On "Never Have I Ever" and Going to The Club
Never Have I Ever:
I forgot that the title of this show is based on a game teenagers play that is intended to reveal the details of your sex life. So I was disoriented when virginity returned as a central theme and driver of the plot in the final few episodes of season 3, which dropped on Netflix last week. Devi insists that she doesn’t want to be a “dusty old nun who doesn’t lose it until college.” Eleanor, one of Devi’s best friends, laments that she can’t believe a nerdy student lost his virginity before she, Devi, and Fabiola (the third in the best friend trio). I’m not bothered by the idea that teenagers would see “virginity” as an embarrassment or something to get rid of in order to move on to become their sexually active, mature adult selves. But I wish that Never Have I Ever was more interested in interrogating this fixation on virginity and pivoting towards personal sexual pleasure and fulfillment and away from arbitrary markers of sexual credibility.
Since its first season, I’ve appreciated the fact that Never Have I Ever flips the conventional script on teenagers and sexuality. For about as long as stories about teenage girls have existed, sexuality has been a central theme of teen drama. I’ve written about a number of these eighteenth-century narratives on this blog. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, “virginity” is a currency so valuable that the protagonist and her parents both value it above her life. In Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, girls escape to a convent in order to avoid the non-consensual violation of their “virtue.” The Forced Virgin (anonymously published), well, I mean, it’s in the title. Even in Austen novels, illegitimate sexual unions often linger in the background, such as in Sense and Sensibility, where we learn that Willoughby “ruins” a young girl by impregnating her and then abandoning her.
In all of these novels, it goes without question that unmarried girls must not have sex. There are, of course, eighteenth-century texts that disrupt this script. But, for the most part, girls earn a marriage with their ideal suitor through vociferously rejecting his and all other suitors’ advances throughout the duration of the novel, proving their virtue and value as marriage options. Even in more recent depictions of teenage sex and first times, the narrative tends to focus on first times that are special or cosmically significant. Aisling Walsh describes the significance of Nancy’s virginity loss in Stranger Things as a juxtaposition between pleasure and death, reinforcing the narrative of female sexuality as dangerous. Shows from Glee to The Carrie Diaries to Reign depict first-times between central couples that are seamless, pleasurable, and perfect.
But in Never Have I Ever, rather than fixating on the imperative to “lose it” with the one or in the right way, Devi has unabashedly wanted to have her first sexual experiences for their own sake. Yet, to an almost obsessive degree, she has also viewed her “virginity” as an impediment to her popularity and to her ability to get or keep a boyfriend. Though Devi demonstrates a liberated attitude toward her own sexuality in that she doesn’t feel shame for wanting sex, it’s clear that her interest in sex is still wrapped up in an oppressive hetero-patriarchal concept of virginity.
Certainly, the lack of shame that Devi and her two best friends, Eleanor and Fabiola, feel is an improvement over the centuries of stories in which coming-of-age for girls is dominated by the imperative to protect their “virtue.” Yet, even though Never Have I Ever rejects the idea that female sexuality will wreak ruin on its protagonist, the virginity through-line still reinforces the idea that a girl’s credibility and maturity are linked to her sexual history. When Eleanor has sex with her boyfriend for the first time, Devi excitedly claims that it’s “the biggest news our friend group has ever had.” Later, she talks about how much more they have to accomplish before graduation, citing her and Fabiola’s lingering virginity as evidence.
All of this is pretty funny. And it’s presented as a particularly teenaged and modern outlook on sex and the concept of virginity. The show attempts to decenter heterosexual relationships with Fabiola, who is queer and dating a non-binary student from another school. But by insisting on the language of virginity without problematizing what this means, the show still ultimately reinforces a hetero-patriarchal conception of female sexuality. Devi claims that she doesn’t need to have “full-on sex” with her boyfriend but that she just wants to get “horizontal” with him. What are we supposed to make of this hierarchy of sexual activities given Fabiola’s queer sexual experiences? The language of “full-on sex” and virginity still suggests that penetrative sex with a man is legitimate sex whereas non-penetrative sex or sex with a person that doesn’t have a penis exists in some other, less legitimate category. The emphasis on virginity tilts the lens away from the pleasure of its protagonist and toward that of a male sexual partner or that of sexual credibility that, though aiming for sexual liberation, is still grounded in the patriarchal construction of virginity. After all, why should self pleasure be less valid and less significant in a person’s life than pleasure with a partner? Why emphasize a character’s loss of “virginity” and not their first orgasm, an experience that does not necessarily coincide with the proverbial “first time.”
Notes on Club Culture:
I went to (sort of) a club last weekend. I say sort of because there was a DJ. But mostly “the club” was a backroom in a chicken restaurant that was loud and where people were trying to dance but mostly only in that shoulder dance and dry-humping your boyfriend way. No one was particularly adept.
But anyway, it was the closest experience I have had to a club. I have to say that I do get the appeal. In general, I like a bar where the music provides ambiance but not an impediment to conversation. I like a bar where there are plenty of seats so I don’t have to put my name in or feel nervous about squeezing in at the end of the bar next to someone who might try to explain bitcoin to me.
People were nice at the club, though. I reached past a person to get to the water cooler (alway be hydrating, ABH, is a motto one must live by), and they helpfully handed me a plastic cup and said to me, “you have the right idea!” These are the types of micro-interactions I relish. It’s why I love going to women’s restrooms at bars. I still, frequently, recount the time that a girl told me I was (and this is verbatim) “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen” in the bathroom at a Taylor Swift dance party ™ (I am, again, nothing if not consistent). I should have gotten her number.
So that was the energy at the sort-of-a-club. And there I was sipping my mezcal drink and waiting for the chicken poquito wraps that my partner ordered to arrive. Picture me wearing a pink dress printed with orange hearts. A peter-pan collar with frilly fringe! I am wearing a dress that Aidy Bryant might wear in Shrill. So I am dressed super cute, but whether or not I am dressed club-cute is a question I don’t know the answer to. I am clutching the tote bag that I got as a free subscription gift from my local paper so that it doesn’t get in anybody’s way. I could have brought with me a smaller, clubbier bag, but I needed to bring this mom-bag for two reasons. The first reason is that I live in Washington, DC. And we are obligated to be repping whatever publications we subscribe to (The New Yorker) via tote bag choices everywhere we go. The second reason is that I needed a bag big enough to carry my walking sandals so that I would not have to wear my heeled boots on the walk home.
I think I will return to “the club” and perhaps even go to a real club soon. I am at a stage in my life where I am now too confident for my own good, which is why I can handle clubs now and don’t have to pretend like I am too intellectual for them, like I did when I was 21.