American Virgin

Emma Burger on the sexual politics of innocence, the cinema of American girlhood and growing up in New York City.

Now when I try to picture him, all I can see is Lester Burnham. And when I try to picture Lester Burnham, all I can see is Kevin Spacey. The three of them share a face and a predilection for teenagers. Something about their shared appearance is flattened and damp, almost adolescent in its half-doneness, as if warning us about their spiritual condition. 

When he first came up to me on the subway platform, I indulged him in friendly conversation. Without thinking, I responded “Roosevelt Island” when he asked where I was headed and “Hunter” when he asked where I went to school. As girls, we’re taught to always tell the truth, no matter who’s asking.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” “What about your parents, do they let you date?” I mumbled some version of no, no boyfriend, and yeah, I guess so. He didn’t ask me straight out whether I’d bleed if he fucked me, but he might as well have.

He didn’t ask me straight out whether I’d bleed if he fucked me, but he might as well have.

“How old are you?” His eyes lit up when I said fourteen. “Fourteen? I was with a fifteen-year-old once.” He wielded that fact like a credential, as if his experience with another child might put me at ease. Enough so that he might one day brag to an unsuspecting thirteen-year-old about having been with a girl just one year older.

Unsure of how to leave the conversation, I turned my back and took off down the platform. My heart pounded as my feet moved fast beneath me, only gaining the courage to look back in his direction once I was sure we had some distance between us. He was following me. Terrified, I sprinted up the subway steps to the platform upstairs, where I squeezed through the 6 train doors just as they were closing. I collapsed on the seat, tears starting to flow as the adrenaline rush lifted. 

I’ll never forget the way his hair looked, dark and greasy, flopping over his brow. The slightness of his frame, the pallor of his skin. He looked to be in his mid-30s. Maybe twenty years older than me. I reviewed these details in the days and weeks afterward, creating a mental composite sketch. My stomach would turn as I left school every afternoon, remembering how quick I had been to divulge my whereabouts five days out of the week. 

When I got back home that Sunday, I lay down on the living room floor, tears welling up once again as I recounted the story to my dad. “Can we go to Princeton today? Please?” The only thing that could make that day better was New Jersey. 

It’s only in retrospect that I can make sense of my urgent and overwhelming need to get back to that manicured suburb in central Jersey. Five years prior, I’d spent many weekends in Princeton when my dad had a girlfriend there. Was I depressed then? Sure. But I was also sheltered from the liability of adolescence. I’d chopped off all my hair and shopped exclusively in the boys’ section. My sister and I had abandoned Barbies and Polly Pockets at the time, choosing instead to climb trees and play soccer and chess and rake leaves with the little boys around us. The last time I’d spent any time there at all, I’d been nine years old and completely mistakable for a boy. At fourteen and unmistakably a girl, I missed that innocence I’d known.

Diaries filled with looping script and Lisa Frank stickers. Pretty purring kitty cats and kissable, pouting lips. Lacy pink panties strewn on the floor beneath a glowing bust of the Virgin Mary. For those of us who grew up in certain corners of Tumblr, these were the pictures of American girlhood.

Princeton was my first glimpse into suburban life. As a city kid growing up in lower Manhattan, I’d always wondered how the other half lived, just like a girl in Skokie or Glendale might watch Kids while dreaming about the New York City high school experience. Two movies in particular shaped the suburban girlhood of my imagination. Both came out in 1999, set in similar towns only 200 miles apart. One was Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, based on the Jeffrey Eugenides novel of the same name, which takes place in a wealthy, post-white flight suburb of 1970s Detroit. The other was American Beauty, starring Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, a languishing middle-aged dad in the Chicago suburbs who falls completely and totally in lust with his teenage daughter’s friend Angela.

Both films are aesthetic feats in their own right. The suburb as fairyland. The family home as Barbie Dreamhouse. The teenage bedroom as gallery of self-expression, as last vestige of privacy, as stage for a barely-there young sex life. Eugenides describes this visual inclination best as “the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.” Glittery swimming pools and sun-dappled wheat fields and lush, verdant front lawns. Diaries filled with looping script and Lisa Frank stickers. Pretty purring kitty cats and kissable, pouting lips. Lacy pink panties strewn on the floor beneath a glowing bust of the Virgin Mary. For those of us who grew up in certain corners of Tumblr, these were the pictures of American girlhood.

The Virgin Suicides, 1999.

While their narratives are vastly different, the films are fraternal twins, in constant conversation with one another—so much so that in 2007, Paramount released the two of them as a double feature on DVD, Mena Suvari’s bare torso running down one half of the cover, Kirsten Dunst’s hazy, seductive gaze down the other. Side by side, the immortal teenage nymphets transfix the viewer, their images repurposed to sell the newest version of their films. 

As one might expect, the flower imagery in both films is heavy-handed. American Beauty’s poster boasts a nude Angela, reclining on a bed of rose petals, hearkening back to Lester’s richly imagined sexual fantasy of Angela taking off her dance team top at a high school basketball game to release a flurry of red roses. Cut to Angela naked in a bathtub full of petals as Lester looks on, then lying on her back on a bed of roses, ready to be deflowered. Everything’s coming up roses in The Virgin Suicides too. Should you like to purchase a copy of the book from Picador Modern Classics, you’ll find it covered in blooming red and pink roses. No naked girls on this one, but roses all the same, there to symbolize the Lisbon girls’ flowers—their virginities—mostly still intact at the time of their deaths.

Subtle.

In its original use, the word virgin referred to a free woman, autonomous and self-possessed. It’s only our more modern interpretation of the word that implies such autonomy is only possible for young girls while they’re still sexually inexperienced, untouched and therefore “pure.” It’s that very purity that heightens the wanting in a grown man pursuing a young girl, yet scares him off when it gets down to brass tacks. It marks her as a challenge, a doe-eyed conquest. Unlike a discerning and demanding grown woman who has lived in the world, the young girl is easy to impress, like a wobbly-legged foal imprinted by a rancher, its devotion gained without much effort.

The narrator in The Virgin Suicides is a Greek chorus of middle-aged men looking back on their time spent pining for the Lisbon sisters, so seductive in their innocence, their chastity presided over by overprotective Catholic parents. While over the years the boys became men, the girls stayed young forever, their youth preserved for eternity by their own premature deaths. But despite the widening age gap between them, the men’s desire never lifted. “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.” 

In a culture where young girls are prized exactly for their youth, the Lisbon sisters hadn’t merely ended their young lives, but in doing so had immortalized their allure. “Carnal angels,” all of them, as Eugenides puts it. I imagine these sad men, huddled outside a child’s bedroom in a treehouse they’d long outgrown, and feel sorry for them momentarily. Sorry for their sick desperation to go back, to reclaim the vitality of their adolescence. Sorrier still for the Lisbon girls, whose memory has been co-opted as the locus of these men’s arrested development. Of the five girls, only one rebelled sexually. Lux Lisbon, played by a cherubic, then-seventeen-year-old Kirsten Dunst, made a habit of sleeping with older men, “the men sweating, risking statutory rape charges, the loss of their careers, divorce.” The other four died virgins, leaving the men to ruminate on the fantasy of fucking them first for the rest of their lives.

Conversely, in American Beauty, the sexual chemistry isn’t all in Lester’s head. Angela’s down too. “I would suck your dad’s big fat dick, and then I’d fuck him until his eyes rolled back in his head!” She tells her friend Jane, played by a dark-haired, post-Hocus Pocus Thora Birch. Part of Angela’s sexual power lies in her contrast against Lester’s philandering old lady Carolyn, who wields her gardening shears like weapons, pruning the rose bushes in the yard like she’s performing a ritual castration. “Your mother seems to prefer,” Lester complains to his daughter, “that I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.”

But when Lester finally does get Angela into bed, he can’t bring himself to devirginize her. “This is my first time,” Angela confesses. “I’m sorry. I still wanna do it. It’s…I thought I should tell you, in case you’re wondering why…I wasn’t…better.” Instead of sleeping with her that night, he comforts her. As if by copping to her virginity, she regains her status as a child. She’s suddenly untouchable, simply by virtue of never having been touched. In Lester’s eyes, it’s a bridge too far. It challenges his own self-conception as an ultimately decent man. As if having sex with a young girl in and of itself wouldn’t make him a monster, but it would if he were her first.

Disturbingly, one has to wonder how much of Kevin Spacey’s performance was acting. In 2020, Spacey was sued for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress by Anthony Rapp, only fourteen years old at the time of the alleged attack. Fifteen others followed suit shortly after, alleging abuse suffered at Spacey’s hands. Allegations aside, perhaps the most telling nail in the coffin is Spacey’s name in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book, containing the star-studded flight logs of the so-called Lolita Express, the private plane which ferried rich and famous men to and from Epstein’s private island where underage girls were trafficked as sexual collateral for the ultra-elite. It’s no wonder Spacey was drawn to play Lester Burnham, where he could hide in plain sight, giving the role an extra personal touch.

American Beauty, 1999.

Back to Manhattan. In fifth grade, a flip switched seemingly overnight when another young girl who lived down the block was stalked and assaulted by a strange man. We installed security mirrors in our building’s entryway. My dad bought Belle Hops for me and my sister, keychain-sized personal safety alarms that would scream if you tugged on them, hopefully drawing the attention of passersby. 

For girls in our age group, the city suddenly felt like a meat market. A dental assistant who worked in the mobile clinic across the street would trail me and my friend on our walk to school, getting off on scaring us. He only left us alone when we told our parents and had them join us for the commute. During a free period at school, my friends and I tried to tune it out when another man on the street harassed us. “I bet your pussies taste delicious,” he said, licking his lips. We were barely old enough to know what he meant, but understood enough that it made our skin crawl. It freaked me out to think that my age alone could awaken something horrible in a person. I couldn’t shake the helpless feeling of knowing with certainty that any strange man’s interest in me was inherently pathological. I learned there was a clinical definition for their fixation and behavior: pedophilia. These weren’t boys with unrequited crushes. These were grown men, I was warned, who posed a very real and life-changing threat.

According to RAINN, fewer than 20% of rapes are committed by strangers. The remaining 80% are committed by relatives and acquaintances, classmates, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, coaches, parents. The types of people no white picket fence can keep out.

Being a young girl in the city made public the private rituals of pedophilia that went on in the movies I watched. According to RAINN, fewer than 20% of rapes are committed by strangers. The remaining 80% are committed by relatives and acquaintances, classmates, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, coaches, parents. The types of people no white picket fence can keep out. Despite the narrative intrigue of the masked man lurking in the bushes, we know that in reality, he’s a far less common perpetrator than those nearby at every house party, church service, and football game.

If the masked man in the bushes is anywhere in America, it’s in a city like New York, where we’re all on display for each other, almost all of the time. And you certainly feel that when you’re young and vulnerable, just beginning to understand the way the world sees its teenage girls. The city lays bare the same insidious scourge that courses quietly through the Lisbons’ and Burnhams’ bourgeois towns. Surely there were predators in Princeton too, well-dressed and unassuming as they might’ve seemed.

Many New Yorkers are quick to point out that New York is not America, and in many ways, they’re right. It is and isn’t, it’s its own thing. By that logic, I sometimes feel like I missed out on the real American high school experience, at least as Hollywood would tell it. The American adolescence of my imagination is colored entirely by movies. It’s Heath Ledger serenading Julia Stiles with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” from the bleachers at soccer practice. It’s Lloyd Dobler collecting car keys at the backyard graduation party so no one drives home drunk. It’s Cher Horowitz and Dionne Davenport leaning against the tennis court fence, talking shit to their gym teacher about the sorry state of physical education in this country. These characters felt more grown up than me and my city kid friends, with their cars and football games and cheerleading squads. As if by virtue of experiencing these teenage rites of passage, they were preparing themselves to join the ranks of adult American society. At the same time, they felt infantilized, ill-equipped to survive the big world outside of their picturesque bubbles. To navigate the frictions that accompany city life, shoulder to shoulder in cramped spaces with millions of strangers, sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. Have these movies romanticized the sun-dappled halls of suburban high schools for me? For sure. But it doesn’t stop me from wondering whether the freshly mown grass is in fact greener. 

These days, I live in Ann Arbor, just a short drive from Grosse Pointe, where the Lisbon sisters met their ends. I go back to New York City often though, and when I’m there, I can feel the way my every move is on display, the performance of being in public. How just by being there, you consent to be perceived. But it no longer scares me the way it did when I was a little girl, inexperienced and unequipped to defend myself. Even though the possibility of violence is still there, still a threat, attraction on its own is no longer threatening. No longer inherently pathological, like it once was. 

Still, I always exhale as I drive I-94 back from the Detroit airport and the highway gives way to tree-lined streets, shading single-family homes in an illusion of privacy. Lulled by the false sense of security a town like this can provide, I sink into the personal bliss of heated seats and the radio tuned to my favorite station, the stillness enveloping me as I pull the key from the ignition and step out under the night sky, constellations glittering overhead. And sometimes in that moment, “I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold onto it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid, little life.”

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Emma Burger is a writer, healthcare professional, and end-of-life doula living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her debut novel is Spaghetti for Starving Girls. You can find her work in Write or Die Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Bruiser Magazine, and at emmaburgerwrites.com.