I’ve talked before about religion’s bizarre obsession with sex. This video made me laugh, but it’s not really funny.
It’s about the most thinly-veiled abstinence advocacy I’ve ever seen. It goes beyond sexual celibacy and says that even kissing is off limits. I’ve seen little kids smooch each other. It’s about as small a deal as can possibly be. Kissing is a expression of affection that seems to be universal. If you’re lucky enough to receive a kiss from someone you care about, it’s an amazing thing. Why anyone would want to deny people such a simple pleasure baffles the rational mind.
There’s also a very telling moment, where the dad says:
What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who saved all his love just for you? One who never even kissed another woman, so he could share that just with you?
Seems like you got some of the words wrong there, dad. Let me fix that for you:
What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who has no clue what the hell he’s doing? One who’s never even kissed another woman, so he has essentially zero shot of being able to gratify you sexually?
There, much more accurate. They of course don’t show the kiss between the husband and wife, since the sight of Johnny Haircut slobbering all over her face as he tries to wrap his lips around hers would be a bit too much to handle. I’ve seen bad kissers; I’ve been kissed by bad kissers. Some people need all the practice they can get.
The guy who asks Pamela out and tries to kiss her is right to smirk – she straight out runs away from him. And it wouldn’t be a heavy-handed awkward Christian morality play unless there was some girl who kissed her boyfriend… with disastrous consequences (note: consequences not shown, just vaguely alluded to). Let’s assume she had sex with her boyfriend out of a sense of obligation. The problem isn’t kissing in this case, it’s that her friend is a spineless moron. If you’re not ready to have sex, you’ve got to learn to say so. When we don’t have honest discussions about sex with our children, this is the kind of shit that happens. It’s not because we didn’t tie their chastity belts on tight enough; it’s because we didn’t give them the wherewithal to say “I’m in charge of my sexuality.”
Some guys I know are still wowie-zowie about virgins. I’m 25 years old – if I meet a girl my age who’s a virgin, I’m wondering what happened in her past to make her that way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with not having sex, but it’s definitely unusual. “Saving yourself” for marriage is basically condemning your would-be spouse to having to teach you how to fuck. Sex is fun, and when done properly, is safe. Fetishizing sex and constructing elaborate taboos about what is essentially a biological function only serves to make us more obsessed, and more likely to do something stupid and dangerous.
You know, the really weird thing is that you and I have the same indictments (mostly) of religion. Legend says that I got kicked out of catechism school because I questioned the priest about something that really got him mad. It was something about confession and how confession would go against that whole “forgive us our sins” part of the Lord’s Prayer. I mean, why say it if we still have to go to confession? So I was never confirmed in the Catholic Church, which broke my one grandmother’s heart.
Hopefully, knowing how I turn out will more than make up for it. If not, it’s between her and God now.
The other bizarre thing here for me in this (and all abstinence propaganda) is the notion that you can “save all your love” for someone.
It treats love like a finite quantity, like we have a set amount of water for our entire lives and we need to carefully dole it out over the course of our life.
It’s just a bizarre conception.
I remember when I was 13 and getting ready for confirmation (Rene, you didn’t miss a damn thing :P). They gave us the sexuality talk in religion class, and they told us this parable of Fuzzy Bear and his box of secrets. I shit you not: this is how they thought to teach a lesson about sexuality to young adults – a goddamn bear.
The whole mystique about sex is that the first time is supposed to be somehow “special”. I remember my first time, and there weren’t nothin’ special about it. It was awkward and totally not worth the years of buildup. Once I got over my shock that I was actually having sex, things got a bit more fun. If and when I do marry, my first time with my wife will be made special by the fact that she’s a special person to me, not because I crammed my sexual feelings into a box of secrets.