Abstinence: Close Your Eyes and Think of Gandhi

Sure, I’ll admit it. Sex Like Men has been out of commission. But that was before a spokesperson for the anti-sex campaign went and employed my phrase, in the goddamn New York Times Magazine (you’ll remember them from that classic piece, “The Kids Call It Hooking Up”). This most recent article features Harvard student and abstinence-crusader Janie Fredell, who argues that:

“Conventional feminism teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. ‘I am an unconventional feminist,’ Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.”

While abstinence-only programs are federally funded and touted by many of the nation’s leaders as the only moral choice, on a conventional college campus in the Northeast, the public decision to abstain from sex can be a lonely road. But Janie had coping mechanisms of her own: “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”

No Sex For You: Apparently, Sex Has Consequences

The cover of today’s “Week In Review” is all about sex–but not the fun kind.

Randy Kennedy reports on a recent trend in art and literature of sending increasingly severe messages about sex. Instead of having sex, people are “waiting and wondering, longing and thinking,” and probably also agonizing and regretting. Caution and denial shade the portrayals of sex in such works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach or Tom Perrotta’s upcoming The Abstinence Teacher. Nowhere near this grim but still sharing some of the same hopes about sex, we find Judd Apatow’s recent hits, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up (a post on this last film is forthcoming). Kennedy writes:

Saving Yourself for The One

If there is an exact opposite of having Sex Like Men, it’s saving yourself for The One. People might think this doesn’t happen much anymore–whether or not that’s the case, many adolescent girls, and probably some guys, grow up thinking they’ll wait to have sex until marriage. Not for religious reasons, necessarily, but for idealistic ones. Whenever I contemplate the idea of The One, I can’t help but think of the fabulously bad Marisa Tomei movie, Only You (1994): when she was a little girl, a Ouija board told her she would marry Robert Downey Jr., so she chases him through Europe to make this happen. Or something like that.