Sex Can Wait
I was browsing Beliefnet just now because I have a tendency to wander into sites that I know will upset me. And this one didn't fail. Despite its approach to all different types of faith, including secular humanism and atheism and agnosticism, they seemed to like to include lots of material about "heroic" teenagers who are waiting for marriage and "heroic" speakers who travel to schools to promote abstinence. For a site supposedly encompassing all faiths, this trend really stuck out to me as pushing one set of beliefs on its visitors.
Look, ninety percent of the kids the speakers are talking to have already done it. It's too late for them, and all these speeches do is make them feel shitty for their choices. There's no way that they can go back - and anyway, why should they? Why are they not free to live their own lives; why must they listen to this one-sided advice from someone who doesn't even know them as a person?
Even the woman speaker whom the article was about admitted that a lot of her crowds don't file under the virgin moniker. But, she goes on, her speech doesn't aim to exclude them, but rather, persuade them that they can turn their lives around, stop having sex, and wait until marriage. Better their lives, she called it. Live for the greater good.
Most young people no longer possess their "full physical selves," as this site states. Most have already "given themselves entirely" to someone else. No matter how badly they wish they could go back and change that, they can't. We all know that secondary-virginity thing is bullshit. You lose something in that first time you can never get back, no matter how hard you pretend. And these speeches only make things worse for those who already regret that decision.
The response to that is generally, "Well, you shouldn't have done it then, if you regret it now." The truth is, a big cause of the regret for sex is because the influence on teens is that they should regret it. If we were taught that the choice is ours, we would only regret our bad timing or having made a bad choice of partner, not having had the sex before marriage. Is that understandable?
Presenting abstinence as the only option before marriage is somewhat judgmental. The message that should be being taught is not "wait for a common, specified, universal deadline." I believe that could lead into people getting married too soon in desperation for the feeling of carnal passion - as even Jessica Simpson admitted, "[Nick Lachey's and my wedding date] won't be too far off because I don't know how much longer we can wait!" (Cosmopolitan, June 2001)
I believe that this is a person's own choice to make. There is no reason why anybody should feel pressured to abstain from sex if they feel ready for it. All they need is to understand the consequences and be ready for anything that might lapse from their actions.
How is it affecting your life if unmarried people want to sleep together? How can you brush that off as a stupid choice, when you aren't the one having to make it? It's prejudice. You don't know what's going through the minds of those two people. Maybe - gasp! here comes a foreign concept - unmarried people can feel love, passion, can grasp the notion of when they're ready to have sex and when they're not and don't need a paper to tell them. Maybe they can make our own decisions. Give humanity a bit of credit. We aren't entirely stupid; we're not all out there screwing because television and movies tell us to. Most of us make decisions for ourselves.
There's an online campaign called "True Love Waits" that encourages visitors to pledge premarital abstinence. But to say "true love waits" is to deny any sort of love that has no wish to or cannot get married. If true love waits until marriage, does that mean that gays and lesbians don't feel true love and should never have sex (although some will argue that, based on their conventional definitions of the word, it takes a man and a woman to have sex)? Does that mean that a woman who never intends to marry should be denied the natural act of sex?
I even read an article by a devout Mormon that said the most common sins committed by young people are "necking and petting," because sex, and any type of activity that suggests or could lead to sex, should be saved for use only within the context of a marriage! So how far exactly are we allowed to go? Is holding hands too far to go before marriage to these people? Kissing? Oops, that could lead to sex, I suppose. Guess we'd all better stock up on garlic. Poor boyfriends.
The question is, if, deep down, everyone's a good person, and good people go to Heaven, why does there exist the myth of hell? To scare people into following the word of god? By the way, I read the Bible, and I found the quote that supposedly means to demand premarital abstinence: "Be faithful to your wife and give your love to her alone.... Why should you give your love to another woman, my son? Why should you prefer the charms of another man's wife?" (Proverbs 5.15-20) To me that means just to remain faithful to your spouse. Even if the word "love" was a euphemism for "sex," as some suggest, there still isn't any evidence of it being written to mean 'abstain from sex even before you are married'. Because having sex was how people got married back in those days! They weren't making up legal marriage contracts on sheepskin.
Trying to enforce your beliefs on others is dumb and ineffective. That would be like creating a poll with only the option, "Yes." If they didn't think "yes" was the correct answer, people would rebel by not voting in your poll at all, i.e. not listening to you, rather than change their minds. It's more wise to give them the options and let them make the choice for themselves.
Beliefnet would like you to believe that virgins are cooler and smarter than the rest of us. They are not, just like sexually-active teens are no cooler or smarter than them. We are all equal; the subject of our sex lives is nobody else's business and should not be used to classify or categorize us.
Sex can wait. But only if you want it to. Don't listen to them. It's nobody's business but your own.
Live, and let live.