(Adding to Gabe’s post below on the NYT Magazine student abstinence piece)

I thought that while the the author, Randall Patterson, does try to present the abstinence activists in a credible way, some of the most hilarious parts of the article are the contrasts between the female and male True Love Revolution leaders. In particular, the opposite reactions of abstinence proponents Fredell and Keliher to hormonal lust and masturbation are worth a look.

On dealing with ‘urges’:

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?”

On masturbation:

“To the matter of masturbation, [Keliher] 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!’

On this note, I’d be curious to know how Fredell’s disdain for masturbation fits in with the “alternative” feminism she propounds. Is the apparent revulsion connected to something liberating for women? Is it her Catholicism that causes this position? Does the True Love Revolution frown upon masturbation? If so, why? Is it about denial of all sexual pleasure not connected to true love?

I agree with Gabe that a better spelling out of some of the philosophical underpinnings would have really helped the activists seem logical rather than reactionary. Any hardcore abstinence activists/philosophers want to fill in the blanks?

Today, the New York Times runs a piece in its magazine on abstinent Ivy Leaguers that tries desperately to make them seem more sophisticated than knee-jerk fundamentalist abstinencers. Hence, the article caption:

In the Ivy League, abstinence is a) philosophical, b) research-based, c) an outgrowth of feminism, d) sexy and fun, e) all of the above.

The writer, Randall Patterson, has to strain pretty hard to make the case. He quotes Kevin Joyce, the former head of Princeton’s abstinence club, saying, “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought,” and then proceeds to spend thousands of words profiling a group of people who make no real arguments whatsoever. All the abstinence activists Patterson talks to operate under the basic premise that sex is dirty, bad, and wrong. The assumption drips from the page. Here’s a section on Princeton’s conservative Catholic group, the Anscombe Society:

Anscombe’s arguments against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to summarize, and the students so admired her logic, they named their society after her. Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.”

Note Patterson trying to give Anscombe and its allies the benefit of the doubt, without actually bothering to include the content of their claims, beyond the assertion that sex “deeply compromises human dignity.” People are obviously welcome to believe that, but if they want to make the case to me, I’d sort of like to hear why.

This kind of stuff is sexual Intelligent Design Theory. It’s pseudoscientific — full of claims like “safe sex is not safe” and “[abstinence will give you] better sex in your future marriage” — and relies on that pseudoscientific veneer to mask a fundamentally religious agenda. I’m glad that this seems to have some sort of relationship with feminism for some, like Janie Fredell, the main subject of the article, who expresses deep and obviously genuine concern about equality, female genital mutilation, etc.

I want to reiterate again here that people are of course entitled to their own beliefs about how personally damaging sex is, but calm the agenda down, guys:

By the time I met her in December, Janie Fredell had grown used to explaining to strange men why she won’t have sex. Only 21 years old, she had spoken with a number of reporters and been on CNN. “It’s such an incredible thing to have the power to influence people for the better,”

Despite Fredell’s clear concern for important women’s issues, one can’t help but get the sense that this is a sad, 19th-century style feminism, in which frail, pure women must be protected from the bestial, carnal desires of men. She denies this avidly, but neither she nor Patterson doesn’t bother to explain how her feminism differs from this “protect-the-weak-women” attitude, except to assert flatly that it does differ. Here’s one of Fredell’s co-abstinents:

Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said — that the real meaning of masculinity is “being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman.”

It’s another example of the ironic postmodernism of the contemporary American right, which is willing to tolerate such dissonance as the cooption of its arch-enemy, feminism, if that means pushing its fundamentally anti-modern agenda.  Present, of course, is the classic victimology trope of those who are pushing for a basically regressive agenda. The group calls itself “True Love Revolution,” and Fredell’s clear comparison of herself to heroes of people who were actually, forcefully repressed:  “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”

I don’t know why sex seems so unhappy and unpleasurable to people like Fredell and Keliher. I’m sorry that it does, and I’ll happily concede their right not to have it if they don’t want to. But it’s offensive to suggest that people who enjoy having sex are demeaning themselves and their bodies, and it’s a completely indefensible argument when its religious underpinnings are knocked away.