StarlightLady Whether sex is positive or negative depends on the situation. Attaching gain to it without that subjective lens does no more good than attaching loss just for having sex, both have their risks on a social level, however we feel of our own individual experiences or want to take lose virginity or gain womanhood literal or not.
Many people throughout this thread have commented that it was something done to 'get it over with'. I'm not ~scarred for life~ because of teenage sex, but I can recognize that my teen-self did things because of the social incentive to not miss out on something that I, as a disabled mixed girl, was told would be out of my reach and that not doing so was just further proof of my lack - who'd fuck the broken ugly mongrel? was something I heard. I don't think having sex damaged me or altered my professional path, but I don't view my choices in a vacuum or that they made me any more assertive. I immigrated as a teenager, I had to prove my honesty and worth to another country - that took far more assertiveness than climbing on someone's lap (which is how I initiated sex both for my first time with a guy and my first time with a girl).
My brother at 16 announced to the household that he'd lost his virginity and become a man. It seemed stupid then, he was no different than when he'd left, and our mother who had been asleep on the couch when he came in questioned whether it was worth waking her up for that, but now I can see that - having spent a year under literal house arrest, ankle tag and all, and dealt with a lot of child abuse I did - it was probably as much a relief to him that someone happily had sex with him, that he was fitting in to the social idea of what was normal for his age. Nothing in what he did suggested he thought his girlfriend wasn't a nice girl or that he'd given her something. None of us thought less of her, we just thought it was silly he was making a big deal about something we'd rather not be involved with.
I wonder if both of us would have waited for better relationships and been less hypersexual as teens if we hadn't been so loved starved and surrounded by a social messages that sex was the ultimate form of pleasure and love - things we both lacked. Taking a sex-neutral view, I tend to discuss sex with my children as something people do, that it should feel good - but so should a lot of other things. We talk and dissect the messages around sex - both those that make it seem like things 'nice girls don't do' and the ones that make it seem like it's something that makes someone an adult or proves someone loves them or that sex changes people, or any other bollocks out there. The whole thing around challenging virginity as a concept doesn't need to be replaced with any other idea of dramatic change that isn't really there for most people.
Culturally, virginity has a lot of baggage and in some settings it still holds a lot of weight, but in some settings, particularly at the individual level, some people see having sex for the first time as a loss, a gain, a mix of both but applying any of those to the wider population, that socially saying gained womanhood or manhood doesn't change the idea in those settings that it isn't something nice girls do - in those settings, women are already infantalized as not as adult as men - and there is little benefit to attaching gain or adulthood to sex. In fact, it's not uncommon for abusers to attach adulthood and maturity to sexual actions to push and quiet the concerns of their victims. There are plenty of ways of supporting positive sex while being sex-neutral in language.