I lost my virginity on a couch to a sort of frat boy with a cute face and an obsession with Japan. Tim was three years older than me and went to another school. We met at a house party in the middle of a snowstorm. He told me I looked like one of my favorite models/actresses and I was unfortunately hooked. He was cute, it was fun. Five months into our fling I found myself lying naked with him in the sheets feeling more self-conscious than ever before. There was a weird tension between us. We tried to have sex but it hurt me and that seemed to annoy him. He casually (but also not so casually) brought up that I should really shave my pubic hair. Can I please crawl under the sheets and poof disappear? I felt mortified. It was embarrassing but also made me feel sad and insignificant. As someone who didn’t grow up in this country I didn’t know that it was some kind of “trend” to shave everything off. My feminist best friend and I used to proudly remind ourselves that hair was there for a reason and we honored it. But now I was there, with the first guy I had had sex with, and suddenly I realized how naked I was. I remember just trying to let it go. But I knew I had to get out of there. And in that moment when I said goodbye to him, I had a funny feeling that I would never see him again. That was true. When I tried to reach out to him like an idiot a week later he sent me a message saying he was “scouted and discovered” in Georgetown and was moving to California to be the star in the new Captain Planet movie…RIGHT.
*names have been changed in this story to maintain anonymity.