LOVE AT FIRST SEX: LATINA GIRLS' MEANINGS OF VIRGINITY LOSS AND RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

Drawing upon interviews with second-generation Latina youth, this article extends knowledge on young women's sexual lives by examining how Latina girls construct their sexual subjectivity within the context of their first sex experiences. In their narratives, girls identified two types of relationships as appropriate for virginity loss—those defined by love and those characterized by a mutual sentiment of caring. Their perceptions of these relationships not only informed how Latina girls made sense of their first sex experiences but also entailed critical consequences for their ability to negotiate curiosity and safe sex with partners at this point in their sexual biography. The focus on the first sex experiences of Latina youth provides insight into their notions of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual ideologies and how they use these ideas to socially construct their sexual identities.

Key Words:

• Sexuality
• gender
• Latinas
• youth
• race/ethnicity
• virginity

This research was supported by a Chicano/Latino Working Poor Research Grant from the Center for Chicano Studies at UC-Santa Barbara, a Sexuality Research Dissertation Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a Dissertation Grant in Women's Studies from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and a Faculty Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC. I thank Denise Segura, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, Amanda Lewis, Barbara Risman, Mérida Rúa, and Laurie Schaffner for their insights and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power for their feedback.

Notes

1. Latina will be used to refer to persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Central/South American descent. However, efforts will be made to distinguish among the different Latina/o groups whenever possible.

2. These studies are largely based on survey data.

3. Information on the sexuality of Latina youth is largely demographic in nature, derived from national surveys such as the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBS) and the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) [conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)].

4. The research design for the project included a nonrandom selection process; thus, the Latina youth discussed in this article represent a highly self-selected group. The following criteria were used to recruit participants in 1999 and 2002–2004: (a) self-defined as sexually active, (b) were between the ages of 13 and 18, (c) self-defined as practicing safe sex, and (d) had no children. The only difference in research selection criteria between the 1999 and 2002–2004 fieldwork excursions was in terms of racial/ethnic self-identification; in 1999 the requirement was that participants self-identify as Latina, whereas in 2002–2004 the requirement was that participants specifically self-identify as Mexican or Puerto Rican (to allow for more comparative analyses of these two Latina groups).

5. Nineteen of the young women reported living in a single female-headed household and all but six of the young women reported still being in school. All of the young women reported having a working-class background; parents typically worked in the service sector or in factories.

6. Laura Carpenter maintains that inclusive same-sex definitions of virginity loss among youth are informed by a cultural context in which the past efforts of gay activists has made it possible for young people (in comparison to earlier generations) to “recognize and express their sexual identities at earlier ages, often without experimenting with heterosexual sex” (Carpenter 2005: 46).

7. The three girls who did not interpret virginity loss experiences as needing to be defined as special or as the next stage in a sexual relationship offered another perspective on the meaning of virginity loss. All three stated that they intentionally did not want the occasion to be marked as “special,” explaining that they approached their first sex experiences as opportunities to “learn” more about sex and had made it a point to undertake this task with a sexual partner who was more of an acquaintance rather than someone they had an established relationship.

8. As Risman and Schwartz's (2002) advise, adolescent definitions of relationships may be more casual than adults and may reflect different timeframes on relationships. Thus, a teen may define a “two-week acquaintance” as a relationship (Risman and Schwartz 2002). In the case of the young women in my sample, relationships generally had been established for three months or longer prior to first sex.

9. In fact, the data on the level of sexual activity for young women that accounts for race/ethnic differences among white, African-American, and Latina girls reveal that the divergences between white and Latina girls are not too wide. The 2002 YRBS (see Centers for Disease Control reference) reports that for the question of ever having sex, the proportion of Latinas is in between the sexual behavior patterns of white and black young women (slightly higher than that for whites and somewhat lower than that for blacks). However, the 2002 NSFG (see Abma et al, 2004 reference) reports that fewer Latina youth are sexually active than white or black girls. As Frost and Driscoll (2006) point out, these reported variations might be attributed to survey methodology, sample selection, and wording of the questions.

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