Anna Kendrick: Sex expectations ‘messed’ with me
Anna Kendrick says sex expectations "messed" with her.
The ‘Pitch Perfect’ star felt very anxious after she lost her virginity as she worried people would suddenly think she was "too experienced" in the bedroom and use derogatory terms to describe her.
She said: "That section about sex, I felt, Oh boy, I’m opening myself up here. Once you talk about sex candidly, people might expect you to do it all the time … That was one of the things that bothered me so much in my early 20s. There was a kind of casual, Oh, if a guy sleeps with this number of women he’s a stud, and if a girl sleeps with this number of guys, she’s a slut. But that was it.
"I was like, What am I supposed to do? Literally six months ago, I was humiliated that I hadn’t even had sex yet, and suddenly, I’m like, what if I have sex with too many people? How am I both things? How am I too inexperienced, and, to someone else’s eyes, too experienced? It really messed with me."
And whilst the 31-year-old actress doesn’t feel that way now, she decided to open up about it in her book to help others who may be dealing with those feelings.
She told Vogue magazine: "Now I’m surrounded by people who are normal and sensitive and intelligent, so I don’t have those anxieties anymore.
"But I know there are plenty of girls and women who do. And that was what I wish someone was saying when I was dealing with it. So I thought: Okay, keep this in."
In her memoir ‘Scrappy Little Nobody’, Anna writes: "When you’re 22, it feels like there’s an ideal you’re supposed to aspire to, but nobody will tell you what it is. It’s completely arbitrary, and some people are going to think it’s the right thing and some people are going to think it’s the wrong thing."
