What Losing My Virginity Made Me Realize

Throughout the next few months, HuffPost Teen is highlighting the way teens think and feel about sex through anecdotes written for our series, "Teen Sex: It's Complicated." All of the authors are teenagers who have agreed to be published anonymously. If you want to share your thoughts, join the conversation here.

By Miranda, 17

Sex was always a taboo topic growing up. It was uncomfortable to talk about and was more known as "that dirty thing that only married couples can participate in."

I grew up going to a very conservative Christian school. They were so scared that all of us would have sex that they didn't even teach sex ed. The only thing we were taught was abstinence only. Anyone who had sex outside of marriage was "dirty" and was looked upon differently. This is what I learned as a 13 to 14 year-old. It made me uncomfortable to even think about people having sex with their significant others.

Now, fast-forward to high school. Same school, just older. Same exact doctrine for sex. But now I questioned it. It didn't make sense why virginity was so important to these people.

At 16, I lost my virginity to a guy I hardly knew -- and it was so much fun. It wasn't something sacred. It wasn't life-changing and it didn't make me any "less" than the other students. So now that I knew sex wasn't a scary thing, I started to do my research: how to have safe sex, the right and wrong things about sex -- anything I could to educate myself. I felt so overwhelmed because I had been taught nothing about this subject. I wanted to learn everything about it so that I could understand why people viewed it so negatively.

What I found was there's a lot of false information. There's a lot of ignorant adults too, who believe not teaching something will prevent it. I knew that this was incorrect. So I did all in my power to make sure I had safe sex and started telling my friends what I learned. It's been over a year now since I've lost my virginity and this is how I view sex: it's something that can be as important or as casual as you want. It MUST be consensual between sober participants and it should be safe. Girls and guys can have the same amount of sex. Girls aren't sluts for doing it and boys aren't losers for not. Sex is just an action. It's natural and it's fun.

Everyone who actively has sex should get check-ups to make sure they are clean. Girls should get on a form of birth control and guys should always wear a condom. It's what I tell everyone that is having sex. It's unsettling that my school and others like it don't educate their students. And it's scary how many teens don't know the first thing about sex. If you're going to have sex, protect yourself and be responsible.

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