Passionate Modernity Book

If you pick up this book thinking it's going to be full of interviews about virgin experiences and even expectations, it's not that even though the blurb may make it sound that way. Nevertheless, while I did notice that the author's conclusions are largely drawn from three or four interviewees she cites over and over again, it's still an engaging read for an academic text--and if you're an American in your early 30s, you'll probably find that one of her hypotheses of how people in America generally view their virginity either once did or currently does apply in some respect. As a character study, it can be helpful especially if you're involved in writing (or in my case, translating) stories that involve virgin experiences and views of said virginity that differ from your own to understand the various ways upbringing and social culture can make a person decide what virginity means to them and how that view naturally evolves over time. It also made me realize just how fundamentalist Christian the US laws regarding public school sex education still is, which explained a lot about my personal experience despite not living in a churchgoing household as being very religious in nature.
I honestly wished there were interview transcripts in the back, though, to get a better picture of how the author's conclusions were drawn--as well as wishing that she would have refrained from making only the lesbian and bisexual women's status as nonparents part of her description of them. It just bothered me, almost as if she was subtly implying that if these women were mothers that would either a) make them identify a stronger attraction to men or b) that it lessens their accounts because many of these women only had sexual experiences with female partners and thus were still 'technical virgins' in a sense. (Gay and bisexual men did not get this same treatment.)