This blog is a collection of stories. Some of them are the result of face to face interviews I conducted for my book, Losing It: How we popped our cherry over the last 80 years, but mainly they are the words of brave, intrepid people of all ages, backgrounds & cultures who sought me out online because I had a blog called The Virginity Project and they had a story they wanted to tell. 

People talk to a stranger about their first sexual experiences for all sorts of reasons. But mostly, they come because they don’t have a space in which they can talk openly about their sexual lives without fear of ridicule or exposure, even if the fear of ridicule is just perceived. Still powerful. 

There is no end of good information about sex these days if we know where to find it. We are so much better resourced than previous generations…..but bare faced conversation about the minutiae of our sex lives? Thats not often on the table for most people. There is nothing  weird or abnormal about this. It’s just the way it is. Talking about your intimate life, if you are REALLY talking about it, is an insanely vulnerable thing to do.

I became an unintentional agony aunt. Once the blog got going. And I did the best I could to hold people and their stories as they unpacked this very personal part of their lives with me – or jumped in at the deep end for the first time and then came back to talk to me about it.

It’s funny, looking back, because the impetus to start the blog was pure frustration with the publishing powers that be. ‘Who is this booked aimed at?’ bleated every publishing house in London as they (very nicely, it must be said) rejected the first draft of my manuscript (and my second. A story for another time). ‘I’ll show you who this book is aimed at’ I thought, as I began this blog, sponsored mainly by my anger. Three months later, I scored a full page of editorial in the Saturday Times News Review about The Virginity Project blog.

The next time I looked up after that, I was in anonymous digital relationships with people from all over the world who needed to work something out, someone to hand hold them, someone to park a very important piece of their life history with. I would never have had these deep, ongoing, get down to the nitty gritty, no holds barred interactions with people, whom I will never meet, but connected with profoundly unless my frustration had got the better of me and I’d started writing online. Some of these people have remained digital friends for years. One I lost track of during lockdown – where are you ‘Ed’? – I worry that you might have succumbed to covid. I hope not. I might never know. But to everyone who ever wrote to me, thank you for having the balls to help create this beautiful ‘anthropology of ourselves’*Mass Observation.

Recently when Typepad, the original hosting platform, mailed me to say they were closing it down and unless I moved my blog, ten years of content would disappear, I realised I couldn’t let it go. So here it is, with a visual glow up on WordPress. The vulnerability is mine too, because when I read so many of my early awkward posts, I remember exactly how freaked out I was when it came to pressing the send button. I felt exposed and dumb, like, what do I know? And I’m not even a writer. I’m just a nosy person who wants to find out what other people think about their intimate lives. But that urge drove me to find a voice. It’s still a work in progress. Much like our intimate lives and hopefully the proverbial fine wine, our sexual lives and our voices continue to evolve, develop and grow as time goes by.