofah into a Mason jar. And I could never sleep afterward. If we parted ways, my mind was buzzing and I couldn’t get clean. If we slept in the same bed, my legs cramped and I stared at the wall. How could I sleep when the person beside me had firsthand knowledge of my mucous membranes?
Junior year of college, I found a solution to this problem: platonic bed sharing, the act of welcoming a person you’re attracted to into your bed for a night that contains everything but sex. You will laugh. You will cuddle. You will avoid all the humiliations and unwanted noises that accompany amateur sex.
Sharing beds platonically offered me the chance to show off my nightclothes like a 1950s housewife and experience a frisson of passion, minus the invasion of my insides. It was efficient, like what pioneers do to stay warm on icy mountain passes. The only question was to spoon or not to spoon. The next day I felt the warmth of having been wanted, minus the terrible flashes of dick, balls, and spit that played on a loop the day after a real sexual encounter.
Of course at the time I was doing it, I had none of this self-awareness about my own motives and considered platonic bed sharing my lot: not ugly enough to be repulsive and not beautiful enough to seal the deal. My bed was a rest stop for the lonely,