Virginity and sexual initiation

Virginity and sexual initiation in The Lying Life of Adults are shaped by a conflict between social rules imposed on young women and Giovanna’s uncertain, developing sense of desire. The subject is not simply whether she has sex, but who gets to define its meaning: relatives who treat virginity as something to guard, men whose desires seem to set the terms of intimacy, and Giovanna herself as she tries to distinguish physical experience from the recognition and respect she wants.

Family Rules and Sexual Conduct

During the Milan visit, Vittoria instructs Giovanna to keep Giuliana with her at all times, including at night. She presents the arrangement as protection against men’s sexual intentions and insists that Giuliana should not have sex before marriage if she wants her fiancé to marry her. The advice makes sexual restraint a form of practical supervision, linking a young woman’s premarital conduct to the prospect of marriage.

Giovanna asks Vittoria why she herself had given in to Enzo. Vittoria answers that he was already married and had three children, and that she loved him too much to give him up. Her account places love, circumstance, and sexual choice in tension with the rule she has just imposed on Giuliana. Giovanna privately rejects the idea that sexual decisions should be governed by opportunistic calculation, or that Giuliana and Margherita have the right to supervise a twenty-year-old. Yet she keeps those objections to herself: she wants to go to Milan to see Roberto, and fears that offending Vittoria could get her thrown out. She agrees to watch over the couple, showing how her own judgment is constrained by dependence and by the immediate purpose of the trip.

Desire, Comparison, and Virginity

In Milan, Giovanna’s first night sharing the household with Giuliana and Roberto intensifies her awareness of her own virginity. She hears Giuliana crying and whispering with Roberto, then listens as they laugh; later, Giuliana comes through the room in a nightgown and returns to the bedroom. Giovanna cannot know what is happening between them. She imagines possibilities, rejects them, and tries to classify the ordinary sounds of the house instead. The scene’s uncertainty matters: sexual experience is something she observes from outside and reconstructs without reliable knowledge.

Giovanna describes her knowledge of sex as both extensive and incomplete, gathered from books, masturbation, and earlier experiences involving Angela and Corrado. Watching Giuliana’s intimacy with Roberto makes her feel her virginity as a humiliation, but she insists inwardly that she is not Giuliana and does not want to imagine herself in her place. Her response combines bodily excitement with refusal and self-distancing; the experience does not give her a settled account of what she wants.

That distinction becomes clearer when Giovanna reflects on Roberto. Before seeing him with Giuliana, she had not imagined being penetrated by him; the act had seemed vulgar to her. On a later night in Milan, she recognizes that she had returned partly expecting sex, but concludes that physical access is not the need driving her. She wants Roberto’s respect and an exchange about compunction and a God who is satisfied while creatures suffer hunger and thirst. She fears that he instead sees her return as a sexual betrayal. In this contrast, sexual initiation is bound up with her wish to be recognized as a thinking person, not merely as an attractive young woman.

Control, Self-Presentation, and the Decision to Wait

Before Giovanna leaves Milan, Vittoria turns sexual restraint into both a rule and a threat. She praises Giovanna’s body, instructs her to display rather than hide it, and then warns her to weigh the consequences before giving up her virginity. She even threatens that she and Giovanna’s father will beat her if she learns Giovanna has “wasted it.” The scene couples encouragement to make use of her appearance with strict control over sexual access: Giovanna is told to present herself attractively, but to preserve what Vittoria treats as a bargaining asset. Vittoria returns the bracelet to Giovanna and clasps it on her wrist as she gives this advice, bringing the object into the same intimate, coercive lesson about desirability and self-management.

Afterward, however, Giovanna recognizes that she has no urgent need to lose her virginity. Although Rosario attracts her for reasons she cannot explain, she does not call him; instead, she contacts Ida about traveling to Venice. Her immediate choice is therefore not simply obedience to Vittoria’s warning. It is a pause in which attraction does not dictate action, and a friendship and journey take precedence over an encounter she had previously imagined might resolve something for her.

First Sexual Experience and Its Aftermath

The decision to wait does not settle Giovanna’s uncertainty; it precedes a different choice. When Rosario arrives on the morning she is preparing to leave for Venice, he kisses her and touches her breast, but she pushes him back and asks whether he has to kiss her. The exchange makes her attempt to set terms visible: attraction is present, yet she does not simply accept the encounter as he initiates it.

Giovanna’s first sexual experience with Rosario is painful and emotionally complicated. She tells him to continue despite the pain, apologizes for being tense and sweaty, and eventually he enters her. Afterward, she asks whether he has done it; he says yes. The episode fulfills the immediate fact of losing her virginity but does not read as a simple arrival at maturity or desire fulfilled. Her effort to direct what happens coexists with discomfort and shame, while Rosario’s response includes anger as well as laughter.

Afterward, Giovanna says that this was how she wanted to do it and kisses Rosario. She then washes and dresses, removes the bracelet, and leaves it on the floor beside the bed, treating it as a bad-luck charm. Rosario drives her home dissatisfied, while Giovanna is delighted. The contrast leaves the encounter without a shared meaning: what he experiences as disappointing, she claims as her own chosen experience, even as the bracelet’s removal gives the moment an uneasy symbolic weight.

The next day Giovanna leaves for Venice with Ida. On the train, they promise each other that they will become adults as no one ever had before. The timing connects sexual initiation to a larger passage toward adulthood, but the promise is made between friends, not defined by a man or by the family rules that had framed virginity as protection, leverage, or a condition of marriage.

First Sexual Experience and Its Aftermath

The decision to wait does not settle Giovanna’s uncertainty; it precedes a different choice. When Rosario arrives on the morning she is preparing to leave for Venice, he kisses her and touches her breast, but she pushes him back and asks whether he has to kiss her. The exchange makes her attempt to set terms visible: attraction is present, yet she does not simply accept the encounter as he initiates it.

Giovanna’s first sexual experience with Rosario is painful and emotionally complicated. She tells him to continue despite the pain, apologizes for being tense and sweaty, and eventually he enters her. Afterward, she asks whether he has done it; he says yes. The episode fulfills the immediate fact of losing her virginity but does not read as a simple arrival at maturity or desire fulfilled. Her effort to direct what happens coexists with discomfort and shame, while Rosario’s response includes anger as well as laughter.

Afterward, Giovanna says that this was how she wanted to do it and kisses Rosario. She then washes and dresses, removes the bracelet, and leaves it on the floor beside the bed, treating it as a bad-luck charm. Rosario drives her home dissatisfied, while Giovanna is delighted. The contrast leaves the encounter without a shared meaning: what he experiences as disappointing, she claims as her own chosen experience, even as the bracelet’s removal gives the moment an uneasy symbolic weight.

The next day Giovanna leaves for Venice with Ida. On the train, they promise each other that they will become adults as no one ever had before. The timing connects sexual initiation to a larger passage toward adulthood, but the promise is made between friends, not defined by a man or by the family rules that had framed virginity as protection, leverage, or a condition of marriage.