First, I have long been on record, documented as thinking the bizarre chastity industry is totally weird and a total scam and fraud. Second, this article by Samantha Pugsley, reposted at Salon* from xoJane, isn't much better. It is a claim from young Samantha that her life is totally ruined, an assessment she makes from the vantage point of the world-weary wisdom she has amassed at the ripe old age of, maybe, 23? And, also, for the record, without names of venues and dates, I am a tad suspicious that she may have made that part of it up.
The weird "chastity" ceremony she says she went through when she was 10 and the farrago of hell-fire and damnation that would attend to her if she didn't keep it till her marriage night is responsible for her having a bad time. She says. And, here's the rub, she wishes she'd had the carefree and promiscuous lifestyle of a member of the hook-up scene instead.
Well, as we all know from the people we know and perhaps have been, nooooo one has ever screwed up their lives entirely by sleeping around before they married, during marriage and after marriage in the kewl hook-up scene today or - in that eternal news to the young who, despite what they believe, that their age cohort invented sex - people who are seriously old now, in the kinky swing scene so old fashioned and .... just so old, that its ridiculousness is a bit more obvious. Really, you kids in your latest fashions and multiple tattoos and body piercings are just this season's version of the polyester leisure suited, disco scene makers of your parents and, sadly, grandparents generation.
Call me skeptical but even as awful and as tacky and as screwed up as the "chastity" industry is - and it is a total fraud and atrocity - the "screw around' industry, with its attendant STDs, unintended pregnancies, abortions, not to mention the life enhancing aspects of being involved in a series of relationships or one-night-stands with a series of losers and users and abusers doesn't have a lot to be said for it either. Just think how kewl a really bad case of recurring herpes is. And that's one of the lesser life benefits of hook-up sex that so many have gotten from taking advice from sex-pos blogs like xoJane and the geezers running online magazines like Alternet, Salon etc. who repost those to try to get the kewl kids eyeballs on their advertising messages. And, in a final bid to turn off a few of you kids, your parents are looking at the same thing. Not to mention your grandparents. Kewl, no?
Hey, if the young Pugsley wants to be a volunteer mark for the pick-up artist set, pretending that what she's about is a feminist act, she can do that. But no one has to pretend it isn't what it is, a profoundly anti-feminist, anti-liberal act.
* I noticed that this first ran with the typo "Salong" which I was tempted to leave as it was. Because that's about what the Salon sex articles mostly are about.
NOBODY had sex until this...no, wait, this...no, wait, THIS generation...or was it that one...or....well, anyway, before now! No, wait: now! Darnit: NOW!
ReplyDeleteToo late.
There is a reason society developed rules for preventing bonobo sex among humans, and it has to do with disease as much as pregnancy as much as prurience. Texas has had "common law marriage" on the statute books since the beginning because it protected women (by immediately creating a property interest for wives in the property owned by the spouses) and the children (who immediately gained a father, as we always know who the mother is, at birth). The idea recognized, IOW, that people like to screw, and that there are consequences.
I, too, once dreamed of being part of the "hook up" scene. Until I realized how old I was, and that such a "scene" existed when I was in high school and college, and being who I am, I didn't try to take advantage of it then, either. But nor was it because of my twisted Victorian childhood....
Whenever I come to this theme I think about the psychoanalytic school of Vienna, and the determination that began there that we are fundamentally sexual creatures, driven and derided by our carnal appetites, and we might as well get good at it (as Stuart Brand advised in the Last Whole Earth Catalog, although he said we were as gods; but the difference is unimportant).
We are, as you say, better when we learn to control it. I know people who were free with their sexual favors (taking or giving, and in the male-female realm, it's still seen that way.). I don't much admire them today, or envy them. The questions of diseases, of self-regard, of living out a bad porn movie....I dunno, is that all there is? I remember the people they were sleeping with; and about the only attraction they had was their willingness to get naked and spread their legs.
Which is not all we are. Not by a long shot. If it was, all of human art would simply be pornography, and pornography would be our highest art form.
It's so weird that people, thirty years after AIDS first arose, haven't learned the first thing about the inadvisability of promiscuity. It's like everyone is a rather stupid 12-year-old. Or that we're supposed to encourage everyone to be a stupid 12-year-old. Well, I don't want to have sex with someone who is 12, not literally, not displaying the maturity and responsibility of one and having sex with multiple people lowers that level of maturity and responsibility.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit, I find a responsible adult to be a real turn on. And responsible adults don't sleep around.