For some people, the idea of losing their virginity brings up fond, sad or even humorous memories. The mention of having sex makes others think of the near or even distant future. Regardless of experience level, many students are unaware of the short- and long-term medical and psychological effects of their first experience with sexual intercourse.
"It was kind of anti-climactic," third-year College student Devon Spencer said. "I just wanted to get it out of the way."
Fourth-year Engineering student John Corbin said he felt like his first experience with sexual intercourse was significant but not as "big of a deal" as he imagined.
"It was pretty memorable -- it was with a girl I had been dating for a while, and she made it easier," Corbin said. "I guess there wasn't a lot of build up -- no real pressure, too."
The Facts
According to Christine Peterson, director of gynecology at Student Health, "sexual debut or initiation" should not be something students worry about. Rather, they should look at it "realistically" because the act is usually physically a "relatively minor thing" in relation to pain for a woman, Peterson explained.
"It's usually uncomfortable because the hymen stretches and there may be very slight tearing in some women, and sometimes there is bleeding," Peterson said. "Rarely does a woman have an actual laceration ... there can be as much bleeding as a person experiences with a period and very rarely does a woman need stitches to repair tissues," adding that protection should be at the forefront of a couple's concerns.
It is important to remember that no type of birth control is 100 percent effective, Peterson said.
"It is a mistake to think that you can't get pregnant the first time," Peterson said. "One way [a student] knows they are ready for intercourse is that they know they're ready to accept the risks [of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection]."
Peterson explained that there is some potential health risk associated with having sex earlier in one's life.
"The younger you are when you have sexual intercourse [as a woman], the higher your risk is for contracting certain sexually transmitted conditions like chlamydia, gonorrhea and HPV associated with cervical cancer and pre-cancer because younger women have more immature tissues that are susceptible to infection," she said. "It's a continuum ... a woman at age 30 has a more mature cervix than a woman at 20, and she has a more mature cervix than a woman at 15."
Looking Back
Peterson said many students come to talk about psychological or mental issues following sexual initiation.
"There are often huge emotional and psychological issues ... whether [the act occurs when the students are] sober or under the influence," she said. "Obviously their whole [attitude] toward sexuality is [defined by] how they are brought up ... and their belief system."
Russell Federman, director of Counseling And Psychological Services, echoed this sentiment.
"Losing your virginity has everything to do with the experience itself, and it also has everything to do with one's own set of values around sexuality," he said. "It's very hard to generalize ... you have to look at the specific psychosocial context that the individual sexual experience is rooted within in order to understand it."
Federman said CAPS often sees women who have problems dealing with the psychological aspects of both wanted and unwanted sexual initiation.
"We see some students where they have their first unwanted sexual experience and feel like they're ruined for life," he said. "Let's contrast that with a wanted first experience ... where it's a special time of intimacy and exploration and all that, and that's wonderful."
New Research
The median age for sexual initiation is about 16 to 20 years old in the United States, said Theo Sandfort, associate professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Columbia University.
Sandfort and a team of other doctors and scientists released a study in January on the long-term effects of early and late sexual initiation in the American Journal of Public Health.
According to the study, which used data from the 1996 National Sexual Health Survey, people whose first sexual experience came early in life had a higher chance of having more partners and increased risk in associating sex and alcohol use. Conversely, those with a later sexual debut often had lower risk factors.
The study also showed an increase in the chance of sexual problems for men who started having sex outside the normative age group, Sandfort explained.
"What we saw in our data was that when men start later, they are more likely to have sexual problems such as getting sexually aroused or getting an erection or experiencing an orgasm," Sandfort said. "Those problems we also see more frequently from those men that start relatively earlier ... around the ages of 13, 14 or 15."
With women, however, the opposite is true, Sandfort said.
"When women start later, they are less likely to have sexual arousal problems than when they start in the normative or early [period]," Sandfort noted.
Though research on men and women shows these trends, doctors and scientists are still unable to pinpoint the reason why sexually active Americans respond to losing their virginity at different times in such a way.
"This is the first time that people have really looked into this -- the next step is to find out why this is possible and why this happens," he said. "Is it [true] only in the United States or maybe in another country that is more liberal with its sexual norms?"
Sandfort said he and his team hope to continue their research, comparing their findings to data from other countries.
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