35 Women Get Real About Losing Their Virginities

“Virginity,” it's a loaded word and we place a lot of importance and pressure on losing it and gaining sexual experience. As a result, having sex for the first time becomes a major milestone for many, and the memories of those often awkward, sometimes painful, occasionally funny moments tend to stay with us.

That's why, in order to show how diverse people’s sexual experiences can be, we asked women (names in quotation marks have been changed) of various backgrounds to tell us how old they were when they lost their V-cards — and what it was like. For some, their first times were great. For others, it was bad. Most, truth be told, were somewhere in the middle. And, they were all pretty different from what you’d see in the movies.