“Crumple the flower, Jane. Now try to make it look new again,” instructs Alba, Jane’s abuela, in the opening minutes of Jane the Virgin’s pilot episode.
“I can’t,” Jane replies.
“That’s right, you can never go back. And that’s what happens when you lose your virginity. You can never go back. Never forget that, Jane,” warns Alba.
It’s young Jane’s first lesson about sex and virginity and one that clearly informs the premise of the series. When viewers first met Jane back in 2014, the 23-year-old had never had sexual intercourse, despite being in a two-year relationship with the lovable, rule-following cop Michael Cordero. Alba made it clear — no sex before marriage, a notion rooted in her religious and cultural beliefs. (Later, we learn her insistence on no premarital sex was in response to the familial humiliation she endured when she had sex outside of wedlock with Jane’s grandfather, and also in response to Jane’s mother, Xiomara, who got pregnant with Jane when she was just a teen.) But as fans of the show now know, a mix-up at the doctor’s office results in Jane being artificially inseminated with the sperm of the dreamy hotel magnate Rafael, which completely upends her life (straight out of a telenovela, right?).
Five seasons later, as the show comes to an end this Wednesday, Jane’s attitude toward sex has changed dramatically, and so have the attitudes of her mother and grandmother. After decades of buildup, Jane meaningfully lost her virginity and went on to have more casual yet equally fulfilling sexual relationships with different men. Xo, who struggled with the shame of getting pregnant as a teen and subsequently being stereotyped as “promiscuous,” reached an understanding with her more traditional mother after butting heads with her her whole life. She also came into her own as a woman outside of her sexuality, defining herself and her relationships in other ways. Alba used to shudder at the mere mention of sex, but now in the final season, she’s even using a vibrator and masturbating for her own pleasure.
Sex was always a way for these women to explore their deepest wants and desires and, in turn, the parts of their lives that shaped these ideas in the first place.
“These are three women with three very different relationships to sex,” Jennie Snyder Urman, Jane the Virgin’s creator, told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview in July. “And I find the idea that all of those opinions and ideas can coexist together really gratifying, because it reinforces that there’s no one way to be.”
After Jane unexpectedly got pregnant, it caused an identity crisis, according to Snyder Urman. She had followed the rules, done everything her grandmother asked her, never had sex, and still managed to get pregnant before she was married, just like Xiomara. Snyder Urman said this immaculate conception of sorts sparked Jane’s desire to “interrogate what was so important to her” about staying a virgin before she got married.
“She sort of toyed with various iterations of, ‘maybe it’s not that important, maybe I’m just going along with this because that’s what I’ve always thought and that’s what my grandmother’s instilled in me,’” Snyder Urman explained.
“But she came to realize this was important to her and thought about why she had waited this long, and she wanted it to be special with the person that she got married to. It wasn’t just a reaction to not getting pregnant, and she was able to own that.”
After much deliberation, Jane ultimately decided to wait to have sex for the first timeuntil she married Michael. The experience was not the “perfect” moment she had imagined it would be — what with faking an orgasm and accidentally sending a sex tape to her grad school adviser — but it was still a choice she made on her own terms and for her own reasons.
(Excerpt) Read more in: BuzzFeed
