Punchline of a Cosmic Joke

After high school, I continued to save sex for marriage and suffered all the slings and arrows as a result. However, there was no safe harbor for people who made this decision despite the growing popularity of the “What Would Jesus Do?” trend which basically amounted to nothing more than a few young people wearing W.W.J.D. bracelets. I also remember talk of purity rings back then but in liberal Massachusetts that idea never caught on either.

During a meeting at St. Mary's rectory in the 1990s, I saw a magazine called You! which was geared toward the Catholic Church's young people. On the cover of one issue was singer Amy Grant and on another was actor John Stamos. I questioned the latter's commitment to the Church's views on sexuality given his rock star image and wondered if the publisher had trouble finding qualified role models.

While some TV shows like Blossom, Beverly Hills 90210, Family Matters and L.A. Law respectfully portrayed characters who refrained from sex, many others like Seinfeld used virginity as comedy relief. Then came the film The 40 Year Old Virgin which only reinforced the notion that late adulthood virginity was a result of ineptitude rather than a beautiful moral choice. One of my friends who thinks the Church's values are foolish occasionally teases me by quoting this movie's line, “What you just gotta do is just get you a bunch of these hood rats...”

During high school and college, I was eager to defend the Church's values at the drop of a hat but as the years passed, I found myself living in the closet in order to smooth things over with the vast majority of people who just couldn't understand. When a married coworker talked about how awkward he was in high school, he admitted to losing his virginity “very late in life” at age 18. I pretended to sympathize with his plight. On more than one occasion, I was put on the spot by coworkers who wanted to know about my past sexual experiences. I either made up a number or said that I didn't really talk about such things. Situations like these are painful because like St. Peter, I was denying a very important aspect of my faith.

I did share my secret with a married Catholic female coworker who never embraced the Church's values on premarital sex. We exchanged knowing looks when Friends was on the television in the break room and the episode airing featured a high school student comically losing his virginity to Monica.

If virginity isn't played for laughs then it's often viewed by society as something of a sideshow attraction...curiosity mixed with disbelief. That was the reaction when actress Rebel Wilson wrote in her autobiography that she didn't lose her virginity until the age of 35. Woke newscasters couldn't mock her “choice” but they found it odd to say the least. Despite our culture of diversity, there was simply no room to consider how waiting so long to have sex could be a laudable goal. Remember when Olympian Lolo Jones gained more fame for her decision to save herself for marriage than for her sporting abilities?

During a recent interview on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, the host embarrassed Kirsten Dunst by reading an old interview she did for Teen Magazine where the actress said she and all her friends were proud virgins having attended Catholic school. Like many who once professed these values but no longer embraced them, she tried to distance herself from her old remarks and found them humiliating.

Even abstinence's one-time role model, Brooke Shields admitted that she lost her virginity during college and was so guilt-ridden by the experience, she tumbled out of bed and ran out of the dorm room naked. She now regrets waiting so long to have sex because she missed out on “a sense of joy and freedom” and largely blames her mother for forcing abstinence upon her. What a role model, but even Lolo Jones partially blames her lackluster performance in sports on her virginity.

On YouTube we see social experiment videos played for laughs when a guy being filmed with a hidden camera blurts out to passing women, “I'm a virgin!” Another video asks women if they would sleep with a virgin. Most of the amused respondents answer with a resounding no because they figure there's something wrong with the guy or he won't know what to do in bed. And then there's the Virginity Exchange on Reddit where dateless wonders (mostly guys) plead for someone to sleep with them for the first time. There aren't many things in the world that are more pathetic.

If abstinence did indeed have some kind of counterculture edginess to it during the 1990s, it's mostly viewed as creepy, comical or sad in today's day and age. For those Catholics who took the Church's stance on premarital sex seriously and never wavered from it, there needs to be a place we can call home...where our moral decision can be seen as an attractive and rewarding one instead of the punchline of a cosmic joke.