my love hate relationship with abstinence.

Now Playing: Come Into My Head by Kimbra (but from the pews of the congregation you'll never know the real salvation) 

I grew up in a little world called Primary School where the girls were divided into two groups - the ones who wanted ten children and the ones who wanted none. Sex...didn't have any say in the matter. I think most of us operated under the assumption that children just suddenly appeared once you got married. When I first learned about the birds and the bees I was sucked into the romance myth. I believed that girls needed flowers and chocolates and diamond rings and mushy proposals to be loved - sex was our end of the bargain, the thing that we gave in payment for all of the luxuries of being adored. I believed that any girl who liked sex was a slut and any girl who slept with a guy without first securing all of the above was cheap.

We put virginity on a pedestal. We put virginity on a pedestal because we didn't know what we were talking about. We put virginity on a pedestal because even though we were underaged and unprepared we were growing up in a sex-saturated culture where virginity is stigmatized. We put virginity on a pedestal because we believed that it was our blackmail, our bribe, the one thing we had that could secure a future we knew nothing about. We put virginity on a pedestal because our sex education and exposure to discussion of sexuality was so sex negative that we were afraid of sex, afraid of sexuality, and tried to suppress it for the greater good. We put virginity on a pedestal because we saw sluts as a threat to the future we were conditioned to want - as Emily Maguire puts it, 'a 'cheap' woman has the same effect on the sex market as a budget airline has on airfares. Men can't be expected to 'pay' for sex by buying dinners and diamond rings and a three-bedroom house in the suburbs when they can get the same 'product' from the neighbourhood slut for free.'

When I was about twelve or thirteen I swore I would not have sex until marriage. Not because I saw sex as something necessarily bad anymore, but because I put sex on a pedestal in the same way we put virginity on a pedestal. I wanted everything to be perfect and beautiful and exciting and the society I grew up in convinced me that the only way to achieve this was a tacky wedding night in some highbrow hotel after a big white wedding. I was also hyper aware of my distinct lack of appeal to boys and I didn't want to be picked on for being eternally single. My Christian friends seemed to have a legitimate excuse for innocence. I created one for myself, out of fear. I wanted to look like I was in control when I felt so out of control when it came to love and other animals; I felt, and still feel, like my happiness and relationships are far too reliant on other people, and on the devil of luck.

The first thing that eroded my stubbornness was the fact that male virginity was never discussed. Ever. It never occurred to me that men could be virgins. I knew that when it came down to it sexual experience would be the last thing I would object to in a partner, as long as everything was safe and consensual and legal and STI-free. And as the feminist in me began to emerge I realized that this kind of acceptance would be something I would want in a future partner, too, and I was not aiding in this ambition in any way by religiously sticking to abstinence.

And in other ways I didn't find the notion of two totally inexperienced people committing to each other for life before even attempting something that is such a fundamental part of a relationship particularly appealing. I'd always liked older guys because I love people with experience - and I suppose that includes sexual experience, too. I love people who seem worldly, people who know things and have seen and done things and can teach me things. I'm always curious and I love to learn and I get very very bored in the company of people who don't know any more than I do, or know even less than I do. I just want to learn about anything and everything. Virginity just seemed less and less appealing to me as time wore on.

Of course there were hormones involved, too. I'd always been a kind of passionate, intense sort of person and that's translated into weird things as time has passed. Where do you draw the line, with this abstinence thing? What's sex and what isn't? Is flirting okay? What about kissing or touching? And if that's okay what's the difference between that and the actual deed? And, more importantly, why do I keep thinking that these desires and the desires of others are wrong? If they were so wrong why do I feel this way? How do I explain to people, and to myself, that what I want and feel is totally incongruous with what I will actually do?

They always tell you that you can 'always say no'. They never tell you that you can always say yes, too. What little I've done that I previously thought was wrong...I couldn't say no. The words were there on the tip of my tongue but nothing and nobody could make me say no to something I knew I wanted, and afterwards nothing could make me feel guilty. In the last year or so I've made more friends with boys - and more than that, deeper and weirder and stronger friendships with boys. The rush of a first hug from a boy was exhilarating, but no different to the second or third or hundredth hug. If it's the same deed under the same circumstances it will always feel the same, whether it's getting a good mark in an essay or a hug from a friend or wearing your favourite dress or having sex. 

And then there is the ideology behind abstinence and abstinence education that I find severely problematic; it functions around the concept that sex is purely for procreation, for male desire, that female sexuality is a commodity; concepts I don't agree with, especially the latter. There are so many examples of people using anologies comparing female sexuality and/or the female body to inanimate objects, and quite frankly, its insulting. People say that sex before marriage is like a man offering someone the same ring he offered to his ex-fiancee, and all I could think of was that this thinking was probably the reason why that fiancee is his ex-fiancee and not his wife. Female sexuality is spoken of as a kind of bribe, a dowry of sorts, and once you've spent it you've lost bargaining power over men. As Emily Maguire puts it, this thinking reduces a woman to one or the other of two things: a battery (can only be used so many times before it runs out) or a car (value decreases with each use). It's a horrific and distinctly misogynistic perspective, but it was nonetheless the perspective that underpins the concept of sexual abstinence in our society.

There is this assumption that women who abstain from any kind of sexual expression are more in control - because control is so necessary for women or they become like men - horny, desperate and fickle. Both of these stereotypes are harmful to both sexes, but the view that women must constantly control themselves is all-consuming. We must wear clothes that controls this and alters that; the reason why obese women are more stigmatized than obese men is that obesity in a woman shows lack of self-control, which is glamorized in men and stigmatized in women. We prize the thin woman in controlling, restrictive clothes and with almost no libido to speak of because a woman with desires - especially a woman who indulges these desires - is an unknown quantity. I didn't want people to love me by how well I can control and suppress myself.

The problem I have with abstinence and the glorification of virginity is that it casts sex as something bad and something to be ashamed of. The reason why I was into abstinence in the first place, and the reason why I am still a virgin, is that I think the opposite - sex is something beautiful and you don't want to corrupt that with recklessness or guilt. I don't believe in glorifying sex any more than I believe in glorifying virginity - but the problem I have with the general opinion of abstinence is that it is usually a very sex negative perspective.

And there is this assumption that you 'lose' all of these experiences - first kiss, first love, first time. Why can't we see it not as losing virginity but gaining experiences? Anything that has ever happened...I never felt any loss. I felt like I knew something, I was learning something, that I had another perfect moment to add to an inventory. I didn't know I would feel like this until before now, and it totally contradicted with whatever I had been told. Because love isn't bait, isn't blackmail, isn't a bargain. It's not a give and take or buyer and seller market. Love is not a commodity, and neither am I.

But the flip side of all of this was the insecurity that comes when you know you aren't the most adored woman on the planet, that you're still single even though you've decided to admit to yourself that you like all this stuff and you're not going to waste any more time feeling guilty about it. You lose that false security, that facade of control that abstinence gives you - you have to face the fact that it's not you, it's them - and not in a good way.

But I'm not sorry that I don't say that I'm into the whole abstinence thing anymore. The reason why is that I don't see virginity as an awe-inspiring thing; I see sex to be an awe-inspiring thing, which is why I'm not so keen on doing anything just to 'get some' just as I am not so keen on doing anything to 'just say no'. At the core of it my attitude towards sex is still the same - I still think it's 'special', but that informs my attitudes and choices in different ways than it did before. Virginity is so often seen as a moral compass - people assume so much about someone's character and attitude and prospects by what they may or may not do behind closed doors. Anyone who's been in high school can tell you that sometimes it's the slut who is there when things get tough and the virgin who can reduce you to a blubbering mess of tears in a heartbeat. Virginity is simply a state of being, not a moral high ground - just as being sexually active is also a state of being, and not a sign of immorality. I'll take things as it comes, explore, learn, grow, make mistakes, change colour. I'll say no when I want to, not when society tells me I should. We can only encourage sex positivity by establishing that virginity shouldn't be put on a pedestal - sex is the thing that should be valued, esteemed, enjoyed, not wasted either in recklessness or guilt.