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Once in a while, my friend Isis will smirk and comment that my "pearls are showing," always in response to some girly exposition on my part. This most recently occurred during my tirade about how I refuse to have anal sex.

But there's a reason I refuse, and it's not forever. As a vague nod to the traditionalism I typically reject (yet continue to idealize), I'm saving my back-end virginity until marriage. As an easily bored single girl, I've engaged in an extensive laundry list of sexual behaviors, but have never allowed a cock in my ass.

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At some point early on, I decided I wanted to reserve one sexual niche exclusively for my future husband. And I certainly can't offer him my virginity, my first threesome, or my first time fucking in a rooftop hotel pool at dawn. Anal sex is something I've flirted with, considered, but never done, all in the name of keeping something, as they say, "sacred."

I played my teen years like a Gonzo fairytale, fast and loose, and slowly evolved toward an adulthood of (mostly) calmer and (mostly) more considered sexual habits. Always informed by an unhinged curiosity and a pro-fun feminist sensibility, my sexual decision-making slowly came to include consideration for other stuff, too. Like many women of my genus — young, single, urban, analytical, horny — my sexual narrative is informed by the tension between an abstract idea of my future — babies, a swimming pool, anniversaries — and the sex I'm having now.

Acknowledging the sundry intricacies of this shit can be genuinely impossible at this point, so my friends and I often attempt to make order of the chaos with restrictive, even punishing, life choices: "I'm only going to sleep with my exes this summer. New people would just complicate things." Or, "I'm off sex till I'm done with my thesis." Or, "Just making out at parties. I'm not going home with anyone." Some girls take an approach that's similar to mine in its self-preservationist agenda: they'll have anal sex, but not vaginal, allegedly keeping their virginity both spiritually and physically intact.