When I was a teen and into my early twenties, I judged people on their sexual experience. Man or woman, if you had had sex (or had done sexual acts) with too many people, I kept my distance. When a friend, for whom needless to say I had complex feelings, lost her virginity and delightedly boasted - as well she could - my response was not the verbal high-five she deserved for the sex, but irritation that she did not love this boy and was certain not about to date him now. She wanted to have sex with a friend for whom she cared, he was only too happy to oblige, and that was that after years of waiting for the right person. Of course, I was jealous too because I might have loved the world where I could have been her first experience, but my judgment was neither unprecedented nor unusual. Unless someone had loving sex with a committed partner - and they were not meant to change these often - they were all dinged up.

It was a shifting goal post. Before I had sex, anyone who did was foreign. Did it matter that my fingers had visited more panties than I could count on one hand and I had kissed enough girls to half-fill a classroom? Of course not. I was largely spotless because I mostly did it for the right reasons (I was fond, left alone, hormonal, and they let me). Anyone who had done more than me and sooner was morally compromised. Only Melissa, already dusted with cocaine and soaked in group sex before I got a pair of panties past ankles, was immune to my critique. Her Pandora's box was beyond hope, so it was best to treat her as a force onto herself, immune to judgment.

Now, it is reversed. If in your thirties, you tell me you are a virgin, I stare agog, unable to reconcile how this could be so (you have missed prime awkward sex years!). If you assure me you never masturbated, I wonder if you have a mental or physical ailment in need of the relief of a licensed professional. I would consider it an act of charity to find you someone who could help you experience any number of fleshy pleasures because it doesn't make any sense to me that you should be allowed to remain deprived, even if you have no stated inclination.

Years ago, a friend confessed to me that she had enjoyed a threeway with two men, one of whom she fancied romantically. I was thrilled for her, then vexed that one of them went into full slut-shaming mode after having wobbled home in the morning. When she got off the phone, I considered whether I would have been that idiotic boy at that age (who, she made clear, absolutely could have savored more no-strings-attached sex if he just acted civilly after). I hope I wouldn't, though partially because I would have bowed out when it became clear she wouldn't be choosing between the two of us that night. I found what she had done liberating and exciting, even enviable. When I was younger, I would have recoiled at the idea like a proper Puritan.

Sex is an undeniable component of the human experience. People who deny themselves from even trying are suspect in their repression.

Sex positivity (or, at least, faulting people what they won't do or pitying them what they haven't) feels fairer than my decades ago sneering that young people explore their sexuality. That does not make it fair, just less unfair.

I do not have a myriad of sexual experience. I chose depth over breadth, devoting myself to delving a few women (though, admittedly, not in a Good Christian Missionary Lights Off fashion) rather than titillating, briefer experiences with a sweet-scented swath. Rather, I let this path was chosen for me because I did not have the mentality where I could have allowed the fleeting. I consider my experience likely the best for me, but I see my friends' summer flings, festival and vacation sex with people who do not have last names (or, a few times, real first ones), sophomore year one-night stands, and bite my lip imagining. It may have been dangerous, but no one was hurt aside from a few incidental urinary tract infections and, once, the need of a new bed frame. The men and women who were more sexually liberal earlier in life are not broken or damaged now. They are mostly well-adjusted, some married, a few parents, all gainfully employed. My finger-wagging was insecurity masked as righteousness, unwelcome by all parties. How dare I disparage people who saw the potential for experiences and seized them when the idea couldn't help being an enticing taboo I would not visit? I was offered. I saw the possibility before me, and retreated to safety and monogamy.

What does this make my current bemusement with who lack my small experience? Am I justifying what I've done, conservative, relational sex with five women in two decades? Do I want these people to have what I passed over in college, to enjoy what being single could entail? No. I merely see a realm they have not visited and should. Did twenty-year-old proselytizers in college see me the same way, judging me for my lack of group sex or drunken sex with my English TA? I recognize they felt that way when it came to drugs, in which they also indulged as abstained.

I've known asexuals and those glacially escaping their closets, but this is different: ready, able, all the preferred parts, but haven't put all the elements together.

I cannot justify to my satisfaction why I feel this way about my inexperienced associates, but I feel it all the same. I hesitate as though it represents a character flaw from which there may be no reprieve. You can debauch yourself, but aren't you still the person who refused for decades? Can a sticky night or two repudiate something entrenched?

I understood my virginity in high school had an expiration date looming. Maybe I would have made it to college, but it would have vanished soon after. College would have been an impossibility for abstinence, if one could consider my "everything but" abstinent.

Do the sexually ignorant now feel the way I did at seventeen? In one's thirties, we do not deal in future acts but past tense; we've done it all and might be up for doing it again if you give us a couple minutes. If we discuss something most should have experienced and someone mentions they never have had this, an almost insuperable chasm develops in the conversation over which I shout, "Oh, but you must! You'll love every second of it once you give it a shot!" I don't want the details. I just expect it has happened and there are few boxes one hasn't thoroughly checked with several pens, maybe drawing a few new boxes to check as well.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies. The interview.

last watched: Deadpool 2
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: Fiona Apple