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Why does losing / popping / busting someone's cherry mean "ending virginity"? One slang dictionary speculates that the term is used because of a fancied resemblance between this fruit and the clitoris. However, there's a logical problem here, since for a woman the loss of virginity often involves breaking the hymen. And the hymen looks nothing like a cherry. (Also Blanche's authorities tell her than in general nothing happens to a woman's clitoris during her first sexual experience!)

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A possible answer to the clitoris/hymen problem might instead look the word cherry to refer not to the fruit itself but to the color cherry. So while a hymen does not look like a fruit, it is often a reddish, cherry-like color. That would make cherry comparable to the slang term pink, as in "I hope I'm gonna get some pink tonight."

The first likely citation for this sense of cherry in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from an 1889 slang lexicon which lists cherry as thieves' vernacular for a young woman. Modern usage also primarily uses cherry to refer to women. Blanche tried a few Google searches to get a sense of this and found that lose / take / bust / pop her cherry appears from four to 15 times as often as lose / take / bust / pop his cherry. Blanche also checked Urbandictionary.com, in which definitions involving female anatomy and virginity greatly outnumber those involving male virginity. The early slang lexicon entry referring to women and the modern usage statistics seem to reinforce each other and suggest that cherry is related to the female genitalia.

Yet that theory faces a difficult problem when we look at the other early references, many of which refer to males! A 1928 novel contains the line "I told him he wuz too young to lose his cherry." And in Saul Bellow's 1953 The Adventures of Augie March we find "She now held off my hands and now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still cherry."

It is true, of course, that Caucasian men may have red/pink balls or dicks, but they certainly don't lose them when they lose their virginity. So when the character in the novel says that someone is too young to lose his cherry, it hardly makes sense to imagine that this is referring to the color of his dick.

This suggests to Blanche that we need to look in another direction for the origin of cherry. Fruit is now used to refer to gay men, but it originally had a wider range of uses. As early as 1895, fruit is listed as a word meaning "easy mark," that is, someone who can easily be taken in a scam. The metaphor here seems to be a desirable or tasty object that is easily acquired.

By 1931 we see evidence that fruit was used for easily available young women, and the term is defined as follows in a slang dictionary: "Fruit, an 'easy mark.' A girl or woman willing to oblige. Probably... from the fact that they are 'easy picking.'" Words for gay men and loose women often come from the same source in English, and so it is not surprising to see that by 1935, fruit is used for gay men as well.

A cherry is a kind of fruit, of course, and for some people a virgin is a particularly tasty treat. So it seems likely to Blanche that cherry originates as a metaphor that compares virginity to a delicious fruit. The word doesn't have to do with the color or the shape of the genitals, so cherry can be equally applied to both men and women (and can also be applied to any race).

Still, in Miss Poubelle's experience, the appeals of virginity are much exaggerated and the potential for virginal disasters are greatly under-appreciated. Youth is appealing, but she prefers men who know how to do what needs to be done. She'll take well-aged beef over fresh fruit any day!