funny because the lst time I checked MEN were the general class failing to see that women have all qualities of a full fledged human becuase they expect women to fuck them and do the laundry, and women are SO much more complicated to understand and all that. Why do women always have to hear this shit! If you are going to make the argument anyone dehumanises anyone with sex as a statistical average, yell at the right fucking people.

I hope ex-slut Dawn finds a nice ex-gay man and settles down and lives happily never after.

Tangent related to prev. post: I and quite a few of my friends have had immense success with online dating services. It’s nice to go into something knowing what the other person is looking for. And contrary to popular belief, there are many decent people on them looking for other decent people. I think the modern dater knows better than to go to stale single’s bars if they want anything more than an impassionate screw.

Totally agree. One small issue though – in my experience, discerning this difference in what you’re seeking in a mate doesn’t totally swearing off sex. It just requires that you become aware that you have hitherto been turned on by self-absorbed assholes, but now you’re a big girl and should consider actually getting to know someone. Happened to me. Starting dating my now-husband, wondered if he was really too good for me – “am I ready for this?” etc., etc. Got beyond my fear, started sleeping with him, married him a year and a half later. Almost two years in, haven’t looked back. Letting him into my life was the best thing I ever did.

No noticeable difference in the “aura” of the sex before/after signing the marriage license.

There’s my anecdotal evidence, anyway. It’s quite the anecdote-fest on the other side of the fence, so why not.

If Dawn Eden felt she needed to swear off sex to get her sh*t together – - fine. But implying that women who have premarital sex are actually man-haters who will never see the good qualities in a man, is, well, pretty dern funny. Baby with the bathwater, anyone?

That actually made me spew diet coke across my desk. And I thank you for it.

As for courting, I had a four month courtship with my husband during which we wrote letters almost daily and spoke on the phone whenever practical. He was in the military and training in another state. I was not interested in a relationship because I was still trying to process the detritus from the last one. So we became friends. Eventually, we visited back and forth and married. If one wants a formal courtship, I highly recommend letters. You will say things in them that you will not say in person or even your emails. And if the other person is freaked out by it, they can say so or indicate that the correspondence needs to end. I attempted that a couple of times and my husband took it as a challenge to convince me that building any kind of relationship takes work and that people saying or doing the wrong thing is natural. He always came around to his belief that, if nothing else, we should continue to be friends. 14 years later, we still are, so it seems he was right. Our banging like mad animals every time we managed to get together didn’t seem to lessen our appreciation for each other. I wonder why that is….

Perhaps Dawn should try one of those internet mating services.

It looks like I made a big old mistake in my post about her book when I said that she was arguin [...]

No, it’s implying it. /pet peeve

The difference between “courting” and “dating” can range from being really seriously marriage-minded about everyone you see (forget that date if you know he doesn’t meet your marriage checklist), to being more chaperoned that most people are when dating, to, at the icky extreme, having a father or pastor (conservative Protestant pastors – no one gives that role to Catholic priests) granting the guy permission to court the woman.

because her religious teaching had told her God would take care of that for her. He’d find the Right One, if that’s what He wanted to do.

One thing I’ll say for Mormons; they tend not to leave that up to God.

Now she is trying to make some connections with single men. It’s tough: so many are divorced with “issues,” or much more worldly than she has been. She got heartbroken over a guy who showed tentative interest, and then cooled. It’s something that most of us would have been through in our teens, if not earlier, and we’d be over it in a flash.

I accept religious doctrine as a reason to stay chaste, but then those who teach the doctrine better have good answers for women who follow it only to remain unhappily celibate for life.

Premarital sex doesn’t solve this problem, but if every potential relationship is viewed as possibly requiring sex, there are still some women who will avoid the dating scene rather than deal with an uncomfortable situation.