“In contrast, participants who saw virginity as a stigma were extremely reluctant to admit their virginity to anyone they knew. Many worked to disguise their virginity, either actively- by falsifying their sexual histories- or passively- by allowing or encouraging others to assume they were no longer virgins. Not surprisingly, people who interpreted virginity as a stigma were the most likely to conceal their virginity from their virginity-loss partners. For instance. Bill (31, heterosexual) decided not to tell his partner that he was a virgin because "It was so obvious to me that she wasn't [a virgin], that I felt demeaned by, if I had [told her]." Indeed, many respondents in this group lost their virginity with relative strangers, from whom they might more easily conceal their sexual status. Most clandestine virgins avoided detection by their partners; however, the three respondents whose partners either ridiculed them as virgins or as sexually incompetent were profoundly dissatisfied with the manner in which they lost their virginity (albeit relieved to have expunged their stigma). Men were less successful than women at concealing their virginity and sexual inexperience, perhaps due to popular stereotypes of men as sexually active and women as sexually passive. Respondents who lost their virginity at relatively advanced ages were also less successful at concealment, apparently because their similarly-aged partners were already sexually experienced. The desire of adherents to the stigma frame to avoid being stigmatized as virgins also affected their use of contraceptives. Of the group least likely to employ a form of contraception (59% did), a number of these respondents declined to discuss contraception- or to insist on practicing safer sex- precisely in order to avoid appearing inexperienced or foolish to their partners.”
