The most popular article at the NYTimes.com right now is about Muslim women in Europe getting their hymens surgically re-stitched so as to simulate virginity.

Why Go Under the Knife: when you can be a born again virgin?

Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

“If you’re a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you can easily end up having sex before marriage,” said Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who is based in London and performs the operation.  “So if you’re looking to marry a Muslim and don’t want to have problems, you’ll try to recapture your virginity.”

First of all, the idea of “recapturing” virginity is a little silly. Makes it sound like the virginity ran away of its own accord, which is clearly not the case.

Beyond semantics, the whole idea is depressing. Is faking virginity really the best way to deal with a young woman’s sexuality? And perhaps more importantly, why are Muslims placing such a high price on virginity? Not that this issue is a particularly Muslim one—an article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago addressed the procedure in the context of a spa and cosmetic-surgery center in Queens. That article talks about New Yorkers getting the procedure to spice up their sex lives (doctors say it probably won’t work), and women from South America getting it because their Catholic upbringing places a high premium on marriage to a virgin.

Traditionally, virginity is associated with virtue and modesty, though I can name twenty friends who are virtuous, modest, and sexually active, and I know more than a few virgins who are horrible and slutty. In Jewish law, being a virgin means you’re worth more in your ketubah, but the text of a ketubah generally refers to the woman as a betulah, a virgin, unless she has been previously married. And since ketubot are rarely—if ever—used to sue for money, it’s a moot point.

I know of at least one Jewish text that seems to separate sexual experience and a broken hymen. There is a question as to whether one can have sex with a virgin on Shabbat, because it is assumed that during the act of sex the hymen will be torn, and it is forbidden to tear on Shabbat. The rabbis mention that there are some who are “precise in their positioning.” That is, they can have sex with a woman without breaking her hymen. These people, in theory at least, can have sex with virgins on Shabbat. (Ketubot 6b) This implies that an intact hymen wouldn’t necessarily mean that the girl in question is a virgin. Which makes the whole idea of hymen replacement pointless in the eyes of Jewish law.

Nishmat, the Jerusalem Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women, addresses the issue of hymen replacement and Jewish law more fully here. A nice highlight:

On a purely theoretical level, it would also seem that a return to virginity is not to be strived for. Breaking of the hymen within the framework of marriage is viewed as a completion of the woman and the contract between the husband and wife, not a detraction (see for example, Encyclopedia Talmudit sv Be'ilat Mitzvah).

It’s frustrating that some women see lying to their communities and spouses at great personal expense as the only way to deal with their pasts. If only we spent more time teaching people to make good choices, and value honesty, and less time coming up with ways to get around the rules. In that vein, evangelical Christians may have beat us to the punch—they’ve been promoting a kind of mental revirginization for a while. Instead of a surgical procedure, one just re-declares him or herself a virgin. It’s a little flimsy, but somehow better than needlessly going under the knife.

Say 'Virgin!': Creepy, right?Is it just me, or are purity balls really creepy? The New York Times has a crazy story this week about a big purity ball in Colorado Springs at which more than 60 girls and their fathers dressed up and danced late into the night to celebrate their purity. The girls do a dance (in tutus with a huge wooden cross), the fathers stand up and recite a covenant, and then two men walk up to the cross and hold swords in an arch over their heads.

Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.

I’m all for fathers spending quality time with their daughters and being a good influence on their kids, but something about this seems a tad overzealous and inappropriate. For one thing, what about the sons? Every time I turn around I see a newspaper or magazine article about how boys these days are doomed. But I’ve never heard of any mother-son galas, and while these fathers all pledge to guard their daughters’ purity none of them seem to acknowledge that if their girls are at risk for surrendering their purity it probably has something to do with how boys are being raised as well.

And it bothers me that men are the ones entrusted with these girls’ purity. Shouldn’t some of this be coming from the girls’ mothers? Aren’t they better suited to warn the girls against the perils of the ‘hook-up culture’? Why aren’t the girls being empowered to make their own good decisions about sex and purity, rather than allowing that authority to be taken over by their dads?

I’ve never been crazy about the Orthodox community’s stance on relationships, but at the very least they have women talking to women, encouraging them to make good decisions, and helping them to see the values of modesty and dignity.

In contrast, purity balls seem to infantilize the girls and inflate their fathers with a false sense of authority. Because what we need more of now is girls who can’t grow up, and men with oversized egos.

Pay Up: or pull outIsraeli mikvah attendants—the women who supervise dunks into the ritual baths to make sure they’re kosher—haven’t been paid in five months, so Kolech, an Orthodox feminist organization, is working to organize a mikvah boycott until ladies of the bath get paid. Without dunking in the mikvah after her period, a woman isn’t supposed to have sexual relations with her husband, so the boycott would effectively deprive Orthodox couples of intimacy until the issue is worked out.

On the Kolech website (Hebrew) Batia Kahana-Dror writes: "Let's drive them crazy, all those who wait restlessly for the night that their woman goes to the mikvah. All those who make up the majority in the religious councils, the Treasury, the Religious Services Ministry and the Knesset, the rabbis and the leaders. Stop. No more sex."

Kahana-Dror is echoing an ancient theme of women withholding sex for the good of their communities. Here are some examples:

• Lysistrata: First and foremost, we have Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens decide to withhold sex from their husbands until peace is declared—a strategy that proves entirely effective. In that vein, The Lysistrata Project began staging readings of the play in 2002. They sponsor events and encourage activism to seek inventive solutions to violence and economic crises, specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The Strike of Crossed Legs: In 2006 in Pereira, Colombia, dozens of women took part in the "Strike of Crossed Legs." When gang members weren't handing in their guns, their wives and girlfriends organized and decided to stage a sex strike. They came up with a strike anthem rap song that included the lyrics: "As women we are worth a lot. We don't want to fall for violent men because with them we lose too much."

• Water for Sex: In Sirt, Turkey, women staged a month long sex strike, protesting the lack of accessible running water in their village. After the existing water supply system broke and the women were forced to walk miles and wait in lines for hours to get water for their homes, they came up with the idea of withholding sex from their husbands until the water supply problem was fixed. After what CNN called "frantic lobbying on the part of Sirt's male population" a governmental official was convinced to pipe water into the town.
  

• Lysistrata with a Twist: Bolivian prostitutes went on a hunger strike when the bars and strip joints where they worked were shut down in 2007. In addition to taking over the local AIDS clinic and refusing to eat, the sex workers threatened to parade around naked. A spokesperson said that if the town of El Alto wanted to do away with prostitution, "then the government should give us a hand and take care of our children, and afterward provide us with jobs."

Related: Does a Mikvah Dunk Make Pre-Marital Sex Kosher?

It’s always easier to argue that we should limit someone’s choices than to argue that we should let someone decide for themself, simply because we all know tons of people making incredibly bad choices every day. The rise of leggings alone could stand as an example of why people should not be allowed to do so much as dress themselves without consulting a panel of experts. But making decisions is a part of being an adult, and the more we blanket our lives with across-the-board restrictions the less responsible we become.
Shomer Negiah Panties: the last reserve
As a result of it being easier to tell people not to do something than to tell them to do it carefully, it’s really hard to talk about not being shomer negiah without sounding like you’re just trying to come up with an excuse to have sex. I know because I’ve had this conversation about five hundred times in the last five years, and though I’m confident that being shomer negiah would not be the right decision for me, my reasons don’t sounds as sexy as the shomer negiah advocates’. But I’m okay with that, because my reasons, though perhaps lacking in sex appeal, are legit. Allow me to explain...

The first reason to question the whole shomer negiah movement is the lack of halacha backing it up. 'Shomer negiah' (a term that occurs nowhere in rabbinic literature) is a technical prohibition against lustful touch (Rambam & Shach on Shulchan Aruch) between a guy and a girl who is considered ritually impure as a result of menstruation, or with a guy and any other forbidden relation. That’s it. Contemporary teachers and overreachers have been teaching that shomer negiah is actually a prohibition against touching someone of the opposite sex at all, but as far as I know, there’s absolutely no halachic basis for that. Presumably, if I got myself to a mikvah, there would be no halachic problem with me kissing my date.

Now, that’s good enough of a reason for me, but not for almost anyone who has read The Magic Touch or I Kissed Dating Goodbye, so let’s look at some more ideological concerns.
Hammer Says: Can't touch this!
One of the things that appalls me about a lot of the shomer negiah rhetoric is that it belittles how important the physical aspect of a marriage can be. Example: I recently went on a couple of dates with a really great guy. He was nice, cute, smart, funny and generally excellent marriage material. But there were no sparks. And neither of us wanted to be in a relationship that was purely cerebral. I want my husband to be nice, cute, smart, funny, and also incredibly sexy. He has to have some quality that makes me anxious to spend every night in his bed for the rest of my life. That’s not a minor thing, and though I might have an okay sense of whether a guy has that without running my fingers through his hair at some point, I’d really rather check before I sign up forever and ever amen.

Sometimes what I hear from people pushing shomer negiah sounds like a fancy way of advocating delayed gratification. Essentially, if you wait until you get married then it will be so so amazing when you finally do get to touch/sleep with that person. But the obvious problem with that is that it might not be that great. I mean, the holding hands part might be awesome, but as soon as you have a slimy tongue in your mouth for the first time and you don’t know what to do with it, I imagine the charm is somewhat less potent. And yes, of course you’ll learn and adjust to what you and your partner want, but the beginning is unlikely to be all violins swelling in the background and fireworks sparkling over the bed. So the delayed gratification argument is, as far as I can tell, ridiculous.

But the real reason I touch the men I date is because I’m an adult, and I deserve to have a physical relationship with whoever it is I’m in a relationship with. I really don’t believe that kissing someone has a detrimental effect on that relationship if we’re not married, nor do I think that having kissed someone else will mean that whatever relationship I have with my future husband is somehow less special.

Sex is a different issue. Being shomer negiah today doesn’t mean being a virgin, it means not touching anyone of the opposite sex, which is a much bigger thing than just waiting to get laid until you get married.

I have a lot of respect for people who decide to wait for sex until marriage, but at the end of the day I’m a lot more concerned that my husband and I share views on how to raise the kids, or how we’re going to observe Shabbat than that we’re both virgins on our wedding night.

Sex is a serious thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself (or herself). But it’s not the only serious thing, and I worry about the amount of emphasis that being shomer negiah puts on sexuality. I’m all for encouraging people to be really careful about the decisions they make in relationships, but being a virgin when you get married doesn’t trump everything else. If you marry the wrong person, it’s still the wrong person no matter how little experience you have in the sack.
Here I Am: not being shomer negiah. Scandal!

Which brings me back to my original point. Being shomer negiah treats the symptoms, not the problem. Preaching a hands off/all-virginity-all-the-time policy isn’t the way to make sure that people think before they jump into bed with someone. And it doesn’t teach anyone to be particularly good at recognizing good and bad relationships when they see them.

 

It’s important to guard your touch, and the touch of those in your life. But that’s not the only thing that goes into a successful relationship, and claiming anything to the contrary is dishonest.

Last week Democratic Senator Barack Obama made headlines by suggesting that public schools teach “age-appropriate," "science-based” sexuality lessons to kindergarteners. He later clarified that "age-appropriate" means teaching children how to avoid predators, not how to unroll condoms. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to sensationalize Obama’s position —formerly Romney’s own position, but what isn’t?—saying, “We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in.” There are few statistics for how many of ...

You might have heard about a big legal battle happening in England now about whether a “purity ring” signifying a commitment to chastity before marriage can be worn in violation of school uniform rules. The case involves a 16-year-old girl named Lydia Playfoot (I swear I'm not making that name up) who doesn't want to take off her "purity ring" while she’s in school. Here’s a brief from the NY Times:

The case offered a counterpoint to a broader discussion concerning Muslim women who wear the full-face veil known as the niqab. But it also revealed stirrings of resentment among some members of Britain’s Christian majority, who say they are the victims of discrimination over how they display their faith.

Keep Sweet: For Jesus

The young woman, Lydia Playfoot, said her school, at Horsham, south of London, had told her that the ring broke the school’s rules on uniforms and jewelry.

But Ms. Playfoot argued that the prohibition breached her right to express a religious belief. Not only that, she said in a statement to the court, Sikh and Muslim pupils were permitted distinctive dress to show their religious identity.

Ms. Playfoot belongs to a British branch of an American-based evangelical movement known as Silver Ring Thing. Both her parents work for the branch, according to its Web site, www.silverringthing.com.

Two Guys At A Silver Ring Thing: should they have to take off their rings to take the SATs?

“The real reason for the extreme hostility to the wearing of the S.R.T. purity ring is the dislike of the message of sexual restraint, which is ‘countercultural’ and contrary to societal and governmental policy,” Ms. Playfoot said in a written statement to Britain’s High Court.

“It is this message from the Judeo-Christian position that is suppressed: exemptions are allowed or permitted for other messages,” she said, arguing that her school “doesn’t offer equal rights to Christians.”

Her remarks showed another aspect of a tangled debate here that has largely centered on concern among British leaders that the Muslim full-face veil has become what Prime Minister Tony Blair called a “mark of separation.” That led some Muslims to say they were the object of discrimination.

But Ms. Playfoot’s remarks suggested that Christians like her see themselves as being treated unfairly.

Much of the debate hinges on whether the purity ring is a religious requirement.

In a statement to the court, Leon Nettley, principal of the school, Millais, said, “It is not a Christian symbol, and is not required to be worn by any branch within Christianity.”

Full Story

Now, I think we all know how I feel about sex. I mean, I think it’s important to have an understanding of the consequences of sex, and I really hope people think seriously about all kinds of things before they jump into bed with someone else, but I cannot in good conscience endorse chastity. The only situation in which chastity seems to make any sense to me is when someone is getting married incredibly young. If you marry your high school sweetheart the day after your high school graduation, then waiting is not such a big deal. But in a world where people are marrying later and later, asking people to wait for physical affection is, in my opinion, ridiculous.

That said, let the girl wear her fucking (or, not fucking, I guess) ring! No, it’s not an obligatory religious garment or piece of jewelry, but it’s a big deal to her, and it’s not like chastity is an offensive or otherwise problematic virtue. A girl who says she doesn’t want to have sex in high school—isn’t that a great thing? Shouldn’t we applaud this girl for being ballsy enough to walk around wearing something that probably makes her pretty unpopular with the gentlemen of the senior class?

I don’t know anything about British law, so I have no sense of how likely it is that this girl will win the case, but regardless, I’m appalled by the whole thing, not least because it’s giving the Silver Ring Thing people more exposure than I’m comfortable with.

It’s my birthday, so naturally, I’d like to write about sex. Yesterday Laurel posted about how dumb the the OU’s new pro-abstinence website is, and I totally agree with everything she said, with everything Mobius said, with everything Jewesses With Attitude said, and everything Josh Yuter wrote, too. But I have two problems with all of the outrage going on:

1) This is not news. It’s not like abstinence was a secret new policy position that the OU just revealed. Not just abstinence, but a complete lack of physical contact between the sexes has been consistent and heavy rhetoric in the Orthodox community for several years now. There was even a shomer negiah themed shabbaton (on Valentine’s Day, of all times) at University of Iowa Hillel when I was a freshman there. So yeah, all the crap they say on the website is infuriating and insane, but some of us have been rolling our eyes at this BS for years. Welcome to the party.

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Be honest about sex
2) Nu? So now what? Thus far, no one has offered a viable alternative to the OU’s whacky website. The only comprehensive discussion of sexual ethics for teenagers that I’ve ever even heard of came from the Orthodox movement. Everyone else is afraid to touch it, and even if they weren’t, what could the Conservative movement say? The majority opinion says you shouldn’t have premarital sex, but the minority opinion says you can if you go to the mikva and lie to the mikva ladies. Yeah, that’s clear.

So okay, we need something to tell Jewish teenagers that draws on halacha, that points towards an observant lifestyle, but that remains realistic and honest. I can answer half of this problem. Below you’ll find the things I think every observant Jewish teenage girl should know about sex, complete with biblical and rabbinical sources. I feel way less equipped to talk to teenage guys about this for a number of reasons, but I hope someone like Steven Weiss, or Rabbi Yonah will take the challenge.

Anyway, here we go…

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Your Chumash Teacher Told You Was Assur

You will love sex. You’re probably not worried about this, but just in case, I want you to know that you will. You might not at first, because it’s not easy or simple, and it can be embarrassing to ask for what you want or need, but trust me when I tell you that after you work at it, you’ll love it.

Sex has serious consequences. Pregnancy is the simplest of these consequences, and it’s not even remotely simple. Do you want to be a single Jewish teenager mother? No, you do not (trust me on this). Neither do you want to have a shotgun wedding. If you think your friends won’t notice that your baby is only six months older than your wedding pictures, you’re wrong.

Besides pregnancy, sex can lead to a variety of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. You can get Chlamydia and not find out until years later that you’ll have trouble having a baby. You can get genital warts or crabs, both of which are painful and unattractive. You can get HPV, which may not cause any problems for you until years later, when you get cervical cancer. And you can get HIV, a virus that will ultimately kill you.

If you want to be absolutely sure that you won’t have to deal with any of these problems, you should wait to have sex until you’ve gotten married, (although of course even then your husband can give you an STD, or infect you with HIV, and there are unwanted pregnancies within marriage). The best method of protection from this stuff is to use a condom every time. Though condoms are not a hundred percent effective, they are simple to use and cheap (often free). The vast majority of the time, using a condom will keep you from getting pregnant, and from contracting STDs and STIs.

Be honest with yourself about your sex life. If you’re uncomfortable with something, it’s your responsibility to speak about it, and it’s your partner’s responsibility to listen. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you’re too embarrassed to tell your partner that something he’s doing doesn’t feel good, then you’re not ready to be in the situation at all.

Waiting to have sex until you get married can seem arbitrary and even impossible. When you’ve found someone you love, someone you think about all the time, someone you want touch and be touched by, the idea of holding back seems ludicrous. But within Jewish law, a marriage constitutes a certain kind of privacy and oneness that you can’t get without some wine under a chuppa. Being married entitles you to a secret that only you and your husband will know. Sex is a big part of that. It may also help to know that in marriage a man has an obligation to satisfy his wife sexually. The gemara even sets out a minimum number of times a man has to satisfy his wife per week (once a week for scholars and mule drivers, twice a week for laborers, and daily for people who can afford not to have a job, (Ketubot 61b)). The Shulchan Aruch adds that a man is obligated to satisfy his wife if he notices her hinting towards wanting intimacy (Orach Chaim 240:1). These obligations are great, but they only apply within marriage.

It can seem even more difficult to hold by these rules when you don’t have anyone special in your life, when you’re just lonely or sad or bored, and an opportunity for sex presents itself. In those times I hope you’ll remember that sex is a holy thing, and that casual sex means treating kedusha, holiness, with a lack of respect. It’s not an ethical call here. It’s not about premarital sex being wrong, it’s about premarital sex not being holy.

More than likely, you will have regrets about choices you made in regards to sex and relationships. In a few years, you’ll look back on these days and shake your head. Tanach is full of people who learn from mistakes they make in relationships, and even from mistakes they make in their sex lives. Judah slept with a prostitute (he thought she was a prostitute, at least), and faced possible public humiliation, but from it he learned humility and responsibility. King David took Batsheva as a wife, and tacitly sentenced her husband to death, and from this he learned about jealousy and greed. Jacob took two sisters as wives, and from their competition and resentment he learned the importance of peacemaking and compromise. If you get hurt, it’s worth it to spend some time thinking about where you went wrong, and trying to figure out how you can avoid it in the future.

Regardless of when you decide to have sex, I hope you’ll observe the laws of niddah. They, too, are part of our tradition, and they help create a rhythm and a flow in your relationship that will, I hope, keep the connection between you and your partner strong, and maintain a sense of desire and intensity.

Continue reading...

Abstinence: For all the wrong reasonsYesterday, Jewschool's Mobius drafted an Open Letter to the OU on their New Pro-Abstinence Campaign:

If you don’t want Jewish kids to shtup before they’re married, don’t lie and tell them that the reason they shouldn’t is because condoms are ineffective. You’re spreading dangerously false information that can actually increase the likelihood of Jewish kids contracting sexually transmitted diseases, which can pose a serious risk to their lives.

If they’re going to have sex — and trust me, they’re going to, whether you like it or not (whereas abstinence education is a proven failure) — you should encourage them to do it safely, otherwise you won’t only be dealing with a problem of promiscuity, but with an even bigger STD problem in the Jewish community than that which already exists.

Furthermore, if you’re serious about fighting intermarriage and promoting Jew-on-Jew coupling, you’re going to have a really hard time doing so when you’re scaring Jewish kids off from being intimate with one another. The Jewish establishment is spending millions annually to encourage Jewish kids to sleep with each other. Michael Steinhardt alone has spent a fortune trying to encourage Jewish kids to jump in the sack.

And he makes some good points... focusing on the insanity of arguing against the use of condoms...

But in a more general sense, I'm just amazed by the stupidity of this "campaign".  Not only are they spreading misinformation about condoms, scaring hell out of kids... but they're also leaning on lame arguments like, "Joseph resisted Mrs. Potiphar, so you can resist the attractions of cooch too". 

Genius!  When I was sixteen, and an insecure bundle of hormones, that would TOTALLY have worked.

I think what bothers me most about this issue is how much it smacks of the evangelical Christian model.  Using bible stories and scare tactics to keep people from having sex, rather than explaining in honest, intelligent, Jewish ways... why it might be better to wait awhile?

Do we want our kids to start wearing teen purity rings too? 

This site also responds to the new freako-teen-website, and does a good job, offering some particularly inane quotes from the OU:

"Sexually active girls are three times more likely to attempt suicede" 

"Over 25% of sexually active teenage girls report they are depressed..."

Yeah, okay.  Okay.  The more I learn about the OU, the more okay I am with my secular Jewish upbringing...

This is a post about not having sex.

In high school, whenever my Orthodox women teachers would start talking about sex and marriage, and how important and awesome it was to wait to have sex until you were married, I would get kind of grossed out. The way it was presented, dating was just one long game of foreplay until the night you got married. And then you could reinstate the awesomeness of the foreplay every month by abstaining while and immediately after your period. Then, when you returned from the mikvah you and your husband would be just dying for it. There was never really any mention of the sad truth that good foreplay does not necessarily mean that the sex will be good. Even as a fairly naïve sixteen-year-old I remember thinking, “Okay, but won’t we be bad at it if we’ve never done it before? That will be so embarrassing!”
Celibacy Is Thrilling: (Or So We Hear)
Never fear, there are many more arguments for celibacy. In a completely hilarious salon.com interview called Sexless and Loving It, Dawn Eden, who wrote a memoir about being chaste (is it me, or does that sound boring?) explains that when we have sex we just can’t concentrate on anything else, which means we can’t be good friends or really “give emotionally in other areas.” Also, she explains that having sex outside of marriage is “telling lies with your body.”

Beliefnet published an interview with Lauren F. Winner, who wrote a memoir called Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. Winner is all about the community being what motivates chastity, and explains that when dating, people should navigate their sexuality in private as if they were in public. This is a fascinating idea, but I have to bring a number of my Orthodox-raised friends who, upon reaching college and having sex, became big proponents of exhibitionism. They would be very happy to have sex in public all the time (and often did). I don’t think communal shame should be the stick when sex is the carrot, especially when you’re in a functional committed relationship.

And let’s not forget everyone’s favorite modest chick, Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty. In her book she explains how the paragon of virtue is the female voice in the popular song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Women who care about their reputation and want to keep some things to themselves are Shalit’s heroes and reasons for championing chastity. On the website she moderates, modestyzone.net you can buy long-sleeved t-shirts that say, 'At Least I’m Not Emotionally Repressed.’ I find all that cute, but also kind of yucky. Shalit is obsessed with how shame is gone from our society, and while I see her point that it’s bad that people aren’t ashamed to wear low-cut everything, and show cleavage at job interviews, there are plenty of places where shame is still firmly in place in our society (say, in regards to children who are molested by clergy), and I wish it wasn’t.

Amusingly, the best endorsement for celibacy I could find was at nerve.com, a site that features essays about the sexual trials of living in your parents’ house, and photo essays about falling in love with the wrong guy that include pictures of said guy’s penis. Nerve recently published an interview with the front man of Explosions in the Sky who says that sex always leads to “emotions” and that he thinks “it's a really progressive society where people can just jump into the sack with whomever, but I'm not interested in that.”

I know it’s just oh-so-revolutionary to say that an alternative to complete celibacy is only sleeping with people you really care about and have serious feelings for, but I’ve always been a rebellious girl, I guess.