yeehaw

Putting this out there bc I've read a lot of BBM fic and I always thought it was pretty clear that the whole "Fellas like you and me, we march off to hell" "You may be a sinner, but I ain't yet had the opportunity" scene was Ennis slyly admitting to Jack that he was a virgin.

There are no lines that directly say this is the case, neither within the movie script (although there were rumors that an earlier draft had Ennis saying smth like "You may be a sinner, but Alma ain't yet given me the opportunity) nor the short story (unless you take "nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed" as the narrator saying Ennis had never penetrated anything before, which is how I have always understood it). I just always felt like Ennis assumes that Jack, the a swaggering, cocky rodeo dude, is more wordly than him and has been presented with a lot of different opportunities to indulge in what their conservative Christian society considers sin and vice... including premarital sex.

So imagine my surprise when I found that a surprising amount of people write Ennis as having had previous sexual experiences before ever meeting Jack. There's nothing wrong with it, of course, like you can interpret these characters however you want yanno? I just don't personally agree with that assessment.

Not to like... give any validity to the idea of virginity since at the end of the day it's just a social concept, lol, but I just think it's really important narratively that Ennis lose his virginity to a man. Like, he's been worried all his life about the consequences of queerness within men, and yet the seemingly first time he's ever presented with the opportunity to have sex is with another man, and he absolutely jumps at it. That point is in tandem with my belief that Ennis is the type who probably never pressured good lil Christian Alma for sex, which probably also leads him down a mental spiral after that first night with Jack. What does that say about him, that he was perfectly content with Alma not putting out, but that he did Jack with an angry enthusiasm the first chance he got? He might deny that it doesn't mean anything, but you know he lingers on it all the time.

Plus, I just think it's really cute that Jack is his first time. Jack, who he's been really drawn to since they first met. Jack, who probably became his first and only friend in life. Jack, who understood him in ways that Alma never could. I just really like the idea that Jack was the first person he ever had sex with, and the love that grew from there kept them coming back to each other over the next 20 years of their lives. How many people can say that they stayed loving the first person they ever had sex with that long? His relationship with Jack lasted longer than his own marriage, for Christ's sake.