(Photo: Patricia Horton)

One of the most humiliating moments of my life was when my best friend told me she had lost her virginity. I knew it was coming—she was 16 going on 17 and in a serious relationship—and I dreaded it every day. I dreaded being the last virgin standing. Our mutual friend, let’s call her Theresa, had already won the informal competition we had going, but I thought I could still be a contender. I don’t know why I thought that. I wasn’t with anyone and I had only ever touched one penis in my life. I know in hindsight that it was flaccid.

I dreaded being the last virgin standing because I really, really wanted to have sex. So a month later, two months before my seventeenth birthday, I invited a male friend over while I thought my parents would be away. I was wrong, but he still agreed to have sex with me. Several seconds after we finally got it working, the phone rang, and my dad hollered that it was for me. It was Theresa, asking if I’d done it yet. I hated her guts at the time, but boy was I proud of myself.

Ever since puberty, I have wanted to be a slut. (I use that word only because it’s less cumbersome than “woman who has lots of sex.”) Not just because all the riot grrrl singers I liked sang so fondly of them, but because I wanted to actually do what I was thinking about doing all the time. I have never been content just thinking about stuff I want to do. When I’m not actively trying to get stuff done, I’m silently resenting all the people who are, which is an ugly state to be in. As a result, I have often suffered from slut envy. When slutty friends told me about all the guys they’d done it with, I had to catch my breath. I wondered what they had that I didn’t.

What they had was courage. For a long time I blamed my looks, and the men who presumably didn’t like them, for my relative prudery, but that was a load of nonsense. Looking back on my teen years, I could have lost my virginity lots of times before I did. There was that guy I met on Livejournal whose apartment I hung out in and whose dad, a sports reporter for the Sun, told me during his “good night” that he’d probably see me in the morning. There was that guy from Whitby who fingerbanged me to a late-night airing of MacGyver. There was that 30-year-old, himself a slut, who bought me beer at Squirly’s and then took me back to his place in Parkdale, where we watched Buffalo ’66. But I didn’t sleep with any of them. Instead, I resented my best friend.

I didn’t sleep with any of them because I was scared, which makes sense because sex is scary, especially for women. For a long time, sex could kill us, either by syphilis or baby, and incur the wrath of the community and its god. Worse still, young women faced a world full of evil ruiners who would have sex with us at first opportunity, killing us or making god wrathful. People wrote novels and essays about evil ruiners, who spread syphilis and babies, so that young women would have the facts. Even though condoms now grow on trees in cities like Toronto, the fear of evil ruiners—guys who would lie about their mythological, fatal, condom-defying STIs, or whose sperm can leap latex barriers—remains, at least for me, because, much like god, those guys could really do a number on us.

In other words, having sex takes guts. It took a long time for me to develop guts, partly because of my fear of evil ruiners, but also because it can be weird to get naked in front of someone you don’t know very well and let them put part of their body inside your body. Sadly, women don’t really high-five each other about sex the way men do. Instead, we “support each other’s choices.” Until forty years ago, society devoted a lot of time and effort to discouraging us from being slutty, and it takes more than forty years to undo that completely. That means sluts, even sluts with robust support networks of swinging women, are pioneers in a sense. And who wouldn’t want to be a pioneer?

But that’s not why I always envied sluts. I envied sluts because of all the sex they had. I’m speaking in the past tense, not because I flatter myself that I’m a slut now (although sluttiness is relative, I suppose), but because I finally learned to treat sex like any other goal. Achieving goals means pushing yourself to do things that scare you for the greater good, or because you’ll probably like them. It’s weird when your conscience tells you to have sex, because your conscience is supposed to tell you not to, but the conscience is usually right.

Before I lost my virginity, I only suspected that having lots of sex was good and fun. Now that I’m not a virgin, I know this to be the truth. Not a lot of things in life are as good as you anticipate them to be, but sex is definitely one of them. I think that having lots of sex with different partners is especially good and fun, the same way it’s good and fun to travel to lots of different countries and read lots of different books and eat lots of different foods. Not necessarily wanton one-nighters, like the kind college women in those studies have because they want boyfriends, but one-nighters you have because you find each other interesting, as well as romantic relationships, sexual relationships, flings, and all the other ways people get together for sex.

Doing these things can enrich your life with knowledge and experience, and they’re more fun than most of the things you can do. I’m not saying you should go out and be slutty if it’s really not your bag. I do not wish to prude-shame. But if you envy sluts the way I did, you should give it a whirl, if only because envy is the domain of weenies.

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Alexandra Molotkow writes Toronto Standard’s Minutiae column and only sometimes writes thing on her stomach in lipstick.