Let me begin by saying that I see religious reasons for any behavior or lifestyle to be utterly empty. The reasons why chastity is important to God is its own ridiculous quagmire that I am simply not interested in getting into, but am secure enough in my views that I am confident in casually dismissing religious motivation for remaining chaste.
The conclusion of the first article you linked to is retarded, primarily because of this bit of ignorance:
Jane Treays wrote:For now, the purity movement is too young for anyone to assess whether it leads to happier marriages or fewer divorces.
This is total and obvious bullshit. Our obsession with adultery and purity has existed ever since we first changed from hunter-gatherers to patriarchal societies. Before we had much of an understanding of biology, the only way to verify that an heir was legitimate was to restrict women to use by one man. So it became a disgraceful thing for a woman to have sex with a man she wouldn't spend the rest of her life with and for whom she would bear a child, and especially disgraceful for her to sleep with another
while the man who claimed her was actively trying to churn out heirs, as the possibility that one of the children he thought to be his own could be a bastard was unthinkable. So it became the responsibility of women to keep themselves pure for their husbands, and failing to do so was serious business. If you want a glance several hundred years in the past, take a look at the Middle East today, the cultural values of which are still stuck in the fucking Dark Ages: when a woman is raped,
she is the one punished for it, and that's because the lunatics thence and yonder think it's the woman's responsibility for keeping herself pure.
I wish I could convey to you how completely underwhelmed I am when presented with an instance of outdated, nonsensical, and evil social values endorsed by a religion that was established around the time that these values were the norm. Organized religions are necessarily bound by the culture in which they originated, and the culture that gave us Christianity was one of our first and worst attempts at making a fair society. What I
am surprised to see is that people don't realize the blatant anachronism in movements like these.
Sometimes I even think I was brought up sheltered in some kind of Utopian environment where everyone was sensible, because I remember how totally confused I was when I was first told that there are people out there who honestly believe that women are so different -- through some fundamental distinction by
gender, of all things -- that they should not be afforded equal rights as men. Naturally, I believe that women ought to be allowed to behave in society the same way that men are, because there is zero meaningful difference between men and women in the set of qualities that could possibly disqualify either from any rights that the other enjoys. It's as arbitrary and stupid to me as the belief that blonde people can vote but brunettes can't, or that only tall people can own property. Human women are just as sapient, experience the same range of emotions and for the same reasons, and share the same perspective of society, as men. In fact, aren't women typically
more socially aware than men? Arbitrarily restricting their influence on society is beyond preposterous.
And that's the foundation that my revulsion of chastity movements is built on. From my perspective, they're the contrived products of someone trying to kludge outdated and evil values into a modern, more fair society -- the classic attempt to shove a square peg into a round hole. Powerful, influential people who were misled to believe that the values of a perfect society are those of a society idealized thousands of years ago try to reconcile the inherent unfairness of those ancient values with modern ones, and the result is a dilapidated cultural movement that has been divorced from its only sensible purpose. Worse yet, the hoops it needs to jump through to be acceptable in modern society force it to produce values that were counter-productive to that purpose. So they become their own little beasties, their own little runts and confusing messes of inconsistent values in a tangled, schizophrenic ball that rolls around and swallows up the sheeple with the same kind of mental fragility that predisposes them to religiosity.
A careful examination of reasons for remaining chaste until marriage will reveal that there are effectively none. Throw any you got at me, and I'll give you a more compelling reason to be sexually active (although responsibly, of course). It seems to me that the chastity camp only see two extremes: throwing caution to the wind and fucking everything that moves, or showing temperance by saving that honor for a magical evening with a person they love. It takes an acute sort of ignorance, honestly, to fail to see the more common, the more mentally and emotionally healthy, and more socially fair and beneficial, range in between those two. People can fall in love multiple times, and having had sex with those people does not in any way demean sex with yet another husband or wife, or girlfriend or boyfriend. Having frequent sex does not erode its emotional weight.
Sexual experience, in fact, leads to more stable partnerships. Lack of experience in handling the emotional subtleties of a relationship, the magnitude of which become massive as soon as sex enters the scene, leads only to frustration, confusion, and anger. If that experience isn't present, any intimate partnership is doomed to flame out in short order, and is the classic source of romantic tragedies that end in violence. Unless you find yourself in some kind of magical fucking fairy tale marriage, 99.99% of which marriages in the real world are
not, that lack of emotional maturity will end up costing you a relationship you were told all your life was supposed to be sacred and perfect. And that'll probably do some damage.
Besides which, I don't know what you people are expecting, but first times are embarrassing as hell. Is that really how you want to remember your honeymoon?
Rant over. I need to eat.
