This Is Not A Post About Sex.

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!” 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.