Sex: Virginity: Rolling Stone reports with 4-letter words the growing Chr yng adult hardcore Virginity trend

I found this story in a heads-up at Evangelical Outpost, in a brief post there today. EO also gives a "coarse language" heads-up which I pass along. In the note, EO refers to a Rolling Stone article you can get to, via the clickable headline of this post, an article written by Jeff Sharlett; EO also points the way to 2 further posts, one on Get Religion, "Like a Virgin ... who won't shut up," and a longer article by the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr Albert J. Mohler Jr, 'The New Virgin Army' —Rolling Stone Meets Sexual Abstinence" in Christian Post (June 27). Mohler analyzes Sharlett's Rolling Stone article, which I've read with rapt attention, altho it's entirely framed by assumed 1woman1man marriage, and hardly notices even the mere existence of homos like me (a 65 yr old vowed celibate) and those in 2women intimate unions and 2men intimate unions. I suspect that Mohler and CP and all the Tuff Virgin movement would simply abandon us to promiscuity as our only option, no matter how hi the libidinal level of different persons may be. The fact is that not only do libidinal levels vary from person to person, and phase of life to phase life, but also the horizon of hope for a good permanent relationship factors into this version of the pursuit of Virginity as a personal Christian praxis - for the time being! That's a gripe. The deck is still stacked, and Evangelicalis, Virignists or no, remain sexually cruel in the "ethics" they proffer.

But one has to applaud the heroes, especially testosterone-loaded young men, who are finding techniques and mutual support to go up against the mainstream of the sexual mores of today, which pushes youngsters into sex, for many far too early, and as the Virginists suggest, if you can, why not wait? What a 1woman1man intimate union you may thereafter be able to make together, when both of you agree on the time and the solemnization in vows intended for life, to the exclusion of all others.

Mohler provides an interesting note on the vehicle reporting the new trend:

A couple of decades ago, Rolling Stone magazine represented the voice of the counter-culture. Now, Rolling Stone is no longer part of the counter-culture--it's mainstream in both audience and ideology. The magazine, we should note, has not shifted right. The culture has shifted left--at least on sex.

The sexual radicalism of the 1960s--the very culture that produced skyrocketing rates of teenage sexual activity, unmarried heterosexual cohabitation, the homosexual rights movement, and the eroticization of everyday life--has produced a moral context in which sexual abstinence before marriage appears nothing less than a perversion of the sexual norm.

Sharlet's article begins by suggesting that the "true face of the Christian right" just might be "that of a twenty-four-year-old religious-studies graduate student at New York University." Sharlet introduces us to Matt Dunbar, a young man who is described as committed to sexual abstinence, but not to prudery. To him, marital sex is "communion," and the act of sexual intercourse--and all other sexual activity--is restricted to the confines of heterosexual marriage.

Another note from Mohler, I had also noticed in reading the Sharlett RS article:

The most interesting part of the Rolling Stone article is the reporter's fundamental assumption that the real agenda behind the campaign for sexual abstinence must be political. Early in the article, Sharlet makes this claim: "Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God's last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom." When Dunbar describes sexual abstinence as a form of rebellion, Sharlet jumps to the political sphere. As he sees it, conservative Christians are now pushing the issue of sexual abstinence in order to make "every young man and woman part of an elite virgin corps."

At times, the article reveals interesting insights and incisive analysis. Sharlet seems to understand the cultural awkwardness that comes with a commitment to sexual abstinence. Something has to explain this counter-cultural behavior, and Sharlet just assumes that the rise of the new Christian right must have something to do with it.

As a matter of fact, he cites the rise of an entire body of literature committed to sexual abstinence before marriage and programs of abstinence-based sex education and sees the Christian right discovering a platform. Sharlet suggests that "it wasn't until the Clinton years that the Christian right fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars."

Clearly, Sharlet hasn't been hanging around conservative Christians for very long. Anyone who thinks that the idea of sexual abstinence is a recent development tied to a political agenda within the Christian right just hasn't been in touch with conservative Christianity. As a matter of fact, the reporter's analysis serves as a fascinating lens through which to see the sexual values of the dominant media class. They haven't considered sexual abstinence as an option for years, and at least some of them have a hard time believing that sexual abstinence before marriage was ever considered the normative expectation for young people. Coming of age in the 1960s--or raised by parents who came of age in the 1960s--those who live in the dominant sexual culture now hear the idea of sexual abstinence as something genuinely innovative and assuredly radical.

There is a serious flaw in Sharlett's (two "tt"s, Dr Mohler!) conceptual construct which politicizes the topic under examination, but who knows, Sharlett may prove to be somewhat "prophetic" in that in these days any trend falls to corruption of extreme politicization via its mediazation - a form of commercialization, to be sure.

Like EO, I too thank The Reform Club for the heads-up. This RS / EO / CP attention will throb thru the Evangelical and broader media for many days to come. But, there's little notice thru-out what I've seen so far, that there's been a very widespread abstinence education in the USA among teens and twenties folk, where now the twentysomethings are the alums and taking the values upon themselves in milieux actively negative toward what they want to achieve for their own lives and marriages.

In closing, Crane Brinton in his celebrated A History of Western Morals, every wave of Puritanism brings forth a new reactionary swing of the pendulum to permissivism in Western sexual behaviour, and vice versa. - Owlb