Sexual Counterrevolutionaries

by hilzoy

I've just been reading (via Pandagon) the oddest article. It's from Rolling Stone, and it's about twenty-something Christians who have embraced chastity. And "embraced chastity" is, I think, the right way to put it: they don't just not have sex, they seem to have made it the organizing principle of their lives in a way that strikes me as very sexualized, and certainly very strange.

"After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. "Cleavage everywhere," notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter."

I guess not.

They seem to have a fairly repellent view of men:

"The most important of these books is Every Man's Battle, which, in the past five years, has become a powerful brand name unto itself, with dozens of Every Man spinoff titles: Every Young Man's Battle, Every Woman's Battle, Preparing Your Son for Every Man's Battle and on and on. (...) The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he'd slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.

"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves. They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen. And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."

The books' implicit disdain for non-Christian women - in Every Young Man's Battle, one name for a sexually active unmarried woman is "Betty Jo 'B.J.' Blowers" -- is matched by their reverence for the virtue of Christian womanhood. There are books that address the temptations faced by Christian women, but the Every Man series more often presents the decadence of the world as a result of men's failure to be guardians and servants of female purity."

Their view of women leaves something to be desired as well:

"This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.

Therein lies the paradox of the virginity movement. It is at once an attempt to transcend cultural influences through the timelessness of Scripture and a painfully specific response to the sexual revolution. The "women's lib" movement, Dunbar believes, preached a message of self-satisfaction: "Do what you want." It is, in his view and that of many in the virginity movement, a product of the same cultural mindset that produced America's booming porn industry. Both are based on instant gratification: women obsessed with winning the privileges of men rather than learning to enjoy the pleasures of Christian submission, men demanding the fast-food sexuality of explicit imagery."

And the huge focus on the sex they are not having:

"The world, she says, is pulsing with sex. Some of it ugly; some of it, like the Song of Solomon, very beautiful; and most of it stupid and sad. Most people, she says, can't help but look at the world through what she calls the "flesh-colored lens." But Christians, she says, see a different reality. Like The Matrix, she claims. The Wachowski brothers' trilogy of women in black latex and men with big guns have become cult films to Christian conservatives, drawn by the Christ story at the movies' core, the search for "the One" - i.e., the Messiah. The fact that the series portrays the everyday world as not only in a state of decay but ruled by evil forces makes for an easy parallel to the theology of Christendom.

Years ago, in college, Broadway participated in a Campus Crusade for Christ "infiltration" of the University of California at Berkeley, an attempt to plant covert evangelists in "subcultures" at the university so that they could gather information that could later be used to convert Bay Area heathens. It was, she says, a raid on enemy territory.

"The students were the enemy?" I asked. She thinks for a while. No, she said. Lust was. Evil is like an ocean, icy cold. Non-Christians are on the verge of drowning, but they don't realize their peril. Their minds are dulled by hypothermia. When a Christian pulls them out of the water, they struggle. The warmth makes their frozen nerve ends scream. "It hurts," says Broadway.

Before Power became fully Christian - back when he cared as much about his guitar as he did about God - he dated a non-Christian girl. His voice gets husky as he remembers: "There were times, when we were naked, and my tongue was inside her, and she's whispering for me to go further." Dunbar is staring at him. He knows this story, but he doesn't mind hearing it again. It's not prurient for them, it's bonding. "There were times," continues Power, "when I had to ask myself, 'What do I believe?' " "

Please.

Now: I have a somewhat unusual take on this. I converted to Christianity at thirteen, and promptly set about reading the Bible cover to cover. (I never did manage to get through Second Chronicles, but I read the rest, repeatedly.) At that time, sex was not an issue for me, but it was abundantly clear to me that there was just no way to read the Bible honestly without coming to the conclusion that God did not want us to have sex outside marriage. Why He didn't, I had no idea: I could see, more or less, why pride and deceit and violence were wrong, but what was wrong with sex outside marriage was a mystery to me. Nonetheless, however mysterious, I thought that this was plainly God's view; and that that more or less settled the matter, as far as I was concerned. I didn't lose my faith until I was 22, and so I understand perfectly why someone might decide, for religious reasons, not to have sex until marriage, and why it might be, shall we say, interesting to go through high school and college while holding this view. That said, these people strike me as deeply strange.

For one thing, it is not, in fact, impossible to live by such a decision without surrounding yourself with like-minded people, thinking and talking about it endlessly, going to 'purity balls' (discussed elsewhere in the article), or coming up with repellent ideas like the masturband or, shudder, the purity ring. You just have to set your mind to it, and draw a line in your mind that you are simply not going to cross, the way most people simply will not steal things, however much they might want them. (I, for instance, am halfway in love with a colleague's 60s Jaguar: I would really, really, really love to own that car. But it would never cross my mind to steal it, and this is not because my desire to own it lacks intensity. Same psychological mechanism.)

So I read this and think: clearly, when you decide not to do something, it helps to have supportive friends to talk things through with. But why all these elaborate social rituals? Isn't that even counterproductive, if you think that at least part of the reason why God might frown on extramarital sex is that it distracts you from more important things, like His glory? Amanda at Pandagon says that it reminds her of anorexia; it reminds me a lot more of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its slogans and support networks and alcohol-free get-togethers, and in general its transformation of giving up drinking into an entire way of life. (I should say that while I have, luckily, never had the need for AA or any of its sibling groups, I realize that they can do a lot of good. What I don't see is why deciding not to do something you've never done before should be so much like deciding to stop doing something you've built your life around.)

But then, people are just strange about sex. When I was in college, I didn't eat meat (and still don't, as you can tell from my comments in the Eat The Whales! thread.) But no one thought that that was because I was revolted by the idea of consuming animal flesh. The idea that someone might decide not to eat meat on moral grounds struck my friends as perfectly straightforward. It always used to puzzle me that no one seemed capable of entertaining the idea that one might similarly decide not to have sex before marriage: everyone, except for my boyfriends and exes, seemed to assume that this must have something to do with fear or shame. I thought they were wrong at the time; looking back, I know they were. And even they, at the time, didn't think this because, knowing me, it seemed plausible; often they were puzzled by the fact that I didn't seem like the sort of person who would be scared of sex, and yet, having made this decision, I somehow had to be. And I found the idea that this was, apparently, the only decision one could make which could not be explained without positing some strange dark psychological force really peculiar. I still do.

My boyfriends weren't always that much help either. Boyfriend no. 1, a Christian, was also opposed to sex before marriage, but for him it was about fear, as I realized after the first time we kissed, when he spent the entire next day in the chapel, repenting. (Really.) As far as he was concerned, the fact that I had no such qualms meant that I must be the original Whore of Babylon. Not knowing any better (he was, after all, Boyfriend no. 1, and it didn't cross my mind until much later that I was his Girlfriend no. 1), I assumed he must be right, odd as it seemed. Boyfriend no. 2, also Christian, assumed that the parts of the Bible about sex were somehow not to be taken seriously, and that the only possible reason why I might disagree was that I didn't know how much fun sex would be. (Wrong.) Thus, whenever he decided that I was, in fact, enjoying myself, which was often, he would decide that any qualms I had must have vanished, and so he should just take all my clothes off and have sex with me right then and there. (Wrong again.) He also spent a lot of time trying to make me feel guilty about this, and he succeeded, since I tended, at the time, to assume that everyone but me knew what relationships were supposed to involve. It was only Boyfriend no. 3, an atheist, who made it clear that while he really, really wished I'd change my mind about this, he respected my right to decide what I wanted to do, and never once tried to guilt-trip me about it, for which I remain profoundly grateful.

Which is to say: Boyfriends nos. 1 and 2 acted exactly the way my friends in college would have expected. No. 1 had opted for chastity, but in his case it clearly was because he has terrified of sex. No. 2 had not, and as far as he was concerned the fact that his attitude towards sex was relatively uncomplicated was all it took to explain that decision. Moreover, they both assumed that one's attitude towards sex (scared or not) would obviously determine one's decision about whether or not to have sex. That was why I seemed to confuse them: no. 1 couldn't wrap his mind around my not being terrified the way he was; no. 2 could never figure out why, not being terrified, I wasn't willing to just go for it.

All very peculiar. So maybe there's something I just don't get, something that explains why these people feel the need to surround their virginity (or, in some cases, their 're-virginity', an odd concept if I ever heard one) with a protective exoskeleton of weirdness.

Whatever it is, though, I don't think it will ever convince me that men are beasts, that women should learn to delight in submission to any mere mortal, that masturbands aren't just plain ludicrous, or that I would have been better off if my Dad had given me a purity ring. Just reading this article gives me the sense of looking in on an alien world, one that is incomprehensible and creepy, and one I'm glad I don't have to live in.

Comments

[heet]

I agree that it is utterly unproductive to obsess about sex to the degree these folks are obviously doing. I've heard some of these stories before and it is strange that people who want to purge their lives with the distraction of sex will devote such effort to worrying about it.

However, I'm not so sure it has much to do with sex. It is about morality, and trying to hold their (supposedly) superior morality above everyone else. They can go around patting each other on the back, tell each other how pious they are, and most importantly, how decadent and disgusting the rest of the world is. They can hate hollywood, liberals, Europeans, basically everyone but their inner circle with impunity. It is just a way of making an "in group" and an "other group".

And that purity ring thing is utterly ridiculous. What year is this, again?

[Anderson]

Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.

If I weren't writing a brief, I'd be searching a hypertext of Aquinas to see whether it's even possible to sin in one's dreams.

Confining sex to marriage makes a fair amount of sense in a world without contraception or STD preventions/cures. To what extent the Biblical prohibition is as local as (say) wearing n tassels on one's garments, is a question that these Masturband wearers (wasn't that on Seinfeld are probably not interested in pursuing. (We could call that approach the "Living Bible," but I hear that's been taken.)

[Jackmormon]

In the Christian conservative version of The Matrix, did Neo and Trinity get married between movies 1 and 2?

If they didn't, that twenty minute-long sex scene at the opening of Matrix 2 might be theologically problematic. As opposed to just godawfully ghastly.

[Gromit]

Jackmormon: In the Christian conservative version of The Matrix, did Neo and Trinity get married between movies 1 and 2?

But wouldn't Neo, being the proxy for Christ, be part of the Trinity? Did I just blow your mind?

If they didn't, that twenty minute-long sex scene at the opening of Matrix 2 might be theologically problematic. As opposed to just godawfully ghastly.

Ugh, and I had nearly expunged those 20-foot spit ropes from my memory. Thanks a lot!

[hilzoy]

So, is there something I'm missing about all this? And aren't those masturbands bizarre?

[Gromit]

It sounds a bit like a modern form of asceticism to me, Hilzoy.

[Digital Amish]

Wish I had thought of that when I was younger, it would have saved me a lot of angst -- 'my inability to get laid proves my moral superiority'.

[hilzoy]

Gromit: yeah, but a lot of the standard forms of asceticism would have extended a lot more broadly, and wouldn't have had the same 'cool people are virgins' aspect. (I mean: the early celibates were godly, but not cool.) Maybe, though, this is some sort of odd modern variant: St. Anthony meets Madison Avenue.

[cleek]

this sounds a lot like the Straight Edge skater punks i used to see at college. they'd strut around with big black X's on their hands, all tough and HardCore! but ready enough to tell you what they stood for (no drugs, alcohol, etc - originally because the black X meant you were old enough to get into the club to see the band but too young to drink).

'my inability to get laid proves my moral superiority'

their inability to legally drink proves their moral superiority, in this case.

[liberal japonicus]

It is only a matter of time before masturband is taken up as the name of a punk combo, which would then probably advocate free sex.

This survey might give some pause.

Adolescents who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are more likely to substitute high-risk sexual behaviors that increase the likelihood of transmitting sexually transmitted diseases, according to researchers who studied the sex lives of about 12,000 teens.

The report by Yale and Columbia University researchers could help explain why a study by the same group last year found that despite having fewer sexual partners and getting married earlier, teens who pledge abstinence are just as likely to have STDs as their peers.

I was looking for their previous survey, which apparently said:

Last year, the same research team found that 88% of teens who pledge abstinence end up having sex before marriage, compared with 99% of teens who do not make a pledge.

As for that 1% who didn't make the pledge and still struck out, like digital amish said, I wish I had known.

[Cryptic Ned]

When I was in college, I didn't eat meat (and still don't, as you can tell from my comments in the Eat The Whales! thread.) But no one thought that that was because I was revolted by the idea of consuming animal flesh. The idea that someone might decide not to eat meat on moral grounds struck my friends as perfectly straightforward. It always used to puzzle me that no one seemed capable of entertaining the idea that one might similarly decide not to have sex before marriage: everyone, except for my boyfriends and exes, seemed to assume that this must have something to do with fear or shame.

I think it's pretty logical why one would understand vegetarianism as a moral choice, but not abstinence.

When you refuse to eat meat on moral grounds, it's because you don't want to cause suffering to animals, right? That's understandable, although people might say that you're a bleeding-heart idealist. However, when you refuse to have sex on moral grounds...what exactly are the "moral grounds"? It's because God doesn't want you to, and there's no other explanation for it. It's certainly not because you want to avoid harm to yourself or others. So people who don't take the Bible literally have a tough time understanding that.

I think I was in a similar position to your Boyfriend #3. I'm a Deist sort of person, and had a girlfriend who was evangelical, although she was also a scientist and therefore virtually never evangelized because she was aware that virtually nobody could possibly be converted no matter what she did.

So...she would do everything except sexual intercourse. She wasn't a hypocritical Philistine sort of religious person, and she never justified her abstinence as because of the Bible; she just said it was her choice, based on morality. I had no idea what her logic was behind both giving and receiving oral sex, but not having intercourse, but because it was some sort of religious decision I knew that it was pointless to argue. It seemed like a complete lapse in her ordinarily logical mind, though.

[Cryptic Ned]

Obviously, the first paragraph in my post was a quote; should have been italicized.

[Anderson]

Adolescents who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are more likely to substitute high-risk sexual behaviors that increase the likelihood of transmitting sexually transmitted diseases, according to researchers who studied the sex lives of about 12,000 teens.

Yes, a friend had to explain the term "vaginal virgin" to me. And it reminds me of my ex-girlfriend's description of how she & her then-best friend stayed virgins in high school: the ex picked oral sex as her piece de resistance (so to speak), her friend picked anal. Apparently they were able to sell the guys on this without too much trouble.

A wristband expressing one's abstinence from anal sex sounds like a much-needed addition to the chastity warrior's armory!

[Jackmormon]

Man, "vaginal virgin" makes little sense to me. When I was a chaste practicing Mormon, hearing all that theology about how sacred sex was within marriage, I copped immediately to the principle that sexual pleasure no matter the position was the deciding factor.

[Anarch]

Maybe, though, this is some sort of odd modern variant: St. Anthony meets Madison Avenue.

To me, it's more like (the Renaissance depiction of) Saint Sebastian meets Madison Avenue. "Look at me! I'm covered in arrows and blood and stuff! I'm SUFFERING! Aren't I COOL?!?!?!"

*has a severe dislike of those bloody St Sebastian images*

[bob mcmanus]

Somewhere deep from the recesses of my vaguely remembered Catholic Catechism:

"Chastity is a Virtue, Continence is a Gift."

[liberal japonicus]

I copped immediately to the principle that sexual pleasure no matter the position was the deciding factor.

Why don't Baptists have sex standing?

It's too much like dancing...

[Anarch]

I learned that one as:

Q: Why don't Baptists approve of sex?
A: Because it might lead to dancing.

Good times :)

[carpeicthus]

Haha, I'd love to see that band, Anderson.

[carpeicthus]

I'd also like to note that all men should be forced into long-term sexual-but-not-coital relationships their first time around. When you finally feel ready for a full sexual relationship, you'll be advantageously well-rounded.

[Anarch]

A wristband expressing one's abstinence from anal sex sounds like a much-needed addition to the chastity warrior's armory!

I dunno; it doesn't exactly seem like the wrist is the place you'd want to put that...

[matttbastard]

A wristband expressing one's abstinence from anal sex sounds like a much-needed addition to the chastity warrior's armory!

I dunno; it doesn't exactly seem like the wrist is the place you'd want to put that...

How about skivvies with the phrase 'exit only' on the behind?

[hilzoy]

Yikes. Let me just say that at least I was more consistent than those vaginal virgins. (I also tried to avoid the sort of situation in which one is forever asking, is this sex? No? What about this?, since it seemed unfair to all concerned.) What a ludicrous interpretation of chastity.

And to Cryptic Ned: the explanation I gave was more or less the one I gave above: for some reason that I didn't understand, God had forbidden it; He was omniscient and I was not, so the fact that I didn't understand this prohibition didn't seem like a reason to doubt its truth; so that was that. -- If you were like Boyfriend No. 3 in this respect, I'd like to thank you on behalf of women everywhere. He had his flaws, of course, but the fact that he never once tried to make me feel bad about this (or anything else, for that matter) was really wonderful of him, especially after the confusing juxtaposition of Nos. 1 and 2, who tried to make me feel bad about diametrically opposite things.

[Anderson]

Haha, I'd love to see that band, Anderson.

I, um, misplaced mine or something ....

[kenB]

When I was in college, I didn't eat meat...But no one thought that that was because I was revolted by the idea of consuming animal flesh.

You were keeping relatively enlightened company, then. I've encountered a number of people who assumed that because I was a vegetarian, I must somehow be afraid of meat (one joker waved a bite of steak at me and make scary "ooooh" noises). And you can see that attitude in pop culture from time to time -- for instance, there was a Far Side cartoon where an "Al's Meats" truck was crashing into a vegetarian restaurant and all the patrons were panicking (more so, presumably, than if it had been any ther kind of truck that was crashing into the restaurant).

[Opus]

Isn't this just an attempt to create a clique, so the kids who are trying to remain chaste can feel "cool" in some way? Thus the wristbands and Purity Events, etc. I suppose the notion on the parts of the adults who created all this stuff is that all the trappings of a Kool Kids Klub would make it easier to resist The Sinful World.

I think it's unnecessary. Good parenting and mentoring can give a child a secure sense of self in which he or she can choose to abstain from anything and stick to it, despite peer pressure. Hell, there are plenty of kids who don't have those things and still stick to their plans, whatever they are.

Anyway, I agree with hilzoy that it's an awful lot of time focusing on sex for kids who are pledging not to have sex.

[John Thullen]

Yes, this seems oddly inverted but wonderfully American.
A fad that is no fun, just for fun.

All that thinking about not having sex and all that talking about not having sex. I wonder if the girls' masturbands match in some way their belly button rings or their thongs? Kind of a matched set but a mixed message.

So they don't masturbate either? But they talk about not doing it all the time. If this happens on the phone, what sort of non-phone sex is it?

Despite Thomas Aquinas, I sin all the time in my dreams but I never get credit for it.

So, when the teenaged boys lock themselves in the bathroom, do their mothers worry that maybe they're spending too much time thinking about not abusing themselves? And the answer "Nothing!" is actually true.

And the handshaking thing? Do we need to think all the time where everyone's hands have been? If a guy wears gloves on a date, what might the girl conclude from this?

I find the entire phenomenon described here extraordinarily exciting. The thought of these young Christians postponing all gratification. When it finally occurs, it really will be the Rapture.

No straying eyes either?! To quote Paul Newman from some movie of other when his eyes were directed somewhere interesting: "Hey, everyone needs to look somewhere!"

[hilzoy]

John: "When it finally occurs, it really will be the Rapture."

Actually, I thought that one of the many things the authors of the celibacy books discussed in the article do that's just wrong is to build up how wonderful it will be to finally have sex for the first time on one's wedding night. " A "sexual payoff," according to the authors of Every Man's Battle, that will "explode off any known scale." " (Kapow!)

Especially for the women, who will experience these transports while in considerable pain. Strange but true. And even for the guys: I have always found that, like most activities, one gets better at it with practice.

[liberal japonicus]

From Young Frankenstein

Igor: You know, I'll never forget my old dad. When these things would happen to him... the things he'd say to me.

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: What did he say?

Igor: "What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don't you get out of there and give someone else a chance?"

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

This story, and the fact that I have been hanging out at a bridge tournament for four days, remind me of the fact that people are deeply weird.

[John Thullen]

Good point. I'm sure putting the pain and probably the boredom back into sex for women is high on the agenda. Though I'm sure, despite my cynicism, that many who wait until marriage for sex have great, fulfilling sex lives. It's the weird, programmatic nature of the thing, isn't it?

"young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." Dobson, et al. need to grow the ---k up. If that isn't the sexual objectification of a female engaged in a lovely, innocent act..? ... a normal person would avert their eyes so as to not cause the woman embarrassment rather than averting their eyes in the utterly selfish act of looking after their own avoidance of arousal.

Dobson is a pervert. It is a joke among many Iranian women that the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote lengthy treatises of exactly this nature, cataloguing all the nasty ways women get to men. Dobson and the ayatollahs, and I guess Bush too: going to war led by their erections.

They love death but they hate sex. Perverts.

On a closely related topic, read the article in the current New Yorker (or see "The Future of a Conservative Political Movement" post over at Red State referencing the article) about Patrick Henry College.

Especially the part where the students must pledge, among other things, that Hell is a place where "all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity." Why do I have the feeling they want to move the torment forward into this life, for the Other, at the hands of their government. This, and checking people's hands to see what they might have been up to is not something I want my government leaders doing.

This idea of infiltrating is, I don't know, creepy. I don't care for this training of cadres to burrow within institutions, undercover, until ... what?

I fully expect I will end up like Kevin McCarthy at the end of the first "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and his reprise in the middle of the Donald Sutherland remake, leaping onto the hood of a car, terrified, pleading with the folks within that "they are coming, they are here" but it will be too late.

All of this utterly creeps me out.

By the way, you are either up late or up early.

[Covaithe]

This all reminds me of times when I, as a teenager in the early 90s, used to get a cheap thrill out of reading the back pages of MovieGuide magazine. MovieGuide was one of those Christian movie reviewe 'zines where they rated the movies on content instead of quality, and the back pages were where they would review the really bad (by their metric) movies, complete with lengthy, detailed descriptions of the sex scenes. When I got to the level of (alleged) maturity where I was allowed to rent movies without parental supervision, I inevitably found myself picking movies based on those back pages, and was often disappointed that the movies themselves weren't nearly as exciting as the reviews had led me to expect.

Oh, and the masturbands are just hilarious.

[Opus]

Are the guys the only ones with masturbands? Because once those chaste boys find chaste Christian babes with whom to naturally relieve that pressure within the sanctity of marriage, they might want to pass the bands onto chaste Christian single women who, probably a little later than the men, might need them. Or have TPTB in this movement not acknowledged female "sex for one"?

[Paul]

The fact that the [Matrix movies portray] the everyday world as not only in a state of decay but ruled by evil forces makes for an easy parallel to the theology of Christendom.

An even better parallel is to the theology of Gnosticism . Which, when you add their loathing for sins of the flesh, is exactly what these Junior Anti-Sex Leaguers sound like.

(That Wikipedia article is pretty good. I was not aware that a modern Gnostic church--the Apostolic Johannite Church--existed.)

As I remarked in the thread on Re-Orientation Boot Camps, the sadomasochistic flavor to so much of the Christian Right's approach to sexuality is what intrigues me. Mix this with patriarchialism, a degree of authoritarianism, free floating resentment, and good old fashioned eschatological fervor, and you have a demographic that's just waiting to be used.

The masturbands are pretty good, but not as good as "re-virgining."

[Jesurgislac]

Hilzoy: I converted to Christianity at thirteen, and promptly set about reading the Bible cover to cover.

It's interesting - I was brought up to be a Christian, and ceased to be one somewhere between age 10 and age 20. (I cannot pinpoint the exact age: it was a gentle drifting away rather than an abrupt conversion.) But, somewhere around age 10 or 11, I decided I was going to read the Bible cover to cover, and did. (I may have skipped some of the later prophets, but for the most part, I got through the lot: and large chunks of it, more than once.)

I can still quote the Bible more extensively than any fundamentalist Christian I've met: one useful side-effect of this self-imposed study was that I can tell when someone is talking BS about "it says so in the Bible" and they know this because they read someone telling them so.

But one thing I definitively didn't get out of reading the Bible: that God wants any specific kind of sexual behavior from people. There were far too far too many examples, all over both Testaments, of people who were definitely approved-of by God having sex outside marriage, inside marriage, with multiple partners, incestuously, even committing rape - while the rules about sex were stuck into a couple of books with many, many other rules that I could see for myself no one obeyed any more, or even cared about. (I didn't, at that time, know any Orthodox Jews.)

I can certainly see where you got the idea from: but it's not something I picked up from rigorous Bible study.

[hilzoy]

Jes: yes, there were lots of people God approved of who sinned in all sorts of ways, but my reading of that was that it was possible to sin and yet be found, on the whole, good. That didn't seem to mean that it would be OK to go out and sin, counting on some unspecified other aspect of me to pick up the slack.

As for the Bible and sex: I just took it for granted that the disapproval of fornication and adultery found throughout the NT meant that they were out.

[Jesurgislac]

Hilzoy: I just took it for granted that the disapproval of fornication and adultery found throughout the NT meant that they were out.

I never thought about it. It never struck me as being an especially important aspect of the New Testament. (Come to that, it still doesn't, now.) The other part of the Bible, besides some of the later prophets, that I tended to skip on later re-reads was Paul's letters to the various early Christian churches.

Perhaps my mind was less on sex when I read the Bible than yours was? (I did my first read-through when pre-pubertal - certainly before I was 12: not a snide comment, just an observation.)

[hilzoy]

Jes -- when I read it sex wasn't particularly on my mind either. (I was in the phase when full-blown ghastly crushes were more or less continuous, but I only ever imagined them leading to kisses. Sex wasn't even on my mental horizon.) It was rather that once the question did arise, the answer seemed obvious, and (unfortunately) impossible to explain away without giving up any claim at all to intellectual honesty.

Whether or not one reads Paul's letters does, I think, make a huge difference. (I did.)

And may I say, OT, that it's really unsettling that of all the things I've ever written, the one piece where I discuss my adolescent views on sex gets linked on the Daou report.

[Jesurgislac]

Whether or not one reads Paul's letters does, I think, make a huge difference.

I guess. I just never saw him as being especially relevant (his "authority from God" was too plainly entirely self-bestowed, insofar as it existed at all) and - while I can imagine which translation you read in makes a difference - didn't find his letters as compelling a read as other parts of the book.

I was in the phase when full-blown ghastly crushes were more or less continuous

Well, to me that is a phase when sex is on your horizon. YMMV. ;-) I read it before I was even getting full-blown ghastly crushes, and while I understood the mechanics of how people have sex, had absolutely no concept of why people want to do it.

[McDuff]

Back when I was a Christian, I definitely tried to believe that God didn't really care about who you had sex with as much as He cared about, say, social justice.

I left Christianity in no small part because the Bible pretty much showed it wasn't true, at least if you were a woman. The entire sexual mechanism in the bible was based on a treatment of women as property, as baby-making machines and whores. Sexual morality isn't the only part that drove me out: Biblical morality is, by any modern metric, almost entirely effed up. If you tried to live your life exactly as written without "interpreting" the scriptures in a modern context you'd probably go about a month without being arrested, during which you would no doubt lose all your friends.

This kind of thing is just one more set of people trying to respond to the idle whims of a perverted God without going into the desert and living on locusts forever. If you try and combine the vagaries of religious life with the realities of living in a world with medicine and feminism, you get exactly this kind of madness.

Don't blame them, blame their God.

[Desert Island Boy]

In a situation like this, I must protest that when the AFI came out with the Top 100 movie quotes of all time, that this particular line was nowhere to be seen.

"You are in more dire need of a blowjob than any white man in history."

- Adrian Cronauer, Good Morning Vietnam

[Nicholas Weininger]

One could perhaps have some fun selling these folks masturbands emblazoned with the caption

"Master of my domain."

Not sure what percentage would get it.

[Anarch]

Not sure what percentage would get it.

Not nearly enough, which is what makes that idea genius :D

[Francis/Brother Rail Gun of Reasoned Discourse]

i have the sudden urge to . . .

hmmm, this is a family blog. Just use your imagination; you're probably correct.

[Anarch]

Does it involve rail guns?

[Jackmormon]

The different reading experiences of hilzoy and jes to me seem to me inseperable from the cultural differences between the US and England. It would be hard for me to explain myself further without slipping into drooling assertions (which is why I didn't comment on this some four hours ago), but my very general observation is that American culture suggests, particularly to its young, that absolute systems and judgments are possible and desirable.

Paul's letters also made quite an impression on me, as a young Christian, devoutly reading through the Bible at around 12 as I thought I should. My grandparents gave me a lovely KJT edition (carefully indexed and footnoted by Deseret Books) when I was eight. My New Critical mother taught me to write in books. This volume sits next to my computer today. I can watch in the index how my young self processed Paul's extraordinary, doctrinal codification of Christ's simple message.

Since my earliest read-through was entirely in green ink (and with less precise lettering), I can know exactly how I reacted to Paul when I first read him between 12 and 13. For example, I circled 1 Cor. 7:32-34 and wrote: "Paul isn't married! How would he know? I don't agree!!!" If you check the verse, you might guess that it's the idea that marriage would alter so entirely the spiritual orientation of a woman that would bother me--and, from a Mormon point of view, that marriage (ie, sexual relations) would block a person's vision of God.

I suppose that one of the reasons Paul made such an impression on me is that he is, in the NT, the most systematic thinker. That system to me limited in very unappealing ways Christ's message--yet I recognized it then as now as necessary for founding a solid Christian philosophy.

Then, at around 16, I read Kant for the first time...

[Ken C.]

I would think that young women would feel more relaxed and reassured around young men whose armbands signified "I've masturbated multiple times within the last six hours (and therefore don't feel an urgent need to go at you Right Now)". And who wouldn't wear such an armband proudly?

[Jesurgislac]

Jackmormon: The different reading experiences of hilzoy and jes to me seem to me inseperable from the cultural differences between the US and England.

I think also the cultural differences between a young and sincere convert to Christianity, and someone - as I was - who had been brought up inside one of the Christian sects most certain that what God cares about is social justice.

[Nathan J Clouden]

Challenging youth to wait until they are an adult is one thing. Scaring the heck out of them, and telling them a condom is a provision for sin is irresponsible. Did you know the Lovers in the Song of Solomon have sex in Chapter 2, but don't get married until Chapter 3? The kind of ignorance Church leaders have about this sort of in-your-face premarital sex in the Bible has gone on too long. If you want to know more, go to my website. It's cheaper than a Purity Ring and a lot more fun than abstinence.

-The Scott

http://www.NotAnotherGeneration.com