Ruminations on Virginity

So I lost my virginity a little over 4 months ago. I posted some vague reference here that I knew my friends would get. I became like that guy on the cheerios commercial who answers his phone and tells everyone he lowered his cholesterol - I told anyone and everyone that I got laid. And it was fine. Nice even. Everything everyone had prepared me it would be. And he was nice...briefly. Unfortunately, that didn't last. But so it goes. He fell somewhere near average on the spectrum of assholes. And in the course of a sometimes awkward and mostly illuminating conversation with him on the subject this evening, I've come around to this (make the personal political? check!) - despite my feeling that the segment of feminism that focused on sexual liberation stole a bit from the larger idea of feminism working toward gender equality in all arenas...we still have a long way to go on the whole sexual liberation front. Men, for sometimes honorable and sometimes not, reasons, still have trouble seeing us as fully autonomous persons, inside and outside the bedroom. Now, personally, my quest to get laid became a comedy of errors over which my former roommates and I laughed and laughed. But many of those errors were due to my naive confession of inexperience and his freaking out and balking. Sometimes because he couldn't escape the feeling that he would be taking advantage of me, sometimes because he feared my reaction in the morning (I loooooove you, I presume, was top of that list of fears) and sometimes for reasons unimaginable to me. But always, in my opinion, because he couldn't believe that I, a fully formed 24-year-old, might not have reached this point by accident, but rather by being fully aware of my body, my emotions, my relationships, and my comfort level. And that despite his inability to fathom it, I was capable of making this decision, without dumping some enormous level of guilt and responsibility on him. Sure, it takes two to tango, but let me be an equal partner in that twosome, damnit! Don't insult me by implying that I need to be protected from my own sexual desires.