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While teenagers Cant Get Away With Nuthin, and characters in slasher films often suffer Death By Sex, it is understood that the leading male must be sexually active. A guy who has never Done It, or even just does not Do It often, is simply Not Man Enough to save the day, solve the mystery or whatever. It doesn't matter whether sexual experience is in any way relevant to the skills needed in the plot, he just has to be Man Enough so he has to have Done It and preferably Do It Regularly. That's How It Is. Don't Argue.
Establishing the character's sexual competence varies from seeing a beautiful blonde, who has nothing to do with the plot and no lines to speak, crossing or leaving his bedroom early on in the film, to references to his ex-wife or old flames. Generally, however, the more macho Action Heroes don't have wives or steady girlfriends when the adventure starts, because that would stop them from hooking up with the female lead. We just have to be made aware that she is far from being the first beautiful woman he's had.
Note that the term "virgin" originally meant "a female who has not had sex with a man", and thus literally no male was ever a virgin. The definition became more vague as language evolved.
Popular sub-tropes:
- Sex as rite-of-passage: The character is desperately trying to have sex to establish his manhood.
- Sexually active sidekick: On the rare occasions that the lead character is sworn to chastity, or else so single minded that he has no time for sex, he will often have a sidekick who is, or wishes to be, sexually active. This seems to be so that the audience won't think the heroes are "queer".
- Rape As Comedy: In the extreme case, a man could never not want to have sex with a woman.
Compare My Girl Is Not A Slut. Contrast Chaste Hero, Celibate Hero.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- The episode of Doogie Howser MD quoted above.
- The Young Ones, episode "Time", includes a long fight occasioned by Vyvyan mocking Rick's virginity. Another episode of the same show, "Nasty", shows the whole cast reluctant to confess virginity in the face of a vampire who drinks virgin blood.
Rick: What, me? Rick? A virgin? Ha, ha, ha! Just try telling that to some of the foxy chicks who owe me favours!
Neil: Well if Rick's not a virgin, then I'm not either!
- House M.D.'s titular character is the mostly chaste one. Other than his New Old Flame, Stacy, and one or two hookers, House is never seen in sexual situations. True to the trope, House's best friend James Wilson (the Watson to his Holmes) has been married (and divorced) three times, keeps being Mistaken For Cheating, and is generally assumed by House to be sleeping with anything in a skirt.
- Knight Rider (2008 Pilot Movie): the first time we see Mike Traceur, he's in bed with a random woman. Then another scantily clad woman returns to the bed to drive the point home. They do almost the same in the first scene of FBI agent Rivai, with another mostly naked blond woman. The twist: agent Rivai is a lesbian.
- In the Firefly episode "Jaynestown," a local magistrate hires Inara to sleep with his 26-year-old-virgin son, supposedly in order to "make him a man." After they have sex, the son is disappointed that he doesn't feel fundamentally different. He asks, "Aren't I supposed to be a man now?" She answers, "A man is just a boy who is old enough to ask that question. Our time together is a symbol; it means something to your father. But it doesn't make you a man. You do that yourself."
- Later on you get the equivalent (for well-written media) of Crow T. Robot shouting "PLOT POINT!"
- Supernatural: While Sam has his Cartwright Curse (although it doesn't stop him from having hot werewolf sex), Dean sleeps with anything that has a pulse (or doesn't, considering his necrophilia comments). However, it's been implied that this might not be such a good thing, with Sam finding it hard to believe that he could even manage a long-term relationship and thinking he's a slut with no standards - see Tall Tales - Dean thinking the same thing, as suggested by his ouch-worthy "Yeah, that sounds like me" in What Is And Should Never Be when Alt!Sam confronts him on having slept with his girlfriend on prom night, one of the seven sins calling him a "walking billboard of lust and gluttony", fans calling him pretty much a whore (not always nicely, either) and his actor teasing that he might have to be a hooker to pay their bills.
- Subverted and invoked by Supernatural, when, after his return from Hell Dean says he's been "re-virginized" and talks about wanting to "pop his cherry" as soon as possible. Sam's response? "Yeah, not even an angel could do that.
- Subverted in Lois and Clark, where Superman is revealed to be a virgin. He had some legitimate concerns.
- Subverted in The Prisoner where Number 6 is deliberately never shown to possess any kind of sexual desire, in contast to the James Bond inspired spy image of the time. Naturally, theories about his sexuality abound, with much being made of the fact that the one time he even goes so far as to kiss a woman, he's in another man's body.
- Possibly subverted on Pushing Daisies: Ned claims he's he's not a virgin, but he is spectacularly inexperienced at romance and may be exaggerating his conquests.
- Captain Kirk. In a specific example, the episode "Bread and Circuses" has the bad guys give Kirk a hot female slave for the night who must do whatever he commands. It is implied that they have sex, of course, and the next morning the Big Bad tells Kirk that he decided to let him "be a man" before executing him.
Film
- The trope was challenged, if not actually subverted, in The Wicker Man, where the hero's religiously inspired chastity is a major part of the plot.
- The 2006 remake is not, where the hero's religion and chastity are entirely omitted, though he's its not explictly mentioned that he isn't a virgin. (Admittedly, part of this may be the difficulty in thinking of Nicolas Cage as a virgin.)
- Sean Connery is a virgin in The Name of the Rose (he plays a monk), but his sidekick is given a sex scene (despite also being a monk). In all fairness, though, this is faithful to the events of the book. Note also that the characters in the book are very heavily based on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
- James Bond. Enough said.
- Sam Spade and most other Film Noir/Hard-Boiled Detective heroes.
- There are two egregious examples of this in the nonetheless excellent Bogart/Bacall version of The Big Sleep. The film adds not only a romance between Marlowe and Vivian not present in the novel, but also a scene where Marlowe seduces a Hot Librarian just to kill time on a stakeout. (Admittedly, the "horse racing" dialogue from one of the Marlowe/Vivian scenes is a classic of on-screen flirtation, but that doesn't make it any less irrelevant to the plot.)
- Author Raymond Chandler once said of Philip Marlowe, "I think he might seduce a duchess, and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin."
- Thoroughly, thoroughly subverted in the early Jim Carrey film Once Bitten, in which the only reason the vampire's interested in the protagonist at all is because it's so hard to find a male virgin these days: she has to bite a virgin to retain her youth, isn't interested in girls, and is having a tough time finding a boy over puberty who hasn't had sex yet. Not so subverted, considering the day is finally saved when he has sex with his girlfriend, making him useless to the vampire.
- The 40-Year-Old Virgin was all about the hero's attempts to lose his virginity. In a minor subversion, however, his male friends — who had all had sex and were eagerly egging him on — were in many ways much bigger losers than he was, and were certainly far more infantile and immature about sex, compared to the affable and handsome hero. One critic pointed that even his "unmanly" preference for bike riding rather than using a car or a motorcycle works to the hero's favor since it helps keep him in great shape and attractive to women.
- Subverted in Hocus Pocus, a candle with a black flame is prophetized to resurrect a trio of witches if a Virgin were to lit it. Initially one would suspect the the little girl in the witch's costume would be the one to light it. But no, it was the main, male character Max who lit the candle. The cursed-as-an-immortal-cat Binx spelled this fact out in case the viewers forgot the Virgin clause.
Literature
- Dr. Watson mentioned at several times that Sherlock Holmes has no interest in women. However, in the tradition of a sexually active sidekick, Watson boasts that he has had experience of the women of five continents! He marries the heroine at the end of The Sign of Four, marries again some time before The Lion's Mane, and shows interest in ladies at various other points. As Holmes puts it, "Watson, the fair sex is your department."
- Watson's reputation as a ladies' man didn't stop publication of the pastiche My Dearest Holmes, in which our heroes are a gay couple.
- Both Holmes' sexlessness and Watson's roving eye (and the facts that Watson is the older of the two, they met as adults, and the supernatural plays no part in their adventures) were blatantly disregarded through terrible adaptation decay in Spielberg's Young Sherlock Holmes.
- Keeping in mind that the film (though ignoring canon in many, many respects) actually presents its events as the reason Holmes isn't interested in women: his True Love, Elizabeth, dies towards the end.
- Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files spends many books being chaste as his girlfriend is almost turned into a vampire by being involved with him. The trauma keeps him from getting too intimate. His sidekick & half-brother Thomas is very active. But he's an incubus, and needs sex to live, sooooo...
- Possibly as a foil for Harry's prolonged chastity, in "White Night," it is revealed that the young and talented Carlos Ramirez, self-styled Casanova, is actually a virgin. Harry spends the entire climactic fight scene teasing him about it. This troper notes that seeing as how Harry has gone over four years without sex at this point, this character is just about the only person he *can* tease on this point. Even the polka-obsessed forensic pathologist Butters has had sex more recently than he has. This troper also ships Ramirez with the most experienced virgin in world history, Molly Carpenter, like *Fed Ex*.
- Dresden's uneventful sex life is at least partly related to his ethics. On one occasion he spurns sex with his new apprentice, Molly, teenage daughter of his friend and comrade-in-arms Michael Carpenter. At that point she is, by her own admission, still a "technical virgin," and Dresden enjoins her, as a condition of apprenticeship, to move back in with her parents and have nothing at all to do with boys for the indefinite future. It's got nothing to do with Virgin Power, he's simply trying to be a responsible father-figure to her.
- Averted notably in the person of Michael Szczgielniak in Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age books: not only is he a virgin (for most of the first two in which he appears, anyway) he's virgin powered.
- In Robert Sheckly's short story Feeding Time (1953), a male bookworm nerd happens upon a strange book in a strange antique book shop: 'Care and Feeding of the Gryphon'. The book explains that the gryphon's sole food are virgins. Despite his extensive collection of pornographic literature, the protagonist is intrigued by the, hm, implications. Although he briefly wonders where you get enough "innocent" young women from. He decides to become a gryphon keeper and follows the instructions given in the book... one spell later, he wakes up in a green field. And looking up, he sees the gryphon majestically swooping down on him, claws extended. He cries out in protest that the sole food of the gryphon should be virgins... then realizes the irony of the situation, instants before he is eaten.
- Each Knight In Shining Armor in The Faerie Queene represents a different virtue. The Knight of Chastity, Britomart, is also the only female knight.
- In the entire romance novel genre it is extraordinary for the hero to be virginal. In fact they are often famous for their lechery. Until recently romantic heroines were always virgins until the heroic rake got his mitts on them...even when they were widows who had been married for years.
Anime
- In Gundam SEED, Kira Yamato loses his virginity to Flay Alster, his troubled crush and girlfriend. This raised quite the Fan Wank among fans since it made him the first Gundam main lead to have sex onscreen. It's also a bit subverted, since said sex scene is actually quite important for their Character Development: Flay manages to worm her way into Kira's heart and will through that, since it was comfort sex after a rather traumatic fight for Kira. Since Flay is a Yandere who blames Kira for "letting her father die", her intentions were anything but benevolent...
- Subverted in Gun X Sword: A recurring gag is that Van, Celibate Hero that he is, usually tries to keep women from getting too close by telling them "I'm a virgin". As he appears to not have had any interest in women before meeting his (soon-to-be-late) bride, he's probably telling the truth.
- Subverted hard by Vash of Trigun. He has a Badass Longcoat, Cool Shades, not one but two badass nicknames ("the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon,"), a 60 billion-dollar bounty on his head, and a very large gun. About the only thing he didn't have going for him was a giant robot. And if he got any action in the course of the series, this troper can't remember it.
- This may hold more true for the manga than the anime. While Vash was never shown sleeping with anyone, the anime gave him a lot of examples of flirting with women, which just wasn't present in the manga.
- In both anime and manga, he was willing to feign being passed-out-drunk rather than accept the grateful, er, attentions of two prostitutes.
- In the manga he was, in general, far more traumatized by memories of Rem's death than in the anime; they say a man's relationship with women is related to his relationship with his mother, and since Rem is the closest Vash ever had to a mother as we know it, it's not hard to imagine sex is rather low on his list of priorities.
- It's suggested that he either is a virgin or stopped being sexually active because of his scars (and, you know, because whoever he gets close to tends to die horribly). Also, he's a Christ figure, which may or may not influence this.
- Subverted hard in Great Teacher Onizuka. The protagonist begins and ends the series as a virgin, despite occasional advances on him by 15-year-old girls. He's not quite happy about his state.
- Played straight in the Live Action TV version, but not involving the schoolgirls, thankfully. He finally got it on, as he proudly points out in the epilogue, with Azusa.
- Subverted in Code Geass. Despite Milly, Shirley, C.C., Kallen, and Kaguya all making advances toward Lelouch in one form or another, he remains a virgin for the entire series.
- Excluding H-Game Adaptations, Harem Anime Males basically subverts this bloody trope to the point this troper simmer in pending rage.
Web Comics
- In Loserz, where two protagonists are virgins and are portrayed as... well... "Loserz." At least, until Eric gets laid, but Ben has no such luck.
- In Pandect, Noah is told his true love will be a male "mature lizard Ace who is also a virgin". Since Aces are animals with human souls and bodies, a virgin Ace has never had sex as an animal or a human, and a mature Ace is at least 100 years old, it genuinely shocks Noah when he finally meets one.
Web Original
- There are at least three examples in Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog:
- Billy/Dr. Horrible - it's not mentioned whether he's a virgin or not, but he ruminates uncomfortably on Penny and Captain Hammer's relationship. "They're probably going to ...French kiss...or something." This could be virginity or simple deep denial.
- Billy's evil moisture buddy Moist has a double date in Act I, and a hot date in Act III.
- Captain Hammer himself has a line in Act III about how he just might sleep with the same girl twice, and then goes on to announce how he "totally had sex" with Penny.
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