The virgins on my screen are in their 20s and 30s. The pilot opens with seven women and eight men. Two are Texans, one is a late-blooming comedian, two went to Brigham Young University, and two wear cross necklaces. What unites them is they’ve all—up to now—made the choice to abstain from sex. They’ve gathered on an unnamed, tropical coast that could be Florida or Costa Rica, to test that choice. Or, simply put, they’ve gathered to see if they might meet someone with whom they want to do it.
Hulu’s latest reality dating show, Are You My First?, premiered with 10 episodes in mid-August. The show’s premise is simple: The “largest, hottest group of virgins ever assembled search for intimacy, love—and maybe their first.” It follows a familiar model. The cast members are presented with “V cards,” or opportunities to take people out on dates. They form connections, experience love triangles, and are faced with the threat of being sent home if they reveal their intentions to be impure, or fail to meet someone worthwhile. The underlying twist is that viewers might follow along as two or more of them have sex for the first time.
The cohosts are two Bachelor franchise alumni: Colton Underwood, who was a self-proclaimed virgin when his season aired in 2019, and was the first Bachelor lead to later come out as gay, and Kaitlyn Bristowe, who ignited light scandal when she broke decorum and had sex—before the fantasy suites—with Nick Viall during the filming of her season in 2015. Gimmicks abound: The beach bar exclusively serves virgin drinks, and elimination ceremonies are called “virgin sacrifices.” The first episode features a white party. “This is not a cult,” a contestant named Katya, 28, says as the virgins assemble in their matching outfits on the beach. “But it’s not not a cult.”
Are You My First? is both a strange and inevitable entry into the reality TV canon in 2025. It feels more at home with Bush-era, early-2000s shows like Newlyweds, Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey’s series that aired after Simpson said she lost her virginity to Lachey, and hokey reality series like The Simple Life. But as an ascendant right wing seeks to roll progressive gains in the realm of sex and gender back to the previous century, Are You My First? falls right in line.
While politics are never brought up by the contestants, Are You My First? smooths the conversation around sex by removing most kinds of it. True to its genre, everyone on the show identifies as cisgender and straight. The show advertises itself as a platform for virgins to date “without judgment,” and neither celebrates nor condemns the lifestyle choices—whether pickiness, fear, shame, or faith—that lead to not having sex well into your adulthood. But this lack of judgment does not extend evenly. When one contestant, Farha Khalidi, reveals she has an OnlyFans to her date, Noah, a 25-year-old hair-product entrepreneur and LDS church member, she’s immediately ostracized. Noah is allowed to share his personal beliefs: “I just have a really, really strong opinion against pornography and I think it’s, like, a poison in society,” he says, parroting an argument that’s been called a right-wing red herring. “I wish it didn’t exist. That is a line in the sand for me. I won’t be pursuing you romantically, just because of the OnlyFans thing.”
Underwood and Bristowe’s voice-over narration oscillates between compassion and punchline. “Welcome back to Are You My First?, where the virginity count remains 16 out of 16,” Bristowe says in the intro for Episode 3. “But that could change if our virgins make things a little saucy, which, by the way, is what you say when you’re a virgin and you’re still working your way up to saying the word ‘sexy.’” If all of reality TV is a stage, Are You My First? presents its cast like a circus: Here are some people who are not like us, and who are also not like you.
The politics and personal reasoning behind when a person chooses to have sex are fraught—way too fraught for any reality television show to untangle. It’s impossible to grow up in this country without feeling some kind of pressure in either direction—virgintiy is both something to hold onto and something to shed, it’s bad if you have it and bad if you don’t. It’s worse for some than for others: The pressure on girls and young women is conflicting and immense. Have sex too soon and you’re a slut; too late and you’re a prude. Are You My First? can’t escape this trap, because nobody can.
I know how it’s possible to wind up on a reality dating show for adult virgins. As a teenager in the suburbs of Houston, I grew up tangled in a web of sexual myths. The only formal sex education I ever received was in a middle-school health class that climaxed with a viewing of the 1982 documentary The Miracle of Life, which ends with a woman giving birth. Most of my friends and I signed abstinence pledges—promises to ourselves and to each other that we’d wait until marriage to have sex. Almost everyone I know who grew up in Texas got a different visual metaphor for sleeping around: a rubber band passed and pulled to the point of snapping, an undesirable piece of chewed gum, or a signed link in a paper chain. Each link was crucial. You’d break the whole thing if you made the selfish decision to fuck.
These lessons were cemented by everything I learned at my evangelical church youth group throughout high school, which traded in magical thinking. As girls, we were taught to avoid being alone in rooms with boys. Intimacy was a slippery slope: Hand holding could lead to kissing could lead to something the grownups disturbingly called “heavy petting” could lead to premarital sex, the ultimate sin. My friends and I lived in fear of the judgment our future husbands would wield if they found out about the desires that lived coddled in our hearts. Sometimes one of us would give way to one of these desires. We decided that communion on Sunday offered a perpetual way out: an opportunity to repent for letting so-and-so finger you on Friday night, a way to slip between the impossible rules.
I recognized myths I once believed in on the second episode of Are You My First?, during a game called “Cherry Pop,” in which the male contestants had to answer a series of questions “about women and sex.” The questions included things like “How long is the average gestational period” and “What is a Diva Cup?” Each time a man answered incorrectly, a red balloon over his head popped and blew suggestive, white liquid all over him. When presented with the question “Can too much sex loosen the vagina over time,” almost every man answered, “Yes.” White gunk flew everywhere. And there it was: Something I’d once believed, too, and evidence of the regressive beliefs that self-prescribed abstinence often portends.
Which isn’t to say that people with lots of sexual partners don’t hold onto false, sexist ideas about anatomy. That is, after all, how we landed here (and here, and here). The question was likely asked because the producers on Are You My First? knew that most of the cast would get it wrong. Imagine the same question asked on Love Island—a reality TV show that purports to celebrate sex in its display of sexy people, but only the right amount of it, and still only between men and women. It’s hard to pretend the results would be any different.
What Are You My First? manages to do is reflect our flawed thinking about purity back to us: We still don’t know how to handle the question of sex, especially among a group of people who so far have refused to have it. The show is at pains to insist that being a virgin is a noble decision, but staying one too long, especially among “the hottest group” of them “ever assembled,” is suspect. Of course, reality television isn’t a venue that can appropriately handle questions like Is love truly blind? and Is now the time for me to fuck? Still, I watched all 10 episodes. For what, I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted to see if anyone would come close. At the show’s end, none of the virgins manage to convert. Two couples are dating as they depart the unidentified coast, but it’s unclear if they’re still together. “Did we fail because no one had sex?” Bristowe asks Underwood in the season’s final scene. “Maybe Season 2,” Underwood responds, alluding to something that, like someone deciding to have sex for the first time on the show, is probably never going to happen.
