Virginal white is no match for the hottitude

I’m sure that the some of the better feminist blogs will be providing their own take on Students of Virginity, but I found these separate passages to be, well, somewhat humorous. To set the stage, Harvard student Janie Fredell heads up a abstinence/virginity club after falling victim to the obligatory shock of the "hook-up culture" (go here to see where this is an article of faith).

She did nothing about it until her sophomore year. Then she began to read in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, about a new student group on campus — a band of celibates, men and women, calling themselves True Love Revolution. They were pushing, for reasons entirely secular, the cause of premarital sexual abstinence, and Fredell, by this time, was utterly committed to abstinence. She could hardly bear to see it ridiculed in The Crimson. An article about the group’s ice cream social appeared under the headline “Not Tonight, Honey, I Have a Brain Freeze.” A columnist who wrote about the group joked of getting “very, very aroused” just thinking about virgins and wondered if such people might be available for “dry humping.”

“It’s an odd thing to see one’s lifestyle essentially attacked in The Crimson,” Fredell said. She began to feel a need to stand up for her beliefs, and what she believed in more than anything at Harvard was the value of not having premarital sex. In an essay she wrote for The Crimson, she asserted that “virginity is extremely alluring,” though its “mysterious allure . . . is not rooted in an image of innocence and purity, but rather in the notion of strength.” As she told me later, “It takes a strong woman to be abstinent, and that’s the sort of woman I want to be.”

Fair enough. And so she arms herself with the intellectual foundation to back up her beliefs.

“People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender politics — and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital mutilation — to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life — men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

She said she read in Mill that women are subordinated in relationships as a result of “socially constructed norms.” If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.

While Fredell framed her own abstinence in a feminist perspective, she was careful to say that women were not the only ones to benefit. “It’s not all about protecting women,” she said. “It’s about protecting people.” To prove her point, she said the membership of True Love Revolution was equally divided between women and men.

One man who was committed to abstinence was her boyfriend. He wasn’t talking, but I had talked to Leo Keliher, the 20-year-old co-president of True Love Revolution, in another Cambridge restaurant.

Jumping forward from here is where it gets …interesting:

The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. “The biological drive can be overcome,” she said. “It’s not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex.”

“And you don’t go down the street thinking you’d like to have sex with him, him, him and him?” I asked.

“No!” she said, abruptly. “Is that what men do?”

It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something “breathtakingly powerful” that “lights all of your body on fire.” He spoke of his lust as “this untamed beast.”

Fredell was incredulous: “Leo said that?”

He told me that he struggles constantly against “physical lustful temptation” — that he can be aroused just by a woman’s touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by “thoughts that just come out of the blue — basically pornography in my head.” They come to him when he’s merely walking around campus, or even when he’s alone in the library — “like a fly buzzing around.”

To the matter of masturbation, he said, “This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s hard to stop.”

Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, “Oh, God, no!”

Actually most people say, "Oh, God, yessssss!" but then Fredell isn’t part of ‘the club‘ so she wouldn’t know about that or the secret handshake (insert your own joke here) (insert your own joke about ‘insert’ here).

But never mind that.

Perhaps I’m just being naive here (even more so than Ms. Fredell) but I have a hard time imagining a twenty-something woman who appears to be fairly bright, bright enough to be accepted into Harvard at least, who is shocked, shocked by the plainly stated fact that men (or women) look at other men (or women) on the street or wherever and think, "I’ll have an order of that with nothing on it".

I’ve stated before that some choose abstinence while others have it thrust upon them, but I think that when one chooses to speak for either a generation or for a club of twenty-four virgins that so interested the New York Times, one should have a basic grasp of the hot and bothereds.

Put down the John Stuart Mill, pick up the Danielle Steele.