this appeared on the forum a little while ago:

"im not sure if i should be asking this but im very bored and so when did you lot use your virginity wot age were you Laughing
dnt worry if ya dnt wanna answer it lol"

i intended to answer it there, but i am gonna go through and answer all the posts at some point...just gotta get time.

In the meantime, here is the typical, white, middle-class answer to your question with the slightly hollow feeling that it left me with and the mixture of pride and confusion that left me spinning.

I was just seventeen...it was a few days after my birthday i think. i suck with days, dates and times. I had started sixth form a few months before which basically meant i had met a few hundred new people to hang out with after seeing the same faces day-in and day-out in high school. One of the girls in my class was heading out to a club that weekend and me and some friends were going along too.

The words 'false sense of confidence' kinda summed us both up on this occasion (fuck, it still kinda hits home for me). I did the natural thing that scared boys do when they need to feel brave...i got drunk. unfortunately, this wipes out pretty much my entire memory of how we ended up back at my place...but it happened either way.

back at my place: ok...so this is it. i'd spent a year being a 16-year-old boy trying to get to this point. i was now a 17-year-old boy wondering what the hell i was going to do. i guess i'd been to second base before, and now i was staring down the barrel of a home run....and i don't even like baseball. so i put my hand to the back of the door, push it open and walk in to the room.

you wanna know it was like after reading all that don't you? well...it's a blur, for two reasons. the alcohol consumed earlier...i was far from being wasted but i could feel it enough to affect the edges of the memories, and of course the fact that i was nervous, dumb and excited. it was like stepping off a rollercoaster and not remembering any of the twists or turns, just the fact that you were shitting yourself the entire time but it felt great to have that much adrenaline hit your bloodstream.

so where does the hollow feeling kick in? pretty much as soon as my eyes opened. we got our shit together and headed for the door, we both had places to be later in the day...can't remember ever having anywhere to be when I was seventeen, but that day i did. we grabbed a quick drink from a coffee bar in our home-town and talked....she was casual (cool, collected and calm..haha!!) as she talked of the boys she hung out with and told stories of her town and what she got up to there. i felt the intense urge to get the fuck out of there very, very quickly...i didn't want to hear about boys in fast cars, girls who will never know better and what they did in the shadows out the back of their local superstore. i ran (not literally, although if i'd had any balls i'd have just hit the pavement at a sprint).

so she dropped out of school a couple of months later and left town. no...nothing to do with me, in fact we only chatted casually back in class after that night. she would make grown-up jokes about sex with a knowing smile and laugh and i would try and act like i 'got it'.

i gotta go right now, but i hope that answered your question....you can ask me about pretty much anything if you really wanna know, I am low on secrets and big on telling boring stories. p.s. i like other people's stories so post them up if you have guts and words.

max x