"People think that I’m saving myself," Lesli tells me. There's both amusement and exasperation in her voice. "Typically, it’s tied to Jesus, which, you know, him and I are friends, I don’t really have a problem with him...[but] that's not what I'm doing."Lesli is a 25-year-old Texas native, incoming law school student, abortion rights activist, and Beyoncé fan. She has also never been sexually active, and this fact about her has a tendency to overshadow the others. "I don’t have a problem telling people that I’m a virgin," she says. "I feel like other people have a problem with it, therefore I don’t talk about it that much, because I've had a lot of people be like, 'You? But you’re in law school and and you wear makeup.'""I can possess a hymen and still know how to do a cat eye!" she adds.I first connected with Lesli after I wrote a column on how losing my virginity taught me that sex doesn't have to be unwanted to be not the sex you want. In other words, my first time wasn't great. My 19-year-old response was to dye my light hair jet-black in a friend's bathroom sink a few days later (change your hair, change your life?), but this adjustment didn't erase my impression that I had squandered some precious, irretrievable commodity on an undeserving recipient; that process took time and perspective and the thoroughly good sex I fortunately went on to have. Part of moving on was telling myself that first times are very often endured instead of enjoyed, and that they open the door to more fulfilling sexual experiences. That's exactly what Lesli reached out to tell me she doesn't want. She is a virgin — what she calls a "secular virgin" — for a very simple reason: not because she has taken a vow of abstinence or has never been presented with a sexual opportunity, but because she has never been presented with a sexual opportunity that appealed to her. And she sees no reason to act on one that doesn't.In our generation, she is far from alone in abstaining. A study published last week in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour rocked the internet with its finding that millennials born in the 1990s are twice as likely as the preceding generation to have had zero sexual partners in young adulthood, or since turning 18. The drop in sexual activity is particularly pronounced among women, with the percentage of women who have been sexually inactive in young adulthood tripling between Gen X women and 1990s-born millennial and "iGen" women. Experts have pointed to a handful of potential reasons : We spend more time behind screens and less time interacting IRL; we are more focused on academic and professional achievements than sexual conquests; we are wary of STIs and rape. Another possible explanation: Young people are pickier than our predecessors about the sexual activity in which we engage. We're waiting for people or situations we really like.Sometimes, we're looking in the wrong place, as Katie Heaney, author of the book Never Have I Ever: My Life So Far Without A Date , now knows she once was. Just after the book, Heaney's account of her lifelong single status, was published in 2014, Heaney shared her feelings about being a 27-year-old virgin on the podcast "Death, Sex & Money": "I really don't like it," she said. "And I also hate that I don’t like it. Because that feels like conceding that it bothers me and that I am susceptible to the opinions of others." Last month, Katie returned to the podcast to update listeners on her love life, which has taken a positive turn: Katie realised that she is gay, and she is now dating a woman. She has never had intercourse — "my girlfriend's like, 'Well technically that makes you a gold star,' which is a lesbian who has never had sex with men," she said — but she understandably no longer identifies as a virgin. "Now, I feel like I can be like, 'Well, I was not pleased with the offerings,'" she said. "I was not into what I thought was available to me."And here's the thing: Not only women who are attracted to women, but also women who are attracted to men, can lack enthusiasm about the offerings. On its face, virginity is obvious. You are a virgin if you've never "had sex." It's when you ask what constitutes sex that things get murky. Are you a virgin if you engage in everything but intercourse (or, perhaps, "half a virgin," as Mean Girls' Regina George put it)? Or are you only one if, like Lesli, you have never engaged in any kind of sex — manual, oral, or vaginal? Are women who have sex with women and don't have intercourse "virgins"? The fact that this seems absurd suggests that virginity is defined, at least in part, by context. "Virgin" is that rare label we assign based on what someone doesn't do instead of what they do; we have no equivalent phrase for the opposite, for a sex-haver, because we don't assume that a single label could possibly describe all of the many people having many kinds of sex.