Friday, June 02, 2006
The idiocy of virginity pledges
Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.
Good. It would be a shame if teenagers were the only people who weren't lying about sex.
Whatever one thinks about sex out of wedlock, virginity pledges are stupid. Like all such oaths -- students of asinine American cultural history will remember the "temperance pledge," which my own great-grandmother saw fit to take at some point in the 1880s -- they are a gutless substitute for standing by one's convictions. Choose your morality, take your stand, make your mistakes, but please do so on the basis of your own thinking. Pledges such as this are not for moral people, they are for weak people who measure right and wrong by the popularity of their decision. Pledges create a line of defense -- the risk of the embarrassment of renouncing the pledge -- for people who do not understand the reasons why they reached a particular moral conclusion. They are cover for people who lack the courage to confront their own motives, desires, passions, impulses and weaknesses. Don't have sex, have sex, decide that the sex you had was a mistake, but don't create some artificial construct to prop up your decision. Instead, work on strengthening your conviction. Better to have lost your virginity in a mistake than live your entire life without genuinely understanding the reasons why you lost it -- or retained it -- in the first place.
9 Comments:
By 
Escort81, at
Fri Jun 02, 11:13:00 AM:
Then, of course, there is the concept of a statutory virgin. You enter college having already had sex, but (for any number of reasons) you go for a long period of time without sex, thereby reverting to your virgin status.
By Pax Federatica, at
Fri Jun 02, 02:10:00 PM:
This sounds to me like yet another symptom of a much larger and unsettling trend in Western public life: Reason taking a back seat to visceral responses. (See also intelligent design and left-wing populism.)
TigerHawk is correct that the virginity pledge is the last - or first? - refuge of moral cowards. (For that matter, so are pledges against any other manner of putatively sinful behavior, but I digress.) But there's also the thought process of the parents, clergy or whoever else is foisting this pledge upon teens to consider. Why would they encourage such an act of moral cowardice? Do they even recognize it as moral cowardice? Or are they simply so dismayed by the idea of sex outside marriage, and so desperate to believe in a pledge as a panacea against it, that that trumps all other concerns?
By Charlottesvillain, at
Fri Jun 02, 02:18:00 PM:
Careful TH, Screwy might think you're writing about him again.
By 
, at
Fri Jun 02, 02:42:00 PM:
I pledged back when I was young to definitely have sex that I would someday look back upon as a mistake.
As often as possible.
By Gordon Smith, at
Fri Jun 02, 11:15:00 PM:
As the point man for "The Left" here at Tigerhawk, I must make it clear that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a virgin.
Wait...that's not right. I pledge only to have sex with virgins.
No, I take it back. That's not right.
I propose a virgin tax to create a government program to oversee and regulate the pledge process.
Wait...still problems...
I'll get back to you...
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sat Jun 03, 12:36:00 AM:
Almost impossible to have a thread like this go on long without some unintentional double-entendre. Hope it's not me.
I can well believe that teenagers would tend to answer all such questions with emphasis on what they think of themselves right now than what would be strict accuracy. For the young, the only times that exist are Now and Not-Now.
I think neither a pledge nor a refusal to pledge is a one-size-fits-all. I agree with the general reasoning of TH, it seems you could make exactly the same argument about marital fidelity. If so, then why make vows at marriage?
I think the age at which one makes such a vow, and whether it is a considered or a spontaneous decision has some bearing on the advisability. Which would lead to the intriguing irony/paradox: if you are too young and unaware of consequence to be making such a vow, are you not then too young to be consenting to sexual behavior?
By , at
Sat Jun 03, 02:33:00 AM:
If one is to make this "pledge", make it with yourself. No one needs to know you have made (or not made) it. I made myself a promise long ago, and I have managed to keep it. I know myself well enough to know that I will not be able to separate "the act" from thinking "commitment". I've known this since high school. In that sense, maybe I wasn't a typical teenager? Since my past opportunities to have sex were not in a context of what one would consider a committed relationship, even now, at almost 36 years of age, I am still a virgin. It is not something I advertise, as it is no one's business. One reason I don't advertise it is because it seems people will assume there is something wrong with you if you have reached a certain age and still have not had sex. At a recent health appointment, when the nurse practioner was taking my history, I think I surprised the hell out of her because of my complete lack of experience. People will lie about sex, either way, for many reasons. I am guess you could say I have lied through omission - I just try to avoid having to talk about it to people who have no need to know, and that I don't feel I can trust to accept me as I currently am - a 30-something virgin.....
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Jun 03, 09:21:00 AM:
AVI -
I think the difference between the marriage oath and the virginity pledge is that the marriage oath is to someone, for that person's specific benefit. It is a contractual commitment as well as a moral one. That makes it different from these public declarations -- whether concerning virginity or temperance or something else -- that seem to me to substitute for moral learning.
Now, I admit that I have this view because I do not view virginity as something intrinsically valuable in need of defense in the abstract. To me, the meaning of life is found in the development of one's own morality, not in a life led entirely without "sin," whatever that is. If one learns that uncommitted sex is a bad idea through the experience of uncommitted sex, that is just fine with me. I do understand that if somebody has a religious belief that virginity is an inherent good -- "I should remain a virgin because God has commanded it" -- then by all means shore up your conviction with whatever defenses will be helpful for you.
By , at
Tue Jun 06, 03:40:00 PM:
If anyone follows this oath or remembers it with any sense of responsibility at some point in their lives, it is worthwhile. Would that I and even the few women I was involved with in youth had even thought of such a thing (ah, the '70s), not because anything terrible happened, but because none of us was ever the same and in each pre-marital instance, we gave up something of ourselves that we probably shouldn't have at that time. Even marriage, wonderful as it is, can't have the magic of being first. I hope my kids will make this one, important choice, whether by oath or mere resolve.
