Virginity is Fake, So Why is it Still a Rite of Passage?
Despite its reputation as a sexist film, I rewatched “American Pie” and some parts still hold up for me, more than 25 years later.
In the fall of my senior year of high school, I was the starting goalkeeper on the boys’ varsity soccer team. After beating our arch rivals, the topic of sex came up, as it does with teenage boys on a long yellow bus ride that put us on this side of adolescence. Who was a virgin, we asked each other, and who wasn’t?
My teammates were astonished to hear I was still a virgin. They presumed I’d been having sex for the past two years with my long-term girlfriend, with whom I’d just broken up. My ex and I preferred heavy petting and deep conversations, I said. We just didn’t have that type of relationship.
As a deeply repressed closeted trans girl moonlighting as a typical white suburban American boy, what else could I say? What excuse could be as passable as a letterman jacket and a soccer ball ricocheting off my chest?