In an article entitled “Christian Virgins Are Overrated”, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford makes a series of good observations about the conservative approach to sexuality, particularly as it relates to sex before marriage and a recent development in American evangelical circles, a ceremony known as a Purity Ball. He summarises it thus: “Premarital sex is evil. Female sexuality must be, as ever, contained, repressed, shoved deep down lest it tempt men to sin like gleeful pagans licking ice cream from the pierced nipples of the devil.” Succinct.

Satanic tits aside, he has a point, as did the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire when he claimed, “It is one of the great superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”

The truth is this: we lean heavily upon our culture when establishing our personal sexual ethics, which has leaned heavily upon the influence of the Christian church in doing so, which itself has leaned heavily upon the influence of a few key characters in church history which themselves have leaned heavily upon loaded, weighted hermeneutical exercises and subjective personal perceptions. One such character was St Augustine, in whose writings he provided formative direction to the early Christian church regarding such issues.

It is best-selling author Jostein Gaarder’s claim that his 1995 book ‘Vita Brevis’ (which roughly translates as ‘life is short’) is a transcript of a letter to St Augustine by his ex-lover/concubine, called the Codex Floriae (translated from Greek in his book). Floria is referred to frequently in Augustine’s Confessions, and this letter is a scathing critique of his Confessions from her. What’s interesting about it is the way it challenges the entire basic premise of Augustine’s anti-materialism, thus provocatively challenging some of Christianity’s key, but post-Christ, precepts. In her letter, Floria doubts that many of Augustine’s conclusions regarding human sexuality would have been shared by Christ himself, and furthermore suggests that he is somewhat bonkers to believe that his premarital sexual relations with her should suddenly be regarded as evil. She believed he was trying to buy his way into heaven by ‘putting aside things of the flesh’, that it was an invention of his own guilt. She said she could not believe in a God that demanded such a thing.

So it may not be a bad idea to try and come up with some original thought - yes, liberated thought - about human sexuality. The Roman Catholic church has long forbidden the use of condoms on a theological premise - yet it is clear that had they not done so, millions in Africa and around the world would not have needlessly died from sexually transmitted diseases. That sounds like a good thing to be liberated from. Ergo, I think the point at which we need to rethink our sexually retarded culture, and what ethical theory it is based on, has come and gone.

Morford’s article comes at this from a more practical point of view. He says that the offspring of conservative evangelicals are going into marriages sexually miseducated, “…unable to tell an erogenous zone from an elbow, a clitoris from a belly button.” This particular section has left me somewhat puzzled, since for the duration of my five-year marriage I had assumed that the elbow WAS an erogenous zone. This may explain the perplexed look my wife has always given me at bedtime. (Perhaps we should work on our communication.)

The article goes on: “Voila, the standard recipe for emotional, physical and spiritual catastrophe, for roughly 17 years of vague marital misery capped off by divorce and much therapy and four unhappy children and the profound and aching need located somewhere deep beneath the pelvic bone to try something, anything new and different and sexually liberating.” Sounds like he’s talking from experience! Maybe not. But despite his tendency to exaggerate here, I think Morford may have put his finger on something.

According to a Harvard study, half of all teens who take any sort of virginity pledge have broken it less than a year later. 88 percent end up having sex before marriage anyway, and, to the further consternation of conservative parents everywhere, only 2.7 percent of respondents in an online sex survey had waited until marriage to lose their virginity (48.9 percent lost their virginity to a school boyfriend or girlfriend). Just how DO you keep ‘em down on the farm? In fact, more respondents were victims of rape or incest (4.1 percent) than who waited until marriage to have sex.

So is the conservative position really that common in practice anyway? What we see in reality is actually something other than the monogamy sanctified by conservatives and so approved by our cultural correctness. It is, rather, more of a ‘serial monogamy’, where a person will have only one sexual partner at a time, but may have several such partners throughout their lifetime (as seen, for example, in the life of a typical man who perhaps had four girlfriends before getting married to the last one, subsequently was divorced, dated twice and remarried to the second, thus having six sexual partners total).

According to Derek McCullough and David S Hall, writing in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, “Serial monogamy is perhaps an unconscious compromise between the cultural ideal of monogamy and the facts of human nature - in other words, we acknowledge that you can love more than one person, but only one at a time. The destructive effects of serial monogamy on children are well documented, with 8 million single parent families in the US, infidelity-fueled acrimonious divorces, through to the spate of spouse murdering lately. Much of the evidence seems to indicate that human attainment of the cultural ideal of monogamy is a myth.”

George P Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas recorded the types of marriage found in 1231 different societies around the world from 1960 to 1980. Of these societies, only 186 were monogamous. The rest were either occasionally or frequently polygamous or polyamorous, where the cultural norms we have do not exist and they have a number of sexual partners simultaneously. Yet despite being in the minority, we are quick to judge polygamous marriages in this country (even making polygamy illegal - a position which is plainly bizarre).

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.” An interesting suggestion. It is also true that almost every society has condemned sexual pleasure as sinful or wicked based on the assumption that God, or the gods, don’t like sex. It’s worth noting that in most of those societies, female sexuality was regarded more as a service than as a result of co-operation between autonomous individuals, and women regarded more as property than as equals.

So, in this strange society of ours, we have learned that women are equals, but have not come to understand that sexuality is perhaps more a matter of pragmatism on a personal level than it is a matter of morality?

Morford’s article concludes that we would be “utterly transformed” if we had “…a new agenda, a sexually informed education system that truly empowered teens, that taught open-minded respect for bodies and flesh, pleasure and joy and physical/spiritual awareness.”

Like many of the other points Morford makes, I take issue with his analysis here. I’m pretty sure that a centrally authorised and approved education system is the LAST thing we need, contrary to his implication. It is, rather, the parents that should be empowering their children, ensuring that the maturity they want to see in all other aspects of their lives extends also to their sexuality. By being a role model to their children with true openness about sex, many a conservative parent could have prevented their children finding out the hard way. We know they will probably have sex anyway - why not ensure that they are educated and feel they can talk about it openly? When my son is 14 years old and hears his friends’ awkward, crude sex talk, gleaned from the overheard conversations of their older siblings - I want HIS reaction to be, “Big deal! My dad taught me that years ago. Were you trying to be funny?”

As Morford goes on to say, parents should “…arm [their] virgin daughters and inept sons with slick and giddy reverence for the joys of the flesh … There is no sacredness in the virgin. There is only the fear, were she to be educated and empowered and really let loose, of what she could become.”

Conservatives have guarded fiercely the safety of their children with great regard to what they feel is right. But maybe an autograph on a marriage certificate doesn’t approve a marriage in God’s eyes any more than not having one condemns it. I believe there’s a better approach to sexuality than that.

And I have a feeling it doesn’t depend on a sanction from anyone other than the individual themselves - virgin or not.

John Wright

johnwright@libertarianreason.com