We just got some really exciting news: "How To Lose Your Virginity" has been accepted to the IFP's Independent Film Week Project Forum happening next month in New York.

What does that mean, you ask? For four days in September, co-producer Lisa Esselstein and I will be meeting directly with distributors and broadcasters who can potentially help us finish the documentary and get it out to the world at large. This is a game-changing opportunity for "How To Lose Your Virginity" and we're honored to be part of this selective film market.

A year ago we had a trailer and now, working with super-editor Dina Guttmann, we have a 90-minute rough cut (see me with the index-card version below). We've gotten this far in large part thanks to your generous donations of money and time, not to mention online enthusiasm. It's a huge leap for the film, but the road ahead is still long: We need to finish editing, compose our score, create graphic design and animation, and more.

Right now, we're working hard on a 20-minute version of the film to show to industry leaders at the IFP Forum. So, as we prepare, you can continue to help us "go all the way" here. We can't keep making virginity puns without you!

Remember, our trailer is always available streaming online. So feel free to download or embed it for your blog, human sexuality class, or friends until the full-length version is finished and ready for the world.

Thanks,

Therese and Team Trixie

Thanks to your generosity and support, we began our 10-week edit last month with the amazing Dina Guttmann. Here she is laying out the first draft of the story on our big wall of index cards. We can't tell you how cool it is to see our footage turning into funny, moving and provocative scenes.

Our goal is to have our first rough cut done by mid-December, along a really tight 20-minute clip to send to funders, broadcasters and distributors. It's all so exciting!

If you haven't already, please check out our Thank You Page complete with names, links and celebratory video. Enjoy a little Salt N Pepa while you're there.

Thanks for your support!
Therese, Lisa and Team Trixie

We just put up our Thank You Page complete with names, links and celebratory video. Please check it out and enjoy a little Salt N Pepa while you're there.

We'll be keeping you posted on the progress of the film through our regular mailing list. Right now we're speaking to editors and hope to start cutting in September. Yay!!!

Some wee housekeeping: We did our best to find out how everyone wanted to be ID'd on the page, but if there are any changes, let us know! Also, if we owe you a DVD of I Was A Teenage Feminist, it will be on its way shortly.

Thanks for your support!
Therese, Lisa and Team Trixie

Thank you to our 202 backers for raising $12,909! Stay tuned for a special thank you video coming your way as soon as we stop screaming!

Thanks to everyone who came out and had a drink or five at our Happy Hour Tuesday night (backer who left her Michael Kors bag behind, I'm talking to you!).

It was so nice to celebrate our amazing fundraising success with all the great people who helped us get here! We filled up our donation pitcher, and Jake's Saloon donated an additional 10% of all the drink proceeds from the evening!

Check us out at around midnight (yes, our Happy Hours last 5 1/2 hours) sporting our 'Team Trixie' name tags, from L to R: Therese Shechter, Shelby Knox and the fabulous Woman In Red.

Hi everyone!

A huge thank you to our backers (you know who you are!) who have increased their pledges over the last few weeks. It's helped us get to where we are now: less than $1000 from our goal!

So consider this: With 143 marvelous backers, if everyone added a mere $10 to their pledges, we'd be over the top today!

We know full well that some of you have stretched as far as you can go. So, thank you very, very much and we absolutely don't want to ask you for more.

But if there's anyone out there who can spare another $10 or more, please consider upping your pledge today. Or double down!

And though you need no reminding, please continue to tweet, post to Facebook and your blogs and email everyone you know. http://kck.st/9Hm93b

Thanks!!
Therese, Lisa and Team Trixie

PS Hope to see you at our NYC party on June 29th!
6:30pm - 10:00pm at Jake's Saloon
202 9th Avenue (btw 22nd & 23rd Streets)

In honor of our base-infused terminology here at Trixie Fundraising HQ, we did a little post on the blog about how we (and others) define the bases. As a bonus, enjoy a brilliant alternative metaphor for sex, the kind with extra cheese. The post is here!

Below from xkcd.com, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. Thanks to Katy Hardy for the link!

Hi everyone - Therese here.

I want to thank a group of fantastic bloggers who have spread the word about this project far and wide. A few of them did Q&As with me, and their questions were so good, they made my brain hurt. Here are some of the hopefully smart-sounding answers I produced in response.

From Amanda Hess's The Sexist who asked about the different meanings of virginity in the contexts of abstinence pledging, porn and the wedding industry:

Therese: I think they’re remarkably similar in that they all work within the fantasy of female sexual purity as something to be fetishized. They have different props—the Big White Wedding Dress, porn’s white panties, and the purity ring—but all use a sort of ritualized process whereby a symbolically virginal female is offered up to a male for deflowering. I say symbolic because the porn actress is definitely not a virgin, we’re pretty certain that most modern brides aren’t either, and given our shaky definition of the V-word, we might not even consider some purity pledgers to be totally chaste. But it’s the fetishization of all three that really fascinates me. For whose benefit is it this being played out?

From Australian journalist Rachel Hills' Musings of an Inappropriate Woman about mainstream media coverage of virginity and female sexuality:

Therese: There’s still a lot of alarmist hand-wringing about so-called ‘hookup culture,’ the evils of young women having casual sex, and the death of relationships. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with it. I think most of us find ourselves in all sorts of sexual situations in our lives, some good, some bad. Instead of talking about how many partners someone has had, it’s more important to talk about consent, doing things because you want to, not because you’ve been coerced, or you think all your friends are doing it so you have to as well. I’ve read that about 1/3 of college students identify as virgins, which is a far cry from the media portrayal of college as one big scary female-soul-crushing orgy.

And from Kyna Morgan's blog about women filmmakers Her Film who asked about the origins of the film from a personal perspective:

Therese: I was planning my own wedding at the time of the shooting, and was getting a little freaked out by all the chastity-based wedding rituals and coded wedding accessories. What would it mean for me to embrace the white dress, don a veil, and be ‘given away’? What would that say about my own sexual autonomy and identity? It echoes the narration of I Was a Teenage Feminist where I refer to myself as “a woman who feels incredible pressure to conform to an ideal that I don’t even buy into. Is it possible to be who I want to be without judgment, or apology or compromise?”

And this post written by Melanie Klein at Feminist Fatale on why the film is important amidst our culture's contradictory messages about sex:

Melanie: These manufactured, one-dimensional images of heterosexual sexuality constantly shoved down my throat (no pun intended). Running parallel to the cultural obsession with sex (and nude or near-nude ladies that grace countless magazine covers, billboards and populate advertisements), is the obsession with female virginity (so much so that many women opt to have their virginity restored via plastic surgery).
Clearly, with all this sex out there, the important issues regarding sex and sexuality are glossed over and given little media coverage. What remains in the public eye remains a vapid, one-dimensional image of sexuality and a perpetual reinforcement of the good girl/ bad girl (madonna/whore dichotomy)

[With thanks to superintern/editor Sara]

As we swing into the last two weeks of fundraising, we'll be posting some great little clips from the film.

Link your friends to these sneak peeks and encourage them to become backers and help get the film finished. We're counting on you to help us go all the way!

Our first 'Just the Tip' features Susan Schulz, the Editor-in-Chief of CosmoGirl! magazine, who you already met in the trailer discussing their Giant Virginity Survey. We're a big fan of this magazine because it provided honest and age-appropriate information on sexuality to teen and pre-teen girls. But not everyone was a fan. Here she talks about the story that got them some of their worst complaints ever –- but not from their readers.

Another example of how hard it is to have open, honest conversations about female sexuality.

One note: It includes a sort of whimsical illustration of a vulva, so this ain't suitable for work, folks.

UPDATE!
The party is Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Time: 6:30pm - 10:00pm
Location: Jake's Saloon
Street: 202 9th Avenue (btw 22nd & 23rd Streets)
City/Town: New York, NY

We're having a party and we hope you can be there!

June 29th is two days before our funding deadline, so we'll be raising the money to bridge that last gap to $10,000be celebrating surpassing our goal!!!!!

The bar is even donating part of their proceeds, so every beer and cocktail you drink helps the cause! For those of you not in the NYC area, we hope you tell all your NYC friends to join us so you can be there in spirit.

So please save the date June 29th and pass it on.

We are so grateful that you're part of this project and we hope to see you on the 29th!

Thanks!
Therese, Lisa & Team Trixie

We are almost at 50%. Love you.

We've gotten some great write-ups in the last week! Thanks to these sites & thanks to our supporters!

Jezebel
"A new film entitled How to Lose Your Virginity takes on the white dress — and in a world of abstinence-only education debates, wedding-crazed culture and a writ-large societal Virgin/Whore complex, this is obviously fertile ground."
http://jezebel.com/5548592/losing-your-virginity-is-harder-than-you-think

FBomb
"Therese Shechter, the awesome documentarian who brought us "I Was A Teenage Feminist," is it again, and this time she’s tackling virginity with “How to Lose Your Virginity.“ If this film is anything like Jessica Valenti’s awesome book The Purity Myth, I’m so there it’s insane."
http://thefbomb.org/2010/05/all-the-way/comment-page-1/#comment-6704

Geek Week
From an interview with Therese: "Pre-marital sex is nothing new, I just think we're talking about it a lot more, and we're more open about sex in general which is a good thing. It's allowing people to see that their own feelings about sexuality are shared by many others, and that there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to our intimate lives."
http://www.geekweek.com/2010/05/how-to-lose-your-virginity.html
Lena Chen at The Ch!cktionary "The trailer for the film is already being screened in human sexuality classes, and the companion blog, The American Virgin, has become a popular source for commentary on chastity, pop culture, and sexuality"
http://thechicktionary.com/post/663725594/make-how-to-lose-your-virginity-happen