quizzical pussy

Today's post isn't really about sex. But this makes up for it, no?

I was born in the United States, and that’s where I live. Today is Independence Day here. It commemorates not any victory or truce, but simply the intention to stop being a trodden-upon colony. This is kind of like celebrating your anniversary with a paramour on the day you first admitted you wanted to fuck each other rather than the day you actually did for the first time. Which is fine, really, just an interesting choice that becomes completely meaningless unless there’s some decisive follow-through. Which, in the case of the Declaration of Independence, there was. It was called the Revolutionary War.

I’m somewhat conflicted as a U.S. citizen. It always feels awkward that there’s not a proper word for us. “American” is desperately broad and kind of pushy, as if the manifest destiny myth gives us the right to claim ourselves the sole possessors of all flavors and varieties of Americas, some of which are entire continents. Sure, “America” in this case is just shorthand for “United States of America”, and no one else seems to need it as much as we do (try saying United Statesian. It just doesn’t work), but it bothers me anyway. Other things bother me more profoundly. Our country was never, even once, all integrity and liberty and pie. The United States government and its citizens systematically slaughtered and displaced the people of sovereign native nations to get us where we are today. They enslaved and exploited those people and so many others for generations. No ends justify those means.

I don’t believe our founding fathers were infallible or indefatigably noble. I don’t think that they necessarily planned for “all men are created equal” to mean seriously fucking everyone someday. They were, as we are, products of their era and culture, and that means they had some pretty shitty ideas about plenty of subjects. Instead of perfect intentions and godlike wisdom (or even the moral high ground), though, they gave us wonderful promises and forged them into law. That’s their beautiful legacy.

What I love about my home are the promises it was built on. Those flawed men gave us the framework to grow into an honest, fair, and free society, or as close as we’re likely to ever get. I intensely believe this, and it makes me grateful and yes, proud.

But just because those promises were made doesn’t mean they’re automatically kept. I don’t just think, I observe that we’re not as free as we think we are in this country. Votes become increasingly difficult to verify as paper ballots are phased out. Appointing corporate lobbyists to White House cabinet and advisory positions has become de rigueur. People are lining up to hand in their reproductive rights, relinquish free speech (funny how limiting someone else’s rights also compromises your own), and to thwart the one provision in the Constitution that seems designed to give us a fighting chance if everything goes irretrievably to hell. We’re losing cherished friends, family, and compatriots in two interminable wars that most of us don’t seem to believe in. Our president, who was stridently opposed to the Patriot Act while he was campaigning, recently extended it by a year, and was met with precious little outrage.

The government can do bad things. It will sometimes try to do them in secret. There are recorded, admitted instances where this has happened in the past. So I have to ask, has any government in history ever cleaned up its act and restored its integrity on its own, without a coup, a war, or at least the undeviating insistence of an incensed public? What makes us think a government that, for example, covertly performed mind-control experiments on many of its citizens without their informed consent mere decades ago can be trusted today?

And yet, apathy thrives. Helplessness encroaches.

I realize that everyone has a different vision of the ideal America (mine has a lot of naked frolicking). I don’t know the answers to everything, and I’m not pretending to. I just feel very strongly that no good can come from a nation’s citizens having fewer rights and sitting idly by while more important promises are broken. Even if you’re not using all your rights or you don’t particularly like some of them, aren’t they… I dunno… kind of nice to have? Just in case?

My fellow United Statesians, have a great Independence Day. See fireworks. Grill meat (or tofu, if you’re kinky like that) over fire. Celebrate your state’s relaxed sodomy laws. Do something outdoors. Our nation is beautiful and you have every right to love it. But today I feel bound to remind myself that freedom isn’t something you’re necessarily born with and get to keep. That’s the way it should be, in a perfect world, but in reality freedom can be taken away at any time. That’s when you have to decide whether or not you’re going to declare your intentions to fight for it. And then, fucking follow through.

This may be hard to believe, but I try not to be a jerk about other peoples’ religious beliefs, or their political beliefs, for that matter. Just because I disagree with someone doesn’t make her/him a moron, an idiot, or a worse or less valuable person. In fact, I seek to respect and learn from the opinions of others. I think that in general people want freedom, equality, safety, and to do the right thing to the best of their ability. Because there’s no easy answer to how to best accomplish these things, and because there are many ways to prioritize them, people may have different views, but very rarely do you find someone whose beliefs are malicious.

At least that’s what I want to think. But then people gotta piss me off, and my good intentions suddenly aren’t worth the internet real estate they’re rendered on.

It’s May, which apparently means that lots of weddings are starting to happen. I’m going to two in the next month, in fact. Can you smell the calla lilies, the poised shotguns, the feckless optimism, the… somethings blue? I knew you could.

Anyway, my little brother recently went to a good friend’s wedding and came back with an appalling report. No, the bridesmaids didn’t have (gasp!) butch haircuts. It was way worse than that. The wedding was apparently crazy sexist, so much so that my brother, who is not a feminist crusader in the least, noticed it and was profoundly disturbed.

I’m not talking about the general complaints you might hear about how marriage is an institution perpetrated by the patriarchy, or even how the act of a father “giving away” the bride in marriage is a call back to a business transaction where women were chattel and men held all the chips. What I’m talking about is something that I really didn’t realize existed in mainstream American culture anymore at all: the bride and groom agreed to entirely different things in their vows.

The main reading was the whole “Wives submit to your husbands” thing that I wish would just die already, (Can we just take Ephesians, or actually all the Paul of Tarsus stuff, out of the Bible? That’d be super.) I realize that it’s not my business to decide who gets to call the shots in someone else’s relationship, and that I should not take this personally. Maybe the bride explicitly wanted her vows to agree to being controlled. But the idealist in me finds it upsetting that two (presumably non-kinky) people would set the tone for their marriage with a religious reading about power dynamics. “Love is patient, love is kind” is hackneyed, yes, but at least it’s not appointing a mayor of the marriage right then and there. So maybe it only follows that the stated vows reflected that. I don’t know what they said verbatim, but according to what my brother told me it was probably something roughly like this:

Groom
I, _____, take you, ______, to be my wedded wife. With deepest joy I receive you into my life that together we may be one. As is Christ to His body, the church, so I will be to you a loving and faithful husband. Always will I perform my headship over you even as Christ does over me, knowing that His Lordship is one of the holiest desires for my life. I promise you my deepest love, my fullest devotion, my tenderest care. I promise I will live first unto God rather than others or even you. I promise that I will lead our lives into a life of faith and hope in Christ Jesus. Ever honoring God’s guidance by His spirit through the Word, And so throughout life, no matter what may lie ahead of us, I pledge to you my life as a loving and faithful husband.

Bride
I, _____, take you, ______, to be my wedded husband. With deepest joy I come into my new life with you. As you have pledged to me your life and love, so I too happily give you my life, and in confidence submit myself to your headship as to the Lord. As is the church in her relationship to Christ, so I will be to you. _____, I will live first unto our God and then unto you, loving you, obeying you, caring for you and ever seeking to please you. God has prepared me for you and so I will ever strengthen, help, comfort, and encourage you. Therefore, throughout life, no matter what may be ahead of us, I pledge to you my life as an obedient and faithful wife.

Notice how only one of them has to say “submit” and “obedient”? Also, “performing headship” over someone is not something I’d want to discuss in front of my parents and brand new in-laws and great aunties, if you know what I mean.

I’ve sat through many, many sermons in my life. Some of them opined that Harry Potter is a Satanic text, and some of them patiently explained that the idea of comparing a husband and his wife to Jesus and his church doesn’t explicitly state that one is better than the other, they’re just different, and hell, someone has to be in charge! But why does someone have to be in charge in a relationship? Is it because talking things over and coming to mutually agreeable conclusions wastes valuable time that could be spent praying? I mean, it’s fun to have someone in charge in bed, but I wouldn’t even agree to that permanently.

I suggest that it’s all bullshit; the Jesus/church comparison belies any claim of “separate but equal”. In the Christian faith I was raised in, Jesus is absolutely held up as superior to the church. He’s the paragon of life, for fuck’s sake, and the church is devoted to worshiping him. To say that this comparison doesn’t elevate the man over the woman in a relationship isn’t just wack, it’s wiggity wack. Ladies, if you’re going to give up that much power, at least have a safeword.

P.S. “I do” is not a safe word.

(image source)

Here’s the newest batch of crazy internet from your friendly internet strangers and possibly loved ones.

I don’t have a foot fetish, but whenever I scrub the soles of my feet in the shower my genitals tingle and I get crazy horny. Maybe I need to explore foot rubs. :)

I use my hot cousin’s pictures off Facebook to pretend to be a woman on dating sites so I can get off to guys lusting over me. I am a mostly-straight man.

When I was 14 my mom remarried and I got a stepsister. She was destined to be fattish when she got older, but when she was 16 her breasts were amazing. I would borrow her bras and panties and rubbed them all over my penis and balls and jerk off. I even stole one silky bra right before she went away to college so I could keep it up. I couldn’t look her in the face for years. Those were still some of the best orgasms of my life.

I have told every man I’ve ever been with that he was the best I ever had. It’s never been true. The best I ever had was my female camp counselor at Lutheran camp.

I’m ashamed of the person who writes this website who has a tag pie, claims to be a nerd, yet has no mention of PI day or clever pun on it.

Oh god, you’re so right. I’m cutting myself off from masturbating for 3.14 days as punishment. I also neglected to give my boyfriend steak and a blowjob on the day in question, which makes me a questionable nerd and a terrible person.

I’m falling in love with a stranger over the internet.

I’m 90% sure that the person who gave me syphilis still hasn’t been treated because he doesn’t know he has it, and it serves him bloody right.

P.S. Yes, I’m sure he’s the one who infected me and no, I’m never telling him.

Keep ConTuesdays alive by sharing your secrets! It’s fun, anonymous, and cathartic!

Oh, man. Some people are not happy about the new Candie’s Foundation PSA featuring Bristol Palin.

The Candie’s Foundation, founded in 2001 by Candie’s, a shoe/apparel/fragrance brand, was started to “shape the way young people in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” and “…educate America’s youth about the devastating consequences of teenage pregnancy.” My snarky side can’t help but wonder if this foundation carries an air of overcompensation about it, considering the fact that Candie’s has drawn heat over racy ad campaigns in the past, such as a print ad photograph of Jenny McCarthy sitting on a toilet, and this fragrance ad (see right) that had to be modified to a “tamer” version for certain publications by removing the condoms and butt crack (because, you know, depicting an unsafe sexual situation is much tamer), but remains hypersexual and (to some) disturbing in either iteration.

I don’t disagree with the Candie’s Foundation’s purpose. They state on their website that the “only 100% way to avoid pregnancy is to not have sex. If you do have sex, you need to use protection every time.” And guess what, urban legends about semen-laced bullets notwithstanding, they’re right! Their discourse is abstinence heavy, but stops short of advocating abstinence-only education. I have no problem with promoting abstinence to a point. After all, many teenagers aren’t ready for sex, and it’s perfectly okay to try to encourage them to wait until they are ready. Candie’s Foundation has used spokeshotties like Hayden Panettiere, Beyoncé, Usher, and Hillary Duff, people that their target audience might look up to, as well as famous cautionary tales like Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, to drive this point home.

One aspect I dislike about the Candie’s Foundation’s methods is that they promote a “Don’t be a slut! Be a tease!“ message. This is not their only message, but it is very well-represented in their campaigns. They offer t-shirts and tank tops that have “I’m SEXY enough… to keep you waiting.” emblazoned on the front. I don’t think it’s wise, helpful, or empowering to pressure young women to try to be sexy (i.e. an object of someone else’s desire), while telling them that if they actually act on their own sexual desires they’ll be devalued.

The foundation’s new PSA features Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin and single teenage mother of some kid with a name that’s just about as weird as hers, saying “What if I didn’t come from a famous family? What if I didn’t have all their support? What if I didn’t have all these opportunities? Believe me, it wouldn’t be pretty. Pause before you play.”

I’m assuming that “pause” here means to either stop and obtain birth control or stop and think, inclusive. I don’t interpret it as a strict “no sex until marriage” message, but you can watch it below and come to your own conclusions.

I’m not sure if you’re into the whole Easter thing. I consider it an annoying, primarily religious, holiday, particularly since I’m not a big candy eater these days. My one fond Easter association is this book, which I guess is a feminist parable according to all the Amazon reviews. I never thought about that before. It was just one of my favorites as a kid.

Anyway, have a bunny with a bullet through his head:

P.S. It’s a cock ring!

James Randi is an awesome guy. He first made his mark as a stage magician, but his greatest fame comes from his role as a front-line skeptic and rationalist. He and his James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) investigate claims of pseudoscience, paranormal, and the occult, offering a $1,000,000 prize as a challenge “to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” Obviously, the money remains unclaimed.

He’s like the cuddly curmudgeon papa of the skeptic community.

Oh, and he likes men. Yesterday, he came out in an interview on JREF’s podcast For Good Reason, and then posted about it on his Swift Blog: “Well, here goes. I really resent the term but I use it because it’s recognized and accepted.

“I’m gay.”

At 81, his close friends and family have known all along, but he thought it was finally time to come out publicly in the interest of full disclosure. He wishes he could marry his long-time partner, but there’s no reason to since his union wouldn’t be valid in Florida, where he lives, and so they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the later-in-life privileges that spouses automatically get.

In the interview, Randi and D.J. Grothe, who is the current president of JREF and also a gay man, talked about how pseudoscience has been used to back up bogus perceptions that gay people make bad parents or that homosexuality is aberrant and unnatural. They’re also quick to point out that JREF is not and has no plans to become a “gay organization”, they just both happen to be gay (they also both appear to be white, for whatever that’s worth, for anyone working on conspiracy theories).

The most compelling thing about the interview is the fact that although Randi’s generation has always seemed so intolerant and unaccepting, he’s never pretended to be anything he’s not to escape judgment. He says that it was unthinkable to be gay when he was growing up, but he didn’t have the luxury to not think about it. It was just who he was. He never denied being gay or positioned himself to seem straight; it just never came up. He had promised himself and others that if anyone in the media asked him directly, he’d reply: “Yes, so what?” But no one ever did. So he finally thought he should just volunteer the information, even though he insists that no one will care except his crazy detractors and enemies, and that no one should.

But actually, I kind of care. James Randi is someone I’ve looked up to for a while, and I’m not alone. Every time an amazing person comes out to the world, there’s a new opportunity for people to stop looking at LGBTQ people as “other” and start seeing them as part of “us”. Randi’s a major leader in the skeptical community, so this revelation could have a real positive impact there.

His blog entry, entitled “How To Say It?”, closes:

“I should apologize for having used Swift as the venue to publish this note, an item that is hardly the focus of what we promote and publish here, but I chose the single most public asset I have to make this statement. It’s from here that I have attacked irrationality, stupidity, and irresponsibility, and it is my broadest platform. Here is where I have chosen to stand and fight.

“And I think that I have already won this battle by simply publishing this statement.”

I think so too, Mr. Randi. You rock.

I would like to think that emotions can usually be controlled. That’s not to say it’s easy. And maybe we can’t always keep them in check… not like actions, but often we can. Emotions follow thoughts, thoughts acquire speed, lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. Or something like that.

But I also can’t get past the fact that it’s all biology. Hormones and neurotransmitters and shit. It’s kind of humbling how little control we have over these impulses that can blindside us. A chemical imbalance can compel you to injure yourself; a surge of dopamine can make you instantly giddy… or it is giddiness, I’m not even sure. I was a liberal arts major.

Even when we want to think that we have control, a chemical signal can fuck that right up. Sex is a perfect example: Penises wax rampant at awkward times, or you suddenly feel inconveniently bonded to that person you were just using for sex.  The honeymoon phase of a relationship often wears off predictably at the precise moment that the natural swoon stimulants runs dry. And (I love this one) you can take a tiny little pill to trick your body into thinking it’s already got a little zygote passenger on board so you can have crazy monkey sex with reproductive impunity.

I started a new birth control pill last month. I liked my old one just fine, but my insurance dropped it and not getting knocked up is pretty expensive when it’s not subsidized, although it’s nothing compared to getting knocked up.

So I switched to something that was still in my formulary. When I say “new pill”, that’s a little misleading because it’s actually the same one (Ortho Tri Cyclen) I started on when I was 19, until I was put on a lower hormone dose (Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo) a couple years later because the lady at Planned Parenthood said it was better.

I was more nervous than I would’ve been with an untried oral contraceptive, though, because I couldn’t help but remember being miserable for nearly every single day that I was on regular Ortho Tri Cyclen. The only exceptions were the bright patches that coincided with the months when I was off-again with my abusive boyfriend. Oh, also, I was miserable for roughly a year before I started taking any contraceptive pill, which eerily began a few months after we started dating, when I found out he was OMFGcrazy. But despite all this, I asked myself: what if the misery was all down to the hormones making me crazy? What if I’ve vilified him in my memory to rationalize that crazy? What if my female hysterics made him hit me and do other not-so-nice stuff? Or what if the hormones contributed even just a little to the whole accursed business? I didn’t want to go back to any part of that.

I knew these questions weren’t rational (I was irrationally afraid of becoming irrational! Can you stand it!?). The difference is literally 0.01 mg of fake estrogen a day. That might make a subtle difference, but it’s probably not going to make someone’s emotional well-being unravel entirely. But however absurd, I was trepidatious about going back to the higher dose. My Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo had been like a grisgris, a talisman protecting me from the dark, ominous mysteries of female hormones and their mind-bending wiles.

It is profoundly sexist that I was swallowing any form of “estrogen makes you crazy” line. I realize that. I don’t think that estrogen makes people crazy, irrational, or emotionally fragile. I don’t even think that fake estrogen does. I was just a little worried, in the back of my mind. Because of internalized sexism, obviously. And beaten girl syndrome. Thanks, patriarchy.

However, I certainly wasn’t going to let all this stop me from taking an oral contraceptive that I could actually afford, so of course I sucked it up, filled the new  prescription and started taking it. I enlisted Laramy to alert me to any strange, “crazier than usual” behavior. He agreed to tell me the absolute, brutal truth, as long as I wasn’t holding anything sharp at the time.

A month in, no perceptible emotional changes have surfaced. I feel vindicated. I was never hormone crazy. I was just abused, and that probably made me depressed, but that’s a fairly natural and sane reaction. I have noticed some physical changes. I was a bit nauseated for most of the first month, which seems to be abating, and my boobs hurt more than usual before my last period started, but that’s fake-out pregnancy for you.

On another hormone tip, I recently adjusted my thyroid medication and I’ve been masturbating like crazy all week and humping the furniture and shit. Which I guess we should call “back to normal” for me. I love science.

Sometimes I wonder if we awkward-phasers who were unpopular in the dating department early on all have trouble mustering up “romance” from our misanthropic hearts, or if it’s just me.

As a literary genre, I can get behind romance (in the old school sense; I’m not talking harlequin here): high adventure, quests, Camelot, and fucking up bad guys are all pretty awesome in my book. Or Latin-based languages, those are fine. It’s the other kind of romance that trips me up: flowers, and the thin line between grand gestures and restraining orders, and… flowers? I don’t really even know what else people consider romantic. But that part where you’re supposed to declare your emotional attachment and minimize your sexual lust for someone? Obviously that wouldn’t be my strong suit.

When I was sixteen all my friends seemed to be single on Valentine’s Day for once, and we decided to wear black and purple to school to commemorate the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre. I guess it was something to take everyone’s mind off not having a date to focus instead on historical bloodshed. I wore the purple and black with them but I didn’t feel all giddy and “sticking it to the system” like everyone else seemed to. It never occurred to me that I might be doing something different with my day. This is partly because it had never occurred to anyone else to ask me out on date at that point. A big part of being anti-romance is admittedly sour grapes.

A year later I was in the early stages of semi-dating a cute little Mormon boy (semi-dating because I never get the “we’re more than friends” message until there’s kissing, and he wasn’t allowed to do that because smooches make Joseph Smith cry). He hid a heart pin in my locker, then later that day showed up at my after-school cashier job with a bunch of mylar balloons and a huge, puppy-dog grin. I knew it was a very sweet, “romantic” thing to do, but I was so embarrassed I wanted to die. And then puke. And then die again. I had no basis for understanding how to deal with this type of treatment. As a result, I didn’t really like it. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it anyway. Maybe it just isn’t me.

Ever since that day, even when I try to make a Valentine’s Day or any other sort of romantic gesture it falls flat, mostly because I don’t understand what I’m supposed to accomplish. I don’t know how to be “romantic”. I’m up for all kinds of boning (to me that is romantic) or giving a “thinking of you” present to try to show the people I care about that I’m happy they’re in my life, but the kind of weird frenzied gestures that people expect each other to make? I can try to ape those sometimes, but it never feels right and I’m pretty sure I always suck at it.

Reginald Sleeth used to leave love poems under my windshield wiper while I was at work or while I slept, and after months of this I finally got the picture that he probably wanted that from me. So I wrote some of the worst poetry in history (although his may have actually been worse than mine, to be honest) and obliged, but it felt silly and forced. It was just another way of keeping the peace with him, really, and in that way it was always calculating and pragmatic, never romantic at all.

Part of me is always going to think that the best Valentine’s Day present is scandalous amounts of sexual intercourse. And all the other parts of me will always admire that part of me for being so infuriatingly clever and sensible.

When I try to talk about marriage I feel like a little girl dipping into her mother’s makeup and clopping around in size eight high heels. I’ve been in relationships with people who had marriage designs, but I’ve never been able to take it seriously. I’m too immature, or something. I haven’t felt those “lifetime commitment” kind of feelings yet. To me, although I’m old enough that most of my peers are getting engaged and married, it’s still something that, well… grown-ups do. Also, husbands have cooties.

There’s one thing I do know: if there was nothing but a tissue-thin shred of common sense keeping me from marrying Reginald Sleeth, a man who hit me, when I was 20 years old, I think my uncle who’s been in a strong and monogamous relationship since I was four should be able to marry his boyfriend if he feels like it. His right supersedes mine if we’re going to start ranking whose rights are more rightier.

But people all over are being stupid and saying that men have to marry only women, and women just men. I’m not entirely positive if they think transgendered people should be allowed to marry anyone, and if so, whom. I suspect there’s about as much disagreement about that as anything else they can’t paint in black and white absolutes.

These people, the ones who are being stupid, may certainly indulge their feelings and freak out about same-sex marriage as much as they like. They can rail against it, publish hateful books and websites, and thunder “Yo butt ain’t made for that!” into the cold, unfeeling sky. Their freedom to speak their minds is just as valuable as mine. However, I refuse to let them legislate against same-sex marriage if I can possibly help it. What’s wrong with hating it while it’s legal? Isn’t freedom just another word for leaving other people alone? It disgusts me that they devote so much time and energy into fucking up nice things (for the sake of argument, let’s just agree that marriage can be one such nice thing) for people who are lucky enough to find “lifetime commitment” love.

I’ve often thought that if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a man, I’d feel pretty shitty about enjoying a perk that many of my friends (or even I, if I found myself in the position where I wanted to marry a woman) are currently denied. I’m not saying life is fair, but this is the kind of unfair that really sucks because it’s the kind we could avoid if we could just all stop being asshats. So it’s a quandary: how much would I hypothetically let my distaste for the unfairness intrude on my personal desire to get a free stand mixer?

I came across this October 8, 2009 Savage Love column about hetero marriage. Dan Savage (a sex columnist who is gay, if you’re not familiar) recalled a wedding he’d recently attended, where the heterosexual couple chose the following selection as a reading in their ceremony:

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.

It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a ‘civil right.’ Without the right to choose to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience.

Source: The 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in that state.

Dan goes on to say that it would be wonderful if the passage caught on as a wedding reading. I agree. Sure, hetero couples can boycott, or move their weddings to states that have legalized same-sex marriage in an economic and symbolic gesture of support. But not many do, and maybe it isn’t practical to expect them to let even deeply-held political concerns influence their romantic commitments. That reading, though? I think it’s a perfect and fitting gesture, and I would love to see it become the new 1 Corinthians 13.

I’m massively creeped out by the purity movement and abstinence culture. You know how religious parents and teenagers– mostly daughters–buy into virginity in a big way with purity pledges, purity balls, purity rings, and… I dunno, probably chastity belts? That’s creepy.

I’m not even going to get into how I hate the fact that we’re teaching young women that their worth depends on their ability to withhold sex and/or to provide an unsullied sexual vessel to some schmuck in the future. I’m not even going to mention that. Well, barely.

What specifically makes my flesh crawl is the concept that somehow fathers are supposed to be the custodians of their daughters’ virginity. The implication that a man can more or less own his child’s sexuality at all is unspeakably corrupt, and giving her a little extra attention in the form of jewelry and dressed-up dancing doesn’t sanitize the concept or make it any easier to swallow. It’s still creepy as hell.

Take a look at this sample purity pledge, culled from the Hollywood Purity Ball’s website:

I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, my future/husband and my Creator. I recognize that virginity is my most precious gift to offer to my future husband. I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind before marriage but will keep my thought and my body pure as a very special present for the one I marry.

…Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but what business is it of this girl’s father, future/husband, or Creator to care so damn much about stifling her emerging sexuality? These three guys are heroically falling all over themselves to bellyflop on some catastrophic grenade, but it’s actually just this poor girl. Now that she needs a training bra she might want to think about sex at some point and do other things associated with puberty. The pin has been pulled! Horrors! “Save yourself, Creator! Future/husband and I have got this. You have other virgins to make.”

And as “precious gifts” go, I think that if I were a guy I’d value other things in my future wife above her absolute lack of experience. Some examples that spring to mind:

1. An awesome sense of humor that still manages to pretend I’m funny from time to time
2. Compassion
3. Wit
4. A terrific ass (I’m an ass guy)
5. A sense of adventure in and out of the bedroom
6. Unfuckingbelievable blowjob skills
7. Independence, self-agency, and the ability to make up her own mind instead of just listening to her daddy all the fucking time
8. A good DVD collection
9. A ravenous intellect
10. A ravenous sex drive

If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you like, you should date and have some fun figuring it out. Being clueless isn’t your cue to go get married. Maybe it’s okay to give some virginity to your husband as a very special present, but for heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be yours!