“No one believes I’m a virgin” is a common refrain during the premiere of Hulu’s new dating competition series, Are You My First?
The reality show centers on “the largest group of eligible virgins ever assembled,” the hosts claim—apart from a high school cafeteria, one might assume—to follow the tried-and-true format that defines shows like Love Island and Too Hot to Handle. A perfectly staged villa’s worth of conventionally attractive people in their twenties and early thirties are sequestered in tropical splendor to “find love.”
In this case, the “and have sex” that is usually implied is a little more blatant. The twist on the format here is that all of these bombshells are sexually inexperienced. Some of them are religious and don’t believe in sex before marriage. Some of them have never been in a serious relationship. And one of them, a 30-year-old Miami cocktail waitress named Rachael, has a little-known but surprisingly common medical condition called vaginismus that makes sex painful, if not impossible. Still, despite these wide-ranging reasons for remaining celibate, every virgin seems committed to finding their first among the palm fronds and pineapple sippers in artificial paradise.
“I haven’t lost my virginity because I don’t lose, period,” says contestant Katya, a 28-year-old artist from New York City who lives by the adage “Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” “There’s power in having sex, and there’s also power in withholding,” she continues. “Do you think Anne Boleyn went from lady-in-waiting to Queen of frickin’ England because she put out?”
Politics plays a role for both the virginal cast members and for those watching from afar, like Ida, a 24-year-old whose own admissions about her virginity propelled her to TikTok virality this summer.
“My mom was like, ‘I’ll literally pay you to go on dates,’" Ida says. "And I said, ‘You don’t need to pay me. Find me a non-Republican in Orange County.’ She couldn’t do it.”
TikTok content
Ida’s videos about dating in New York City, where she candidly discusses her fear of physical intimacy or her first time kissing someone while naked, have been viewed by millions of people at a time when virginity seems to be reaching a new cultural apex.
Chaste Scene
Are You My First? is the third reality series in recent months to focus on virgins, following Virgin Island on Channel 4 in the UK and TLC’s Virgins. In June, pop singer-songwriter Lorde released an album called Virgin, which reflects an evolution in self-perception more than sexual novice. But a 2022 survey by the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney found that one in four Gen Z adults have never had sex—the same generation now making up most of the cast of these reality shows.
Rates of virginity among Gen Z have slightly risen, but what appears to be a sudden influx of virgins and cultural fascination about young people remaining abstinent may be less of an indicator about changing sexual behavior and more about what we’re willing to share publicly, says Justin Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute.
"I'm a behavioral scientist, so I often think, 'Has the actual behavior changed, or is it the social context around it?’” Garcia says. “I think for a long time, Americans had a lot of shame about not being sexually active. We're seeing that more people are willing to talk about whether they're having sex or not. Rather than saying, 'I'm in a drought,' people are saying, 'I'm having a voluntary celibate period.’ It's not a position of weakness or a position of inability."
For Ida, who doesn’t want her last name disclosed due to privacy concerns, her virginity is unmoored from religion or purity culture. She doesn’t view her eventual first time having sex as something being taken from her, she tells WIRED. It just hasn’t happened yet. And one big reason why is that, despite having grown up in “extremely conservative” Orange County, California, Ida isn’t interested in having sex with conservative men.
“A big reason why Gen Z isn’t dating that much is because women are getting so much more liberal and men are getting so much more conservative that it’s like, what do we even have in common with each other? If you don’t see women as people, then why would I even be having sex with you,” she says.
Role-Play
This political gender divide is also the root of some of the earliest tension on Are You My First? Apart from the classic conundrum of multiple men pursuing the same woman, drama quickly crops up around contestant Godwin, a real estate developer from New Jersey. He tells one of his mutual interests, Jade, a Miss New Orleans USA and former NFL cheerleader, that his love language is “acts of service.” His version of that is coming home after a long day of being a "provider” and “protector” to his “woman” serving him a home-cooked meal.
“I don’t really believe in gender roles, but I believe that the man is to be the head of the family and that, you know, the woman is there to be a helpmate,” Godwin tells Jade in a perfect description of believing in traditional gender roles. Her expression scrunches into discomfort.
“That doesn’t seem like something that necessarily aligns with me,” Jade says in a confessional later. Her tagline briefly switches to “Feminist virgin,” but Godwin is able to convince her that he really cares about reciprocity, not subservience.
It’s a typical kind of conversation in these reality shows, even when virginity isn’t the focus. Are You My First? is hosted by two former Bachelor franchise alums, including Colton Underwood, who was the first lead to identify as a virgin. He later came out as gay and got married. (His former girlfriend he met on the series also obtained a temporary restraining order against him in 2020, which Underwood described as “in good faith” and was later dropped.)
For some women who have embraced voluntary celibacy offscreen, these kinds of disputes are at the heart of their decision to stop having sex with men—or never start in the first place. The term “volcel,” which refers to someone who is voluntarily celibate, has peaked in search interest in recent years, according to Google Trends. And while it’s largely understood as a spinoff from the toxic, misogynistic “incel” or involuntarily celibate community, there are some women who find it a respite from those kinds of men.
Author and screenwriter Sai Marie Johnson has written about being voluntarily celibate since 2020. She tells WIRED that the decision came after being married, having children, and experiencing toxic relationships with men. She and Ida both identify as sex positive, meaning they don’t view having sex as shameful, but are wary of how men can weaponize sex and relationships against them.
“Our climate right now has allowed men to be emboldened in their practice of misogyny,” Johnson says, highlighting reproductive coercion (the ability for men to control women’s reproductive decisions) through the inability to access abortion as a key reason that women are turning to voluntary celibacy. “Conservatism is trying to foster a more puritan society after we had done all this to push sex positivity for the past decade.”
“I think it also has to do with mothers like me, who’ve been through these things, going to our daughters and going, ‘Look, this is what my mom didn’t teach me,’” Johnson continues, adding that her 23-year-old daughter is a virgin. “You don’t have to be the puritan trad wife. You can be on OnlyFans if that’s what you want. The problem is that men automatically assume that every single opportunity to connect with a woman means they’re going to get to have sex.”
But the opposite also appears to be true.
As the contestants on Are You My First? explore some of these dynamics with each other, it becomes evident that some of the men aren’t as comfortable pursuing women, even when the women are enthusiastic about it. On night one, Rachael, the woman with vaginismus, makes it clear to Michael, a stand-up comedian, that she’s interested. He reciprocates—but reveals in a confessional that he is still working through a fear of intimacy.
It’s ironic that people like Michael who are fearful of sex are now encouraged to work through that fear publicly, on television, in highly manipulated social experiments. That contradiction may be another root cause of what average Gen Zers are experiencing—a push to share more of themselves with the internet about how they’re sharing less of themselves physically.
“There are a lot of other cultural reasons that young people are not having sex that don’t really correlate at all to conservative politics or religion or a lack of awareness about sexuality,” says Magdalene Taylor, a sexual culture critic and editor at Playboy. “I think a lot of young people are trading these usual markers of adulthood for a more digitized life. We’re having fewer in-person social interactions, and sex is a natural part of that.”
After Ida’s TikToks about virginity blew up, she posted about receiving a DM from a person involved in reality TV production casting. She says she can’t share specifics, but on Sunday, the day before Are You My First? premiered, Ida says, she participated in the filming of a pilot episode. The new series isn’t a competition, she adds. It would provide more personal context about her journey.
“My mom, literally every week she calls me, she goes, ‘Are you done embarrassing yourself on the internet?’” Ida says. “With TikTok and reality TV, if you have the opportunity to talk about your sex life or lack thereof and have it be the reason you perhaps have a career, why wouldn’t you do it?”
