DocuMental: How To Lose Your Virginity

Every Saturday, Fusion brings you a documentary that explores the issues you care about, from science to social issues to sex, all in a way that challenges the norm. Now we’re going to take it a step further, one film at a time.

Our new series “DocuMental” is a new way of viewing documentaries. The films will be shown in their entirety, but in between segments, journalist and host Mariana Van Zeller will interview the film’s creators and cast about the struggles they encountered making the film, their feelings about the topics presented and what has occurred since the cameras stopped rolling.

This time, DocuMental, focuses on society’s obsession with losing your “v-card.” In the film, “How To Lose Your Virginity,” director Therese Shechter uses her own path out of virginity to explore why our sex-crazed society cherishes this so-called “precious gift.” Along the way, we meet sex educators, virginity auctioneers, abstinence advocates and young men and women who bare their tales of doing it or not doing it.

Are you a virgin? Seems like a pretty straightforward question, right? But in the film, we learn that this question is anything but easy to answer; leading to even more questions: At what point do you lose your virginity and what does it mean to be “technically” a virgin?

Van Zeller interviewed Shechter to clear up some of these questions. The interview also includes two of the women featured in the film: Brita Long and Ellen Westberg. The four discuss everything related to sex including artificial hymens, dildos and gold star lesbians.