21 Women Describe Their First Time

In our society, “virginity” is a loaded word, and we place a lot of emphasis — and pressure — on losing it. As a result, having sex for the first time becomes a major milestone for many women, and the memories of those often awkward, sometimes painful, occasionally funny moments tend to stay with us.

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. Some of their first times were great. Some were bad. Most, truth be told, were somewhere in the middle. And, they were all pretty different from what you’d see in the movies.