Andrew Greeley once said, in defending clerical celibacy, that he thought it was no harder to live up to than marriage vows – sometimes easy, and sometimes nearly impossible.

I’m not convinced that his equivalence between the difficulty of celibacy and the difficulty of marriage is quite on track, but the business about celibacy being sometimes easy and sometimes nearly impossible has the ring of truth to me.

It was easy for me to graduate high school still a virgin. Being not all that popular was part of it, but not all of it. I really wasn’t dying to lose my virginity, or requiring lots of self-control to maintain it. “Not me, not now” was what I wanted, and I never regretted waiting.

Staying virginal until I married at the age of 27 was another matter.

So, yeah, according to these places, the sexual partner one should least trust is the one who mentions birth control.

I generally raise my divorced eyebrow and say nothing. I save my energy for the bit where they tell me that condoms are rubbish and don’t stop anything, and that there’s no need for STD tests if you’re having sex (after marriage, of course) with a “good Christian you can trust”.

Kyra – my story’s like yours minus the pledge. Still a virgin, don’t really care, because I haven’t found anybody I want to have sex with. It’s not a matter of waiting for True Love or marriage; it’s waiting for someone I like and trust enough.

really? the core goals of instilling shame and fear about sex have been accomplished, and when the kids screw up, they serve as an example to others.

I’d imagine that an abstinence suggestion based on waiting until you a) know yourself well enough to avoid negative emotional consequences, b) are assertive and self-confident enough to expect and demand both safety and pleasure from a partner, c) possess the self-esteem to avoid self-loathing and stand up to the “slut” double standard from society and peers, d) have attained access to birth control and found health care and STI testing facilities you are comfortable utilizing, e) have considered the various possible consquences and how you will react to them (decide whether you’d have an abortion or not before it becomes an issue; have access to EC; have money available for treatments and emergencies), and f) have found someone interested whom you desire and truly want to have sex with, would be a lot more useful at getting young people to delay sex than any moralizing “save-it-for-marriage-’cause-you-don’t-deserve-pleasure-beforehand” types.

Focusing truly on “you’re worth it” without the negative qualifier “you have to wait,” (which sort of undermines “you’re worth it” by badly attempting to repackage a sacrifice as a reward), and allowing a potentially-very-soon payoff, with the timing ultimately up to the student rather than an ages-away wedding night, will not only make waiting less of a burden, but also avoid the stigma of virginity as something you are forced into choosing.

I spent several years in middle and high school ashamed to be a virgin, because it felt like giving in to the pressure and coersion from family and church and so forth. It took quite some time before I managed to claim the decision as my own, based solely on the fact that I hadn’t met anyone worth fucking, rather than choosing to have sex with someone I wasn’t interested in, solely to feel like I had made my own choice, which I probably would’ve done if I hadn’t realized that I could make the pressure irrelevent, that my own choice should be in spite of that pressure, and not because of it. No thanks to family and church on that one.

Virginity pledge be damned. MY choice, thank you very much.

That’s a pretty substantial problem.