Sunday, March 30, 2008

You're going to see many posts on the article in the NYT "Students of Virginity" covering the abstinence among Harvard students in the organization True Love Revolution.

Look, I could care less if university students want to abstain from having sex. Good for them for trying to take a stand against an increasingly pornified culture. The problem for these privileged kids is that they succeed in investing way too much focus and power on sex by making it a platform to display the perceived sanctity of their moral compass and personal virtue. Being a virgin doesn't mean you're a good person, it only means that you're not a person who has sex. More to the point, their organization makes my skin crawl because they base their abstinence program on misogyny and misinformation. It's not about individual choice, it's about placing women's worth on the sole measure of the state of the hymen. The group uses fake science conjured up by religious wackos designed to spread false ideas that link human sexuality to a base pathology.
For example, one dude in the group defends their platform on the following ideas:

“We found a huge body of scholarship that suggested conclusions that nobody on our campus was making,” he says. They posted the conclusions on their Web site — the belief that “ ‘safe sex’ is not safe”; that even the most effective methods of birth control can fail; that early sexual activity is strongly associated with all manner of terrible outcomes, from increased risk of depression to greater likelihood of marital infidelity, divorce and maternal poverty. Premarital abstinence, on the other hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better relationships and, best of all, enabling “better sex in your future marriage.”

Sexual encounters are presented as wholly unsafe, leading to mental and physical illness. Behold, it is only through the magic power of the heterosexual marriage under patriarchy that transforms sex into the officially approved version. The whole buying the cow and legally getting its milk thingy. This retrograde estimation of human sexuality as confined to hetero marriage is the height of antimodern, homophobic and antifeminist thought. How can they even keep a straight face saying that virginity until marriage results in better sex and stronger marriages? Based on what evidence? The highest divorce rates in the U.S. are in the bible belt in the South where folks like to think that they need a marriage license to have sex. They get married young and divorced young. Sexually inexperienced and repressed folks will not automatically become good lovers once the ring goes on.
Sigh.
And these are Harvard kids.

10 comments:

grimsaburger said...

You know what enabled better sex in my marriage? Premarital sex with my now-husband. Scandalous!

Medbh said...

Hee, Grims, scandalous indeed. You were mad to want to see if you were sexually compatible before you took the ring.
The whole article pissed me off with those smug kids thinking that women who have sex are whores. Jesus Christ, what year is this?

Sam, Problemchildbride said...

Bunch of numbnut fools.

Medbh said...

Sam, but the hymen is an all powerful talisman. If you don't break the magic seal until your wedding night you will live happily ever after.

daisy mae said...

any time one breaks a social more it seems to come back down on the woman.

i hate it even more when supposedly smart kids are the ones behind it... although weilding social power and privilege rather than thinking something through and making up your own mind is always the easier route.

Manuel said...

"making it a platform to display the perceived sanctity of their moral compass and personal virtue"

that's it right there.....that is exactly what it is.....

Medbh said...

Yes, Manuel, how does keeping your pants zipped make you a bastion of morality?
Denying the flesh has led to a host of moral transgressions from the clergy across history and cultures. Fuck that. If you want to aspire to being a moral individual, you're going to have to do a bit more than refrain from fucking.

fatmammycat said...

But teh sex and teh gays are so ungodly!
I dislike this kind of soapbox morality, there's more to any person's worth than virginity.

Eolaí gan Fhéile said...

I'd have more time for such abstinence if they didn't talk about it and weaponize it.

Medbh said...

Right, Eolai. It's not about them taking charge of their sexuality, it's about them using it as a cudgel to beat up other women and call them whores for having sex. At the end of the article that's exactly what we're left with: men want virgins and if you're not, you're a whore.
Fuck that.