By not losing my virginity until I was in my twenties I was absolutely sure I was going to get it right: that I could evade the awkwardness of bad sex, of it going wrong with the other person involved. As you can probably tell from the fact that I am now writing about it online: that's not exactly how things worked out.
But it turns out, quite a few of us feel that way about losing our virginity. A recent survey, carried out by Natsal and published every decade or so, reveals that 40% of women believe the age that they started having sex wasn’t the right time for them. A significant difference compared to 26% of men. The figures also suggest that this age - the one that most people lose their virginity - is before 18. But there is a large proportion of those in the survey (who were between their teens and early twenties) who lost their virginity before turning 16, the legal age of consent.
I didn't start having sex until I was 24, a point at which I was legally able to marry or adopt a child of my own volition. I was a bona-fide adult with a job, a degree that had a heavy focus in feminist academia and I was renting in London. So why did I still experienced the gut-twisting shame and paranoia of "should I have done this?"? If these statistics are to be believed, I should have felt more positive due to the fact that I waited until I was older as most of the participants in the survey felt it was too soon for them. But that's not the case.
It wasn't that I was waiting for marriage, or deliberately celibate. But at University (the time when everyone is generally getting to grips with the mechanics of sex) I did suffer with crippling body shame. I gained a stone in my first year, which doesn't sound like a life-altering weight change. But that didn't stop me from becoming fixated with it and spending most of my time hiding under oversized Primark sweaters and leggings. I didn't like looking at myself in the mirror and wrote vicious things about my bodyin my journal. If I didn't even like the way I looked in underwear: I definitely wasn't going to expose it to anyone else.
This pre-dated the social media body-positivity maelstrom, otherwise maybe I would have felt differently and more positively about myself. Today we're lucky to be exposed to and surrounded by people with a much more diverse range of body types that celebrate different standards of beauty. We have a whole host of celebrities and influencers Like Jada Sezer, Tess Holliday and Ashley Grahamwho are breaking down the myth that being happy, confident and leading a normal life has anything to do with your weight.
But as I say: that wasn't the case when I started University in 2012. The perpetuation of a gazelle-like, lithe body as the only one which was acceptable was nothing if not galvanised by University tabloid competitions titled things like: 'The rear of the year' and 'the fittest fresher'; competitions which literally created a set of guidelines for what was attractive.
And yet at the same time a strange thing was happening: this system that venerated a certain type of woman was also becoming a paradigm in which to punish them. Mostly through the comments section where other students would speculate about what the nominated female candidate might 'be up for' if she was willing to pose in a bikini on the University news site. it wasn't uncommon to see a comment to the effect of 'I would [have sex with her]' (and I've cleaned that up - usually what was written would be a lot worse) immediately underlined beneath with something about the venereal diseases you might catch from the student in question. Then followed Yik Yak - an anonymous app that drove the culture of latent slut shaming by creating yet another way to humiliate any female student considered to be having too much sex.
In light of this: I'm not sure why I was surprised to feel wracked with guilt when I did start having sex in my twenties. My sense of the impact that it would have on my life been warped out of proportion through some nuclear-waste scale toxic societal norms. If anything waiting longer made that more rigid, and it took a long time to amputate my sense of self-worth from someone I'd slept with or what the world might think if I'd had a one night stand.
The majority of us grew up with similarly confused messaging around what is the 'right' time, but does the 'right' time even really exist? Really - it has nothing to do with time, place, waiting until your twenties, your relationship status or whether you look like Jennifer Lawrence (and as I lost my virginity on my best friends landing with fake birds pinned in my hair - I can confirm this is all rubbish). The only real 'right' time is whenever's right for you.