Don't Lose Your Virginity on a Roach-Infested Sheet

The first time I did the deed, I was 19. I think I just wanted to get it over with.

(Note to Future Sluts: Wanting to "get it over with" is not a good-enough reason to give it up.)

L. closely resembled Erik Estrada, but that's not why he was my first. He was my first because I was ... well ... a nerd.

Guys simply never asked me out. In retrospect, I can see that there were guys in high school who had crushes on me, and wanted to ask me out, but they didn't have the gumption to make their intentions clear, and I was too clueless to read between the lines.

So when L. swaggered up to me on the train between New York City and New Haven and started flirting, I was flattered. So flattered that I didn't care that he was in rehab and on parole.

Our brief courtship consisted of him coming to Yale, where I was a sophomore, when his drug-treatment program would let him out. We'd make out in my dorm room; we'd walk down the street holding hands; he gave me his wool-lined blue-jean jacket; it was love.

So the fateful day arrived when I took the train to Bridgeport, CT and entered the scary, third-world realm of the Father Panic projects. As we walked to his place, L. proudly pointed out all the undercover-cop cars. He showed me off to his brother, who gave me a "what's a college girl like you doing with a knucklehead like him" look.

And then we were in L.'s twin bed, finally finishing what we'd been attempting to start for weeks. I don't remember tenderness or togetherness, but I do remember how I felt when it was over. Like my virginity was a game, and I'd just lost.

L. was instantly cold and dismissive. Our pillow talk went something like, "You'd better get out before my mom gets home." And there, next to me on the sheet, was a dead roach.

For Glorified Sluts, Reformed Sluts, Would-Be Sluts & Future Sluts

I used to be a prudish Catholic girl, raised by a promiscuous single father, who had an unhealthy penchant for bringing real, live, true-blue, off-the-street sluts to our home for cheap, quick, dirty sexual escapades. The women were usually high or drunk, but I didn't figure out they were actual streetwalkers until I was 18 or 19, when my foster mom broke it all down for me.

But the point is, despite my very real belief that eternal damnation lay in wait for me if I dared open my legs before marriage, I became a slut. I felt like a slut immediately – but confirmation that I really was a slut came years later, when I read mainstream press that claims the "average" woman has four sexual partners in her lifetime, and the "average" man has seven.

Oops, my bad. I beat the men by a wide margin.

In fact, I'm part of the 9 percent of women (and 13% of black women) who admit to sleeping with more than 15 men.

I admit this now, safely ensconsed behind the anonymity of a screen name, as a "reformed slut" who, in fact, has reached the ripe, old-maid age of 37 with no marriages, no pregnancies – and no sex of any kind for two-and-a-half years. (Now the only thing I copiously make love to is chocolate, and I have the stretch marks to prove it.)

So, why write a blog about being a slut? Or more specifically, not being one?

Because being a slut is glamorized in pop culture. Because being a slut did me no worldly good. Because I'm bitter about it. And because no one ever talks about the mental and emotional fallout that happens when good girls go slutty.

So this is a blog for:

• Glorified sluts (women who look and dress like sluts in the public eye but are often quite close-legged in private)
• Active sluts (women who are giving it up a little too easily to all the wrong men)
• Reformed sluts (women like me who used to be sluts, but they've tried real hard to clean up their acts)
• Would-be sluts (the true good girls who secretly wish they'd been more like me)
• And most importantly, the future sluts (the next generation of teenage girls and young women who don't know how painful and un-fun being a slut can be).