For a girl losing her virginity can be very scary. In the books The Bell Jar written by Sylvia Plath and Americanah written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie both the main characters, Esther and Ifemelu experience the loss of virginity. They were both scared because the loss of virginity had one main troubling factor and that was the thought of becoming pregnant. Esther and Ifemelu were both educated girls who had their whole life ahead of them. They were not thinking about having a family just yet, they were engaged on having a successful future. Not knowing how sexual intercourse actually feels, they assume it must be an exciting get away within the souls and decide to act upon it. However, at the end it was not what they had expected and the urge to have sex was no longer within them.

In the novel the bell jar, the main character Esther has sex for the first time. She decides to get a fitting in other words a form of birth control so the consequence of her action may no longer worry her. After she gets a fitting she decides it is now okay to have sex. However, she was not thinking about who to have sex with. Her main concern was that she wanted to be free and for once she wanted to do something that no one else could tell her otherwise. After she has sex with a guy she barley even loves, she completely shuts him down. This is her way of redeeming herself and being in control of her life. She states, “It occurred to me that the blood was my answer, I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.” (pdf. 120) Esther’s sexuality was considered as freedom, and although she does not chose to be with the guy anymore she realizes what she had done was worth doing and starting from this point on she is in control of her life. This is why the very first thing she did was send her partner the medical bill for her obsessive bleeding and erased him out his life. In conclusion Esther being protected from pregnancy gave her the rights to her own body/life.

In the book Americanah written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ifemelu has sex for the very first time, expect she has sex with her lover, Obinze. As stated, Ifemelu is also troubled from the fact that she may end up being pregnant. She is not protected from birth control and she did not use condoms. Later that week Ifemelu had started throwing up and this is when she started going crazy because she thought she was pregnant. As a reader you could tell Ifemelu was still very young because she was troubled about the fact she would have to tell Obinze’s mother she had sex with her son. The narrator states, “She had been tense through it all, unable to relax. She had imagined his mother watching them; the image had forced itself onto her mind..” (pdf. 72) This shows me that Ifemelu sexual experience was much different than Esthers because she couldn’t relax, she had the issue of being pregnant and also the issue of telling his mother. Ifemelu had felt tense even when she chose to have sex with the love of her life, unlike Esther who was much happier having sex with someone she did not know.

Overall, as you could see Ifemelu would have been happy if she had the power to get birth control, and the fact that she did not, her sex with the love of her life (Obinze) was not an act worth doing. And for Esther the act was worth doing only because she had protection (birth control) however she chose the wrong guy to do it with.