“You’re a virgin? Really!?”: A qualitative study of emerging adult female virgins’ experiences of disclosure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent research has highlighted that off-time sexual transitions such as maintaining virginity into adulthood are often experienced as a stigma. Based on stigma and identity theories, adult virginity is conceptualized as a concealable and stigmatized identity. The literature on concealable stigmatized identities emphasizes the significance of their disclosure and the personal and interpersonal consequences of their concealment. Little is known about the subjective experience of adult virginity as an identity and about adult virgins’ experiences of disclosing this identity to others. The present study explored personal and social experiences of adult virginity (i.e., perceptions, motives, identity) and its disclosure (i.e., confidants’ reactions and their impact) through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 heterosexual women aged 24–29 who identified as virgins and had never engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse. Data was analysed using directed content analysis and two main conceptual categories were identified: a) Framing virginity: Making sense of not having sex, and b) Disclosure and concealment: Managing virginity stigma. Participants perceived the meaning of their virginity as likely to endure despite its anticipated temporary nature and described the risk of losing a relationship opportunity as present whether they disclosed or concealed their virginity. The results of this study highlight the need to challenge virginity stigma by increasing awareness and the visibility of adult virginity as an identity. Implications for sexuality educators, clinicians and researchers are discussed and focus on interventions that frame adult virginity as a form of sexual diversity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".