Sex as Rite-of-Passage

aka: Sex As A Rite Of Passage

"Eighteen years old. You're a man today! Give him a drink, John boy. And after that, we'll go find you a lady of the night."

— Arthur Shelby Jr., Peaky Blinders

A plot in which a man (usually) who has no sexual experience will be mortally embarrassed about the fact and feel the need to get de-flowered as soon as possible. The plot follows his attempts to meet girls and get them into bed so he won't be harassed like hell in college. This is almost always a comedy plot, so his attempts are inept or nerdish and Hilarity Ensues. (Sometimes the person is a lady, and the motivation is usually other than embarrassment from lack of experience.)

Conventionally the hero is successful, thus finally experienced and reassuring the insecure male virgins in the audience that they, too, will someday get laid. An Aesop about love being more important than sex will then be shoehorned in, and the hero will settle down with a nice girl — quite possibly the unlucky childhood friend he completely ignored in his quest to "get some". Whether this happy ending satisfies the Moral Guardians varies; the wholesome 10% may shed some sanctity on the rest, but that's not what the audience is paying to see. They're there to enjoy the titillating adventures of a protagonist who wants only to get laid.

Often a subtrope of the Coming of Age Story, and a motivation for the Quest for Sex. Contrast with the Celibate Hero theory, which says, "Real men can resist sex." Compare Sex Is Cool. Often found in the Sex Comedy. A subtrope of this trope is Professional Sex Ed. See also Their First Time. Closely related to Virgin-Shaming, which is about people being mocked for not being sexually active.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In ∀ Gundam, the protagonist and other children would celebrate a coming-of-age ceremony as per tradition: among other things, they would go to the top of a mountain, strip naked, and put leeches onto each others' backs to create marks. It isn't shown what happens after this (Loran and Sochie's ceremony is interrupted by the Moonrace's first attack), but considering they pair off into boy-girl pairs and are unsupervised, many fans have wondered.
• Domestic Girlfriend: The manga starts with Rui and Natsuo having sex just for the experience of it. They quickly realize it hasn't actually made them any more mature, and decide to move on. Multiple other characters, both virgins and non-virgins, do subscribe to this mentality, but they're portrayed as immature for obsessing over something that is ultimately unimportant.
• GUN×SWORD appears to play this trope straight at one point, with Fasalina promising to turn the newest member of the Original Seven into a man through sex. However, this is later subverted, as the narrator explicitly states that Van (a virgin) is a man, while Michael, despite his initiation into adult sexuality, is just a boy.
• Interspecies Reviewers: Averted, at least within the usual trappings of this trope. Despite being introduced as a virgin in a world where Everyone Has Lots of Sex, Crim loses his virginity within a day with little fanfare. It also fails to cause any change in Crim's character on its own, with his acceptance and even enjoyment of casual sex only happening after many repeat experiences. Even then, he's still a bit apprehensive about it, doing it largely for the money his reviews get or out of loneliness if Stunk and Zel aren't present. His friends do have a reaction much more akin to this once he goes to a succugirl brothel entirely on his own without their prompting, however, viewing this as proof he's a real man.
• In the Kodocha manga, Sana proposes to Akito to have sex as a way in which both could see each other as adults, before he went overseas. When he agrees to do it, the mood gets ruined at the very moment that Sana proves to be too ticklish. Fortunately, both Sana's mother and her manger barge in before anything else can happen and Sana receives an earful from her mother about what a bad idea this was.
• The universe of the anime and manga Loveless has a unique aspect in that all virgins have cat ears and a tail until they first have sexual intercourse, and this is utilized in various ways to show a character's personal life. It's also subverted and questioned, especially with Soubi who loses his ears as a result of sexual abuse by his teacher in a traumatic experience. What makes it more twisted is that Soubi was raped by Ritsu because Ritsu resented Soubi's mother for marrying someone else.
• The Transformation Sequence of Prétear uses this trope symbolically.
• One of the main themes of Revolutionary Girl Utena is the difficulty and implications growing up, and while it doesn't use this trope as a plot, it does use sexuality to explore the concept of becoming an adult.
  • Akio represents the glamor of adulthood - he is a rich, handsome authority figure with a Cool Car and forbidden knowledge to share. He takes the younger characters for drives in his car in sequences so dense with psychosexual imagery that the interpretation that he has sex with each of them is perfectly valid. As a result the younger characters are swayed by his ideas about the world, at least for a little while.
  • An inversion of this trope is a possible interpretation of the Brother–Sister Incest themes of the series, exploring the tension between characters wanting to return to their carefree childhoods with their siblings but increasingly unable to access that world except through 'adult' means.
• In Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Akira is somewhat self-conscious over the fact that he's never gotten a girlfriend, much less had sex. The fact that his Best Friend Kencho has gotten laid plenty of times motivates Akira to finally get a girlfriend even in the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse, though his luck has been pretty dry since his first two crushes both had boyfriends already. Though he seems to be having better luck with Shizuka, who demonstrates interest in him no matter how much she denies it, though Akira himself is oblivious to it.

Comic Books

• In Sex Criminals, when Suzie sleeps with her high school boyfriend Craig, she thinks it will be this. Turns out she doesn't feel any different afterwards.

Fan Works

• In an Empath: The Luckiest Smurf mini-story, Tapper and Duncan McSmurf both comment about Empath's privilege of being the first Smurf among his generation to lose his virginity to a female Smurf (in this case, Smurfette) after being legally married to her. Duncan is both jealous and proud of Empath, while Tapper simply says that the experience belongs solely to Empath and only he has the right to disclose or not disclose anything about it. Empath's first-time with Smurfette does, however, enable him to speak in Smurf language fluently, marking him as a true Smurf.
• Zig-Zagged in Myrmidons. After nineteen-year-old Cadet Sheri Walford has her first time with a warrant officer after her birthday party, her boss, Admiral Kanril Eleya, gives her a mild talking-to for sleeping with an enlisted man (it's not allowed because she's an officer) but then commiserates with her a little on the experience.
  Kanril: Was it good, at least?"

Films — Live-Action

• Porky's, promoted as "The Raunchiest Movie About Growing Up Ever Made", features a 17-year-old hero. The sequel advances into My Girl Is Not a Slut territory.
• Revenge of the Nerds: No matter how many times the Nerds outsmart the Jocks, they haven't really beaten the Jocks till the chief Nerd seduces the chief Jock's girl. (Yes, I know, there was the big speech about Nerd pride while the Scary Black Man types intimidated the Jocks, but which part did we all really cheer at?) Of course she's a cheerleader, too; see All Guys Want Cheerleaders.
• The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Much of the humor in the film is due to the fact that the hero lives up to the title. He collects toys, underlining the pre-manhood status of male virgins. Ironically, despite his 'man-child' status, in many ways his non-virgin male friends were far more infantile and immature about sex than he was.
• Taken to another level in The Mockbuster The Asylum film, The 18-Year-Old Virgin. The titular virgin is a female nerd who wants to lose it to her crush at a party. The guy is open to the idea but doesn't want to have sex with a virgin, so she has to find someone else to take her virginity before she can hook up with her dream guy. Hilarity Ensues.
• The entire plot of the film American Pie, which in turn owes more than a passing debt to the similarly structured 1980s comedy Hot Moves.
  • And even more so in American Pie The Naked Mile, where ironically this trope was shoehorned as the secondary plot (because watching nude people was the one true point of that movie).
• In the '80s Affectionate Parody of westerns, Rustlers' Rhapsody, the hero is confronted with the fact that one of the requirements to being an official sanctioned hero is that he has to be a "confident heterosexual". He thought it was just heterosexual.
• Played for drama in 2002's Roger Dodger, with the interesting approach of treating it as a Film Noir object.
• A Rare Female Example in Four Rooms, where a girl remarks on how she is "now a woman" after having sex with the main character.
• Another female example would be Winona Ryder's character Charlotte in Mermaids. This is somewhat of an inversion, however, in that Ryder's (Jewish) character embraces strict Catholicism, and even hopes to become a nun, precisely to avoid having to deal with her newly awakened sexual urges. She ends up doing it in the end, however.
• Subverted in The Hairy Bird. When pressed about her future goals by her friend group, Odette says her foremost one is to lose her virginity to her boyfriend Dennis. Later, when she finally tries to do the deed with Dennis, she realizes she isn’t into him as much as she thought and doesn't go through with it.
• A harrowing example in Leaving Las Vegas. A group of frat boys "buys" Sera to make a man of him. When she rejects his request, they gang-rape her.
• Sex Drive is about a teenaged virgin who goes on a cross-country drive to meet up/have sex with a hot girl he met on the internet.
• Played horribly straight in L.A. Confidential where three teenagers kidnap a girl and rape her in order to 'become a man'. She is then left tied up in an apartment for days and only rescued because the kids were framed for another crime.
  • Much worse in the book: after raping her, they drove around and "sold her out" to all their friends.
• A more serious-minded example: Summer of '42, in which the narrator notes that he said goodbye to "Hermie" (his 15-year-old self) forever after losing his virginity that summer.
• In the movie Milk Money, three preteen boys go to great lengths (breaking open piggy banks, having yard sales) in order to come up with the $100 (in change) needed to hire a hooker and achieve manhood. Hilarity ensues when they get to the city with the money, only to start asking random women to remove their clothing because they can't "tell a prostitute from everybody else." After successfully hiring one (who only gives them a brief topless show for their money), they pass out cigarettes, announcing that they have had sex and are now men. Men without matches, as it were, so they simply enjoy the unlit cigarettes hanging there.
  • One of the boys chooses to cover his eyes when the prostitute removes her top, proclaiming that he "wants to be a gentleman." This is fortuitous, as it removes the squick factor of the prostitute's likely disposition at the end of the movie as his future stepmother.
• One of the subplots of The Boat That Rocked is the attempts the crew to let Tom Sturridge's character lose his virginity.
• Most of the plot of The Last American Virgin.
• Dirty Dancing: Baby.
• Boner (pronounced "Bonner") in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. He spends the entire movie trying to get some. At one point, he spontaneously declares that the protagonists should make a pact to lose their virginity before graduating. Everyone turns him down simultaneously (but Slab O'Beef agrees). At lunch (oysters, natch), he laments that roofies aren't getting him laid when he takes them (Slab opines that he's not taking enough). Even when it looks like he's getting some at the climax, it's all sight gags to illustrate Martina Martinez's rules of a parody situation. A Hospital Hottie jumps him for his Gag Penis as he's being loaded into an ambulance. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that she's a post-op transsexual; Boner doesn't care.
• This is pretty much the plot of every Michael Cera film. Superbad, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Youth in Revolt, plus he also loses his virginity in Juno.
• The Virginity Hit is the story of Matt, whose friends try to get him laid. And make a movie out of it. On a side note: the main character is played by Matt Bennett. Yes, that Matt Bennet.
• In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, although he has to be persuaded by others into doing it, having sex is what gives Billy Bibbit the confidence to stand up to Nurse Ratched, and gets rid of his stutter into the bargain. Candy must be some lover.
  • Though after this triumph, Nurse Ratched threatened to tell his mother. Billy promptly started stuttering again, locked himself into a room, and killed himself.
• Road Trip: Kyle experiences this after scoring with Rhonda. It allows him to stand up to his father.
• Another Rare Female Example: In Little Darlings, two teenage girls at a summer camp compete to be the first one to lose their virginity.
• The Cheerleaders is another Rare Female Example even as soft-core porn as Jeannie isn't even considered Hollywood Homely by the cast, just either obscured by her fellow outgoing cheerleaders hogging all the guys and/or hit with hit with hilariously Epic Fails like a casanova's waterbed bursting open enough to wash her out the door, plus her boyfriend's a a bland nebbish that sees her as a Genki Girl in the bad way. It finally takes a guy from the opposing team that's also in the same situation since he missed out on the orgy that wiped out both teams to finally get laid in the locker room. Ironically, the star actress was actually as casual about being naked as Helen Mirren compared to the outgoing cheerleaders in the cast.
  • Speaking of porn, a couple of the (non-Debbie) cheerleaders in Debbie Does Dallas invoked this trope, in the shower, in order to carry on their money-raising scheme. Unfortunately, one of the actresses had a c-section scar, which undermined the scene's authenticity!
• Sixteen Candles: Freshman Ted spends most of the film trying to get laid. He starts with a puppy-dog crush on Sam, a sophomore, who wants nothing to do with him. When she finally reveals why she's been rejecting him (she herself has a crush on a senior, Jake), he gives up his dream in order to hook the two of them up. By doing so, he ends up rewarded by having sex with Jake's drunk girlfriend, Caroline.
  Ted: "Did we-?"
  Caroline: "Yeah, I'm pretty sure."
  Ted: "Did I enjoy it? Of course I enjoyed it. Did you enjoy it?"
  Caroline: "Yeah, I think I did."
• The central character in Sex Comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row is a frustrated high school senior who sports erections all the time and can't believe he's never so much as touched a breast. The guidance counselor steers him towards a female teacher to be his Mrs. Robinson.
• In Fraternity Vacation, a nerdy pledge joins two frat brothers on a trip to Palm Springs, and his father secretly promises the older guys that he'll renovate their frat house if they get his son laid.
• Cherry Falls: This Slasher Film plays with the idea of a Rare Female Example; the serial killer only targets virgins and the teens realize that they need to have sex in order to stay alive. Cindy, the most experienced of the girls, holds her pre-game talk with the other girls to prepare them because a lot of the guys are also virgins:
  Cindy: "Girls have to everything. Guys are clueless when it comes to sex. It starts with them trying to unhook our bras, fumbling around, and it never changes. Wait until they try to put their dick into you."
  Diana; "Please don't say they need help with that."
  Cindy: "Always."
• Blockers is about three 18-year-old girls who make a pact to have sex for the first time on prom night. In the end, only Julie goes through with it, and the others describe her as "a woman among girls".
• Played with in Submarine. Oliver makes it a goal to lose his virginity and clearly sees this as a key part of his coming of age narrative. But after doing the deed, he's no more mature, and it doesn't advance his relationship. Subverted with his partner Jordana — she's only willing to sleep with him after he tells her she should just "get it^note losing her virginity over with", avoiding the meaning and ritual usually associated with the event.
• A very literal example in The Wicker Man (1973), where a teenage boy (who may or may not be a virgin given Summerisle's general level of sexual freedom) has a pleasant evening with the Really Gets Around daughter of the local innkeeper...which is explicitly part of the island's May Day pagan religious celebrations and is treated very much like a priestess initiating a novice. The rest of the townsfolk downstairs in the tavern sing a rather sweet Bawdy Song about young lovers and sexual experimentation, and the young man is seen taking a leadership role in several May Day events afterwards.
• A side plot in Safety Not Guaranteed has Jeff repeatedly pestering Arnau the intern to have sex as a way to become more assertive and break out of his Bollywood Nerd stereotype.

Literature

• The Dark Tower: In Wizard & Glass, Roland goes downtown and gets a prostitute immediately after becoming a 14-year-old gunslinger. He does it for no other reason than because he could. Although it's a subversion because immediately after this, Roland's father busts into the room and lets him know he's still got a fair way to go before he's truly grown up.
• For another Stephen King example, in IT, six eleven-year-old boys run the train on the one female in the group (consensually!) as a way to reforge the bond between them and find their way out of the sewers. It's used as a metaphor for leaving their childhoods behind.
• In The Quest for Saint Camber, Kelson has a vivid dream of marrying and mating with Rothana during his cruaidh-dheuchainn. Meanwhile, Dhugal observes a young female Servant named Rhidian disappear through another door near the underground chapel (the girl is gone for an hour); he later speculates that Kelson participated in some kind of sexual initiation or ritual marriage, but he doesn't share this idea with Kelson.
• In the Apprentice Adept series, werewolves can only receive full adult status (conferred by a fourth syllable in their name) by going through a ritual first mating. A female chooses a male to mate with when her first heat comes. There's no chance of pregnancy, but the two are barred from mating with each other again. Because of that restriction, the girl usually chooses an Oath Friend for her partner.
• In the sci-fi novel Eyes of the Calculor a fifteen-year-old youth is going off to fight a duel against a more experienced opponent. He intends to stop off a brothel first because dueling as a virgin is regarded as bad luck, but the 22-year old maid seduces him figuring she'd be a better inspiration to live than some anonymous whore.
• Discussed in The Bad Seed: during a discussion with friends, Motormouth Monica Breedlove mentions how much she despises sex being treated as a rite of passage in fiction; she feels sex is just another life experience, nothing more, nothing less, and goes into a surprisingly funny rant about how she would rather read a story about a boy casually losing his virginity to a prostitute.
• A major part of Johnny and Owen's growing up in A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving concerns the efforts of Johnny in particular to find a girl. However, it's subverted when the adult Johnny of twenty years later admits he is still a virgin and no longer has an interest in changing that.
• In the Earth's Children series, a rare female example is provided en-masse by Cro-Magnon culture, where a girl's first time happens shortly after her first menses and is called First Rites. They can pick whichever eligible and consenting man they want to perform the ceremony (provided they're not related). Boys get special training so that they will ensure the girl has a good time. A man's first time isn't really as specially celebrated although men who are frequently asked to perform First Rites are considered quite the stud. This is contrasted with the Neanderthal culture that raised Ayla, where sex is something men demand whenever they want, of any woman, who will immediately assume the...position. A young man who hated Ayla raped her repeatedly this way in order to flaunt his power over her and punish her for being herself, even though there was no sexual stigma.
• In Xanth, this is referred to as "joining the Adult Conspiracy", as the details thereof are a closely guarded secret.
  • Though simply knowing how "stork summoning" is done is enough to become part of the Conspiracy. Jenny Elf and Gwenny Goblin are shown uncensored Tapestry^note The Tapestry is a Magician-created artifact that can show any scene from anywhere or when in Xanth. Naturally, access to the Tapestry is highly restricted pictures of a couple going at it, in order to initiate them, as they needed the knowledge to complete their Humphery-given task. (Che didn't count; as a centaur, he already knew the "raw facts")
    • This trope is played so straight that in one book, the plot kicks off with a goblin having to take her kid brother to a forgetfulness spring because he's gained tremendous power just by learning to swear. Lord knows what would have happened if he'd found out about stork summoning.
• The Vorkosigan Saga has Miles' first time described in his thoughts and fitting the Feudal Future, it matches a traditional one of European aristocrats — on a "Grand Tour". Miles went to Beta and had his first experience with a woman who had a fetish for those deformed like himself. When he saw her with someone else, he tried to slit his wrists and was only stopped from suicide by Bothari (the context of Miles' memory is that he knows Bothari was a psycho, but he also remembers Bothari's kindness to him).
  • Beta Colony has Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapists, who are often hired by virgins looking for a safe, educational, and comforting first time. The hermaphrodites are the most popular for, as one puts it, "Young persons taking the introductory course." LPST's need at least a bachelor's degree in psychology, and are seen as providing a skilled service (comparable to that of a hairdresser on another world).
• In The Iron Dragon's Daughter, girls have a "naming ceremony", in which a good experience will render their ladybits "pliant and a friend for life". It's implied that boys have a similar rite.
• This trope is common in the books that Miss Marple's nephew Raymond West usually gives her to read, and Miss Marple hates it. Not because of any squeamishness about sex, but because of the rite-of-passage bit; she feels that it removes all the romance and mystery from sex and reduces it to something roughly equivalent to taking a vitamin pill.
  Sex as a word had not been mentioned much in Miss Marple's day, but there had been plenty of it, not talked about so much, but enjoyed far more, or so it seemed to her. Though usually labeled Sin, she couldn't help thinking that was preferable to what it was now, a kind of Duty... Really, to have sex urged on you as though it were an iron tonic! Poor young things.
• In The Red Tent, girls in Padan-Aram undergo a ritual upon reaching their first period where they are masturbated with a small household idol by their female relatives, in order to a) break their hymen to offer the resultant blood to the goddess Inanna, and b) encourage (via orgasm) the girl undergoing the ritual to dream about what her destiny holds. (The Canaanite women, who do not do this ritual, view it as disgusting.)
  • In the same book, Prince Shalem mentions having been taken to the high priestess to lose his virginity upon reaching puberty. She kept the room dark, so he couldn't actually see her, the idea being that he was sleeping with whatever goddess she served or represented. He fondly remembered it as "like a dream within a dream," although he says it does not compare to his honeymoon with Dinah.
• Apparently, Beowulfans in the Honor Harrington series believe this for both genders, to the point where Allison Harrington wanted to get her daughter a night with a male courtesan for her Academy graduation. Mom did not know until much later that it was more than self-image issues that made Honor a Celibate Hero for so long. She was pissed when she found out.
• In Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, there's an alternate universe and humans have discovered absurdly cheap power by exploiting the different rules of their universe and ours. In the alternate universe, there are three kinds of gaseous people and a kind of solid people. The solid people are the merging — which is their analog of sex — of three gaseous people.
• In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild Enkidu only becomes a civilized man after he has sex with the temple prostitute Shamhat.
• In "Överenskommelser" by Simona Ahrnstedt, we get a Rare Female Example when Beatrice has sex for the first time with Seth. Despite how she has to keep this a secret, because of the uptight culture of the 1880s in general and her family situation in particular, this is clearly a big turning point in her life.
• In Memoirs of a Geisha, Sayuri's virginity is sold to the highest bidder, to reimburse the okiya for the cost of her training and outfits, and to signify Sayuri's transition from a maiko to a full-fledged geisha. Unlike most examples of this trope, Sayuri doesn't enjoy it.
• Kushiel's Legacy:
  • In Kushiel's Dart, protagonist Phèdre and Alcuin are trained as high-class courtesans (partly as cover for their work as spies), which is considered a sacred occupation in Terre d'Ange. Both their virginities are auctioned off when they come of age.
  • It's something of a tradition in Terre d'Ange for a young nobleman's male friends to buy them a night with a courtesan of the Night Court when they turn sixteen. When Imriel turns sixteen in Kushiel's Scion, his foster mother Phèdre does this for him instead, pointing him to a House that specializes in Intimate Psychotherapy since Imriel has already had his first time, nonconsensually.
• Inverted in Homecoming, where the rite by which a boy becomes a man requires that he demonstrate his self-control by spending an entire night alone with the girl he loves and not having sex with her.

Live-Action TV

• 3rd Rock from the Sun: With the exception of Harry, this occurs to the aliens. Harry was implied to have had sex in an early episode and it was presented as a joke that someone that clueless actually "got some", but the other three Solomons lost their virginity with great fanfare.
• Babylon 5: Subverted when the ranger Marcus Cole admits to Ivanova that he is a virgin, and is saving himself for the right woman (i.e. Ivanova). He seems completely at peace with this; Ivanova feels sympathy for him, but he neither needs nor desires her sympathy.
  • He never does lose it, either, instead dying to save her life.
• Boy Meets World: Cory and Shawn say that their prom night will be "the night we leave as boys and come back as men", and both try to persuade their respective girlfriends to have sex for the first time. Cory and Topanga almost go through with it, but decide not to in the end, and Shawn and Angela, well... the episode ends without resolving that plotline and it's not mentioned in the subsequent episodes.
• Firefly: The episode "Jaynestown" dances back and forth between playing this straight and subverting it. Inara, the show's Hooker with a Heart of Gold, is hired by a rich snob to "make his son a man." The son has much more confidence afterwards, but it's not clear how much was meant to be attributed to the sex and how much to Inara's pep talks before and after. Inara herself doesn't believe in this, saying that her having sex with him "means something to your father, but it doesn't make you a man. You do that yourself."
• Game of Thrones:
  • Slightly parodied. Tyrion and Bronn set this up for Podrick (with three high-priced prostitutes). When he comes back, as awkward and boyish as ever, still carrying all the money they assume he refused to go through with it. Apparently he impressed them so much they forgot to ask for the money. Not only that, upon hearing he still has the money, "Sit down Podrick," Tyrion says. "We're going to need details. Copious details." What they hear apparently impresses them so much that they are still talking about it the next episode. A much later episode showcasing his singing talent led to the fandom joke that he sang to them instead.
  • Zig-zagged with Tommen. After his brother Joffrey dies and Tommen is set to become king, his grandfather Tywin - appearing more affectionate than anyone has seen him up to that point - informs the young man of the duties of rulership. It's not framed as a right-of-passage, per se, but as the responsibility of kings to further their family line. As the two exit the scene, it's even implied that Tywin will be giving Tommen the Westerosi equivalent of "the talk".
  • Arya sleeps with Gendry in the final season, but as she doesn't seem any different afterwards the fandom suspects Gendry inherited his father's lovemaking skills, i.e. none at all.
• Glee: Finn loses his virginity to Santana, believing in this trope. but was incredibly regretful about it immediately afterwards and the following Monday denies he lost it yet.
• Harry Enfield and Chums: Has a comically exaggerated example in the last regular episode, when Kevin the Teenager, an extreme stereotype of the horrible teenage boy, finally loses his virginity. The next morning he has been transformed into a charming, polite, and helpful young man, to his parents' incredulous delight (and his friend Perry's disappointment). Though the transformation (but not the sex itself) was retconned in a subsequent Christmas special, turning out to have been just a beautiful dream of his mother's.
• Hotel: One episode has a man try to get his son to lose his virginity to a hooker friend of his. The son privately admits to one of the main characters that he's not a virgin anymore but respects the girl's privacy too much to tell his father. When the son runs out on the hooker, she suggests someone more his age and calls another call girl. The son finally gives in and approaches the woman he assumes is the other hooker. Except the woman he approaches turns out to be an undercover cop and busts him for soliciting sex.
• How I Met Your Mother: A flashback showed how Barney losing his virginity to Rhonda "The Man-Maker" French turned him into The Casanova we know today.
• The Inbetweeners: Loss of virginity is a big aim of all the main characters.
  • Which leads to a hilarious reveal in the final episode with Neil.
• Married... with Children: Much of the humor of the Bud Bundy character centers around his pathetic and increasingly desperate attempts to have sex, and his sister Kelly repeatedly teasing him for it.
  • He has an active sex life, but he lacks partners...
  • ... and whenever he finally does have one, the circumstances are not good. For instance, one of his earliest was his Axe-Crazy cousin's fiancée.
• M*A*S*H: Subverted in an episode with a wounded soldier who is taunted by his for waiting to have sex until marriage. He finally has enough when they deal him a hand of pornographic cards just to tease him for being flustered and claims to be volunteering for a dangerous mission, even going so far as to request the necessary paperwork to do so. He is ultimately convinced by Potter that he shouldn't do anything he is uncomfortable with, be it sex or putting his life at even greater risk, in order to prove himself as a man to anyone.
  • Also subverted a couple of times with Radar, most notably in the "Fallen Idol" episode.
• New Girl: Used as the main focus of one episode.
• Peaky Blinders: On his cousin Michael's 18th birthday, Arthur suggests — not very seriously — that they get him a prostitute. Their mother/aunt shuts down the idea right away.
  Arthur: Eighteen years old. You're a man today! Give him a drink, John boy. And after that, we'll go find you a lady of the night.
• Rome: Atia hires war-hero Titus Pullo to make her son Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) into a man. Naturally, one of Pullo's efforts is to take young Octavian to a Roman whorehouse. (Note that he looks to be about twelve when this is going on.)
  • "Octavian, have you penetrated anyone yet?"
  • Also note that Atia at this time believes Octavian has been penetrated by Uncle Caesar because he can't tell her where they disappeared to one night (Caesar was actually having an epileptic seizure). But the Romans saw it as necessary for Octavian to do the penetration to become a man.
• Skins: Sid is under pressure from his best friend Tony to lose his virginity, as Tony is embarrassed to be friends with a virgin. JJ in the third season is also miserable about being a virgin, especially when his two best friends manage to be very sexually successful but eventually, his lesbian friend Emily sleeps with him out of pity.

Music

• Bob Seger's "Night Moves".
• Mentioned in some Parenthetical Girls songs, and the focus of "Unmentionables."
• Although occurrences of this trope with female protagonists are usually referred to as rare, they seem to be downright common in pop songs — or at least, there are a fair number of songs about a girl "becoming a woman" through sex, though she may not have sought it as desperately as the guy in the classic male version. See, for example, "Strawberry Wine" by Deanna Carter...
• ...or "This Girl Is a Woman Now" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap...
• ...or "Morning Girl" by Neon Philharmonic...
• ...or "Nothin' Like the First Time" by Lady Antebellum...
• ...or "Amoureuse" by Kiki Dee...
• ...or "Resistor" by Alisha's Attic.
• Country music is rife with story songs about older women de-virginating older teenaged boys:
  • T.G. Sheppard's 1982 hit, "War Is Hell (On The Homefront Too)" has a man recalling how, as a teenaged delivery boy for a local general store, he lost his virginity to an older woman while her husband was away fighting in World War II.
  • Country music band Atlanta's 1983 debut single, "Atlanta Burned Again Last Night," was about the sexual encounter between a 17-year-old high school senior and a 31-year-old woman, both of who felt emotionally and sexually neglected. (He had been dating a classmate who had been crowned homecoming queen; she was in her second marriage and the elder of her two children was nearly as old as he was.)
  • "Summer (The First Time)" by Bobby Goldsboro. Like several other examples, this 1973 song is about a young man reflecting on a hot summer day 10 years before when, as a 17-year-old, he was smitten by a beautiful 31-year-old woman and "saw the sun rise as a man" after the encounter.
  • Garth Brooks' "That Summer" is another now-adult man reflecting on a summer working as a farmhand for a recently widowed woman (described as "hellbent to make it on her own"). One evening, she reveals to the boy she is in need of physical intimacy, and then ... . Years later, he reflects on the encounter and how he can still feel her arms wrapped around him.
• The main topic of the song "Sic Transit Gloria" by Brand New
• Mondo Rock, "Come Said the Boy".
• Madness' "House of Fun" is about a sixteen-year-old celebrating their birthday by going to a brothel (a "house of fun", if you will), but is embarrassed about asking on contraception to the woman behind the counter in the pharmacy, so uses euphemisms like "balloons". Hilarity Ensues when the woman behind the counter doesn't understand any of it and recommends that the sixteen-year-old should go The House of Fun, implied to be the name of a store for kids' parties, because "This is a chemist, not a joke shop!"
• "En Het Werd Zomer" by Dutch singer Rob de Nijs, about a guy seduced by a girl one summer day and becoming "a man" afterwards.
• Main focus of "La Première fille" by French singer Georges Brassens. The narrator goes on to detail all the different girls it could have been and all the different ways it could have happened, regardless of which he will always remember his first. This incidentally allows the narrator to imply a very rich sexual life on his part by enumerating random female names saying that they'll all be forgotten long before he forgets his One True Love. Brassens uses the phrase "baptism of love" which is exactly this trope, as well as Self-Deprecating Humor about how awkward and nervous he was while trying to keep his cool which could imply this trope in retrospect.
• "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by the Four Seasons

Video Games

• Implied in Double Homework with Amy, who is both very eager and very inexperienced. If the protagonist makes contact with her at the ski lodge, he actually tells her to slow down and enjoy what she’s doing rather than just doing it for its own sake.
• The Adventure Game series Leisure Suit Larry: This is the entire plot of the original game, starting with Larry's desperate attempts to visit a prostitute before trying to find "True Love". In fact, failing to have sex before sunrise in the original game results in a Nonstandard Game Over, as Larry, sworn to lose his virginity by the end of the night, commits suicide. He even gets technical about it after visiting a prostitute and deciding that prostitutes don't count.
• Rare female example in Baldur's Gate II: if the player romances Aerie, she asks to sleep with the protagonist at the end of her romance arc to prove herself a woman rather than a girl. Accepting her offer leads to the bad ending of the romance. The good ending has the player teach Aerie the distinction between sex and love. The good ending leads to Aerie's continued romance arc in Throne of Bhaal where this trope is visited again as Aerie, very much in love, asks the protagonist to sleep with her again, not to become a woman, but because she loves the protagonist, and sleeping with her is the good path.
• Used (somewhat euphemistically) in conjunction with the Coming-Out Story for symbolic value in Blaze Union as the final arc of the canon route. Gulcasa, grieving over Siskier's death and left stricken by being forced into symbolically committing matricide, turns to Nessiah for comfort. His childhood friend Jenon and his remaining mentor figure Medoute sense that something is different about him, but don't understand what until Medoute witnesses a sexually charged scene between Gulcasa and Nessiah while spying on them.
• Alistair in Dragon Age: Origins subverts this trope by refusing female!Grey Warden sexual advances until he falls in love with her, despite the fact that he admits sexual attraction and current virginity.
• Melody gives a female example with the title character. On her romantic path, her (hetero)sexual initiation marks her progress toward adulthood in other areas of her life as well.
• In-universe example in No One Lives Forever 2, when the backstory of the traitor from the first game is explored. A series of audio diaries reveal that he trained rigorously to take on the role of a super-spy, but being unable to pick up women leaves him feeling inadequate. This changes when the last tape is found...

  "She wasn't good looking and she smelled like a horse, but she was woman enough for me. My last obstacle to becoming a super-spy has been conquered. As of today, I am no longer a virgin! YEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAA!"

• In Katawa Shoujo, this is the case for Hanako Ikezawa, another rare female example. She allows Hisao to have sex with her even though she's obviously uncomfortable and neither of them is emotionally ready, because she wants him to stop seeing her as someone that needs protecting. (Even more so, after their sexual act Hisao mistakenly thinks that he forced Hanako into sex, and while explaining this trope Hanako has to dispel these fears too.)
• Taketo Kanzaki's sequel in Class Trip Crush takes an interesting angle on the trope. Early in the route, Taketo and the protagonist agree to have sex if Taketo's high school soccer team wins an upcoming national tournament; when an accident leaves Taketo with a cracked rib just before the tournament begins, that promise is one of the main things behind his determination to get back onto the field in spite of his injury. In fact, the protagonist is looking forward to it almost as much as Taketo is and there's no real reason that victory has to be a requirement — except that Taketo wants it to be as momentous and meaningful as possible, and won't settle for less than winning the tournament and ending his soccer career on a high note beforehand, to the point that if the team doesn't win, he decides to wait and try again at the summer tournament... rather to the protagonist's disappointment.
• In Final Fantasy X, Yuna has her first time after she escapes from her arranged marriage to Seymour and rebels against the Yevon faith, asserting herself for the first time as an independent person with her own needs and desires. (This is in stark contrast to the emotionally distant living figurehead she was before, a girl intended to live and die solely to help others.)

Webcomics

• For a long time, Ménage à 3 manifested this trope in seemingly pure form with Gary, the desperate, confused geek virgin. Then Gary got laid, and his story turned into a subversion of the trope: he became a desperate, confused geek ... who occasionally has sex. He's still Gary.
• Taken to the logical extreme with Francis and Marcy of PvP when they lose their virginities to each other.
• This strip of The Perry Bible Fellowship.
• Christian Weston Chandler's Self Insert Character in Sonichu is just as desperate to lose his virginity as his Real Life counterpart. Hilariously (or disturbingly, or a little of both) when he does finally get laid it's by tricking a woman into having sex with him...and he brags about it.
• In Scary Go Round when The Boy loses his virginity he immediately becomes a MAN and resolves their problem. Once he's done though, he's expended all his strength and reverts to "callow youth".
• Mentioned almost by name in Arthur, King of Time and Space, by Morgan on Arthur's coming-of-age birthday. Morgan being a witch, Arthur thought she was talking about a completely different rite.

Web Original

• YouTube personality DrNerdLove challenges this thinking in "The Virginity Paradox", saying that losing your virginity doesn't really change the person you are, that you'll still be the same person you were before it happened, just with a new experience.

Western Animation

• American Dad!:
  • One episode parodies this plot, in full-blown Does This Remind You of Anything? style. Stan is upset because although he is a CIA agent, he has never killed a man and A Real Man Is a Killer. So he sets out to find the right person to be his first kill.
  • The first several episodes of the series had subplots about Steve trying to score with girls. Luckily, this aspect of his character was later downplayed.
  • The episode "Failure Is Not a Factory-Installed Option" has a repo-man telling Steve "Well you may have planned on becoming men through sexual conquest, but perhaps an equally valid preparation for adulthood would be a night filled with disappointment and compromise."
• In the Archer episode "Pocket Listing", Prince Fawad, otherwise dominated by his mother, apparently sees having sex with Lana (who is disguised as a maid) as this:
  Fawad: And so, beckoned by the servant, a powerful Negress giant, Fawad entered the boudoir and soon became a man.
• Beavis and Butt-Head: In probably one of the greatest speeches of all time, Beavis talks about how he and Butthead are never going to score, and grow old without having sex.
• Butters from South Park getting his first kiss in "Butters' Bottom Bitch" is an obvious metaphor for this trope.
• An early episode of The Cleveland Show dealt with the double standard with this trope. He tries to prevent his step-daughter from having sex while trying to get Cleveland jr. to lose his virginity.
• My Year of Dicks: A relatively uncommon female version of this trope, as a teenaged girl named Pamela decides its time to lose her virginity, and spends a whole year seeking out various boys to do the deed with her.
• Mike Tyson Mysteries: Pigeon tries to invoke this with an overweight underachiever the gang is helping in one episode, trying to get Yung Hee to have sex with the guy. He cites his own experience of losing his virginity at 13 to a Mexican hooker as helping him lose weight and become more confident. Then again, considering he eventually became a huge womanizer and that destroyed his marriage and led to him being turned into a pigeon, it might not have been for the best.
  • Oddly enough, Yung Hee actually considers it, mainly because she wants to invoke the trope for herself. She quickly loses interest, however, when she sees the guy vomit all over himself while exercising.

Other

• In the stage musical Jersey Boys, Bob Gaudio notes how much of a personal milestone losing his virginity (while on the road) was. The other characters respect him more and treat him with more affection after (except for asshole Tommy, anyway).
• The internet legend Densha Otoko (aka Train Man (2004)) is the story of a virgin Otaku who falls for a woman he saved from a train groper. While he does throw out his Otaku-ish things once he realizes he's fallen in love with her, his real enemy isn't his desire to prove himself so much as his own self-confidence.

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