CHAPTER 9
Chastity
The Final Taboo
THOUGH ADMITTEDLY not a professional historian, I do watch a lot of the History Channel—now that it mostly programs reality shows, instead of all that dreary business about the past. With my semiprofessional credentials thus authenticated, I feel it incumbent upon me to mark the historical moment when our nation became conclusively, irrefragably slutty. Or at least the moment in which it occurred to me.
It wasn’t in the Roaring Twenties, when flappers, tight on bathtub gin, started hiking up their newly shortened skirts in the backseats of Model Ts. Nor was it in the swinging key parties of the Quaaluded and Qiana-draped seventies. To me, the realization of our overwhelming sluttitude dawned in the year 2000 (I’m not the quickest study), during the Republican National Convention.
I was ostensibly there to cover it, meaning I was mostly on the lookout for oddities and open-bar parties, while my more sober journalistic colleagues suffered through speeches from the electrifying likes of George Pataki and Tom Ridge. But my nose for news took me to a dirty bookstore in Philadelphia, a place in which I ordinarily wouldn’t be caught dead, on account of all the clammy-palmed perverts you meet there. (Not in the dirty bookstore—in Philadelphia, I mean.)
The Scorpio Adult Bookstore wasn’t just a book/video store, but a full-service sex shop, complete with strippers plying their trade in peep booths—the kind of establishment where you wished you’d worn cleated hiking boots instead of loafers. I arrived along with a media pal named Lexxx Rubba. (That’s not his real name, but to protect the “innocent,” all friends appearing in this chapter have been given aliases originating from a porn-star name generator.) We had come to see a convention-themed political question-and-answer session with the legendary porn actress Nina Hartley. Think of her as the Judi Dench of the one-handed film world, with star turns in the likes of Minivan Moms 12: Cougar Edition and Woodworking 101: Nina’s Guide to Better Fellatio.
Hartley, who grew up a brainy, red-diaper baby, is a “sex-positive” feminist who, when not rutting for money in drafty warehouses in the San Fernando Valley, likes to crank out essays for turgid anthologies with titles such as “Frustrations of a Feminist Porn Star.” Standing between racks of culturally diverse porn videos, from White Trash Whore 3 to Black Knockers Volume 60, Hartley had some political thoughts she wanted to share with the small crowd—all men—who had flocked around her. She prattled on for a spell, fretting that George W. Bush was in the pocket of the religious right. She enthused over Bill Clinton, “a highly sexed man, I like that in my leaders.” Though she scrupulously added that, regarding his Monica problem, “oral sex is sex,” thus authoritatively settling the most pressing intellectual debate of the 1990s.
It probably warrants mentioning that while Hartley was holding forth, she stood before us buck naked, except for a pair of stiletto heels and tastefully understated nail polish. Lexxx and I labored not to elbow each other. But as she droned on about the terrifying prospects of Bush’s Supreme Court appointments, she began scratching her crotch. Not subtle scratching, either. She scratched like a third-base coach with a chigger infestation.
Maybe it’s my biological wiring. Maybe it’s that I was raised Southern Baptist, where we like to keep our guilty pleasures a little guiltier. (Baptists believing that there’s no other kind of pleasure.) But I generally prefer women who are a tad less in-your-face. I’ve never been too keen on strippers or porn stars, since something about a stranger working that hard to turn my crank makes me unbearably sad. Lexxx, on the other hand, is a lusty satyr, especially when his blood-alcohol concentration is north of .30, which it happened to be during the entirety of convention week. And Lexxx, it should be said, generally likes his women the way he likes his liquor—promiscuously offered. But as Hartley kept itching, even Lexxx was prompted to lean over and whisper, “Good Lord, let’s get out of here.”
What bothered me, however, wasn’t the scratching. Nor Hartley herself. After all, when you think about it, why should she be scandalized by her own public nudity while discussing the lack of dynamism in future Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao? Hartley is, after all, a trained, professional pornographer. For her, getting worked up over nudity would be like a plumber getting agitated over a basin wrench. What struck me was that nobody else batted an eye at the spectacle of a birthday-suited porn star solemnly holding forth on Al Gore’s electoral chances. The assembled gents didn’t even seem particularly invested in her as an object of desire. Sure, a few took pictures with her, sliding their hands to places most HR departments don’t permit. (She willingly, if joylessly, let them.) But otherwise they might have been getting ready to phone into C-SPAN. They were blasé and businesslike, as if they see this sort of thing everyday. And with the Internet having turned America into a 24/7 porn emporium, they pretty much do.
The jaded, ho-humness of it all made me realize how far we’d fallen. Here they were, staring one of our debased culture’s most treasured icons of sexual athleticism right in the face (among other parts). And yet, anything approaching actual sexiness had been subtracted from the equation. “Sex” in this context, was coarse and blunt and transactional—a once-juicy plum now dehydrated into a prune.
As another friend, Daddy Jammer (porn-star generator name), puts it,
The underreported problem with a society that places no limits on sex is that after a while, it dulls desire. For the same reason there aren’t many hard-ons in a nudist colony, a sex-soaked society gets boring after a while. I see it even with my own son. He’s only sixteen, but he seems way less anxious about sex than I did at twenty-one, probably because in his world, they’re giving away blowjobs, and he knows it. And there’s always porn if they aren’t. It worries me. It’s like he’s too calm—the calm before the boredom. Or as my father once put it, “The problem with pornography is that it’s numbing. After a while, you can’t get it up unless you’re wearing a chicken costume.”
Which brings us to the virtue at hand, chastity. If you go by the received wisdom, chastity is the thick-ankled stepsister of virtues. The wallflower with the wart on her nose, the last one to get asked to the dance. With an identical beginning and ending, along with the same number of syllables, chastity has the phonetic ring of the sexier virtue, charity. Except when you practice charity, you get pats on the back and deductions on your taxes. Being chaste just gets you odd looks and suspected of being a weirdo.
If we even say “chastity” anymore (which we mostly don’t), it’s purely by accident. Like when discussing the gender reassignment surgery of Cher’s beefy former daughter, Chastity Bono (now her beefy son, Chaz). It has a fusty archaic-ness. Saying it out loud sounds like you’re putting on airs, or like you’re trying to employ words from the same family as “per-adventure” or “soothfast,” mothballed relics of a bygone time.
Chastity, of course, can be defined numerous ways. In the classic Christian understanding, it tends to mean sexual purity outside of marriage—that is, no premarital intercourse. (Though as Professor Hartley stipulates, the definition of “sex” can be a bit more elastic.) If you’re a certain stripe of cleric, say, a Catholic priest, it can mean embracing a far scarier notion—lifetime celibacy, leaving even believers like me to pray that if I’m ever called to ministry, it’s as a Protestant. And if you’re married, it means fidelity, or put another way, making sweet monkey love to your heart’s content, so long as that monkey love stays within the confines of your marriage. Though even here, there is some debate about what exactly being “chaste” entails. Especially since Christ, whose work I’m a tremendous fan of otherwise, left the gate wide open in His otherwise flawless Sermon on the Mount, when He said, “That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
Which, technically speaking, makes me a serial adulterer every time my wife’s Victoria’s Secret catalog arrives in the mail. I take comfort in the fact that Christ also said, “Let he who hath not [lusted after Alessandra Ambrosio] cast the first stone.” A loose translation, admittedly, but it is in the Bible. Go ahead and Google it.
Because of its inherent difficulty, chastity, unlike most other virtues, has taken a kick in the shorts even from plenty of literary and theological giants. Aldous Huxley called it “the most unnatural of all sexual perversions.” C. S. Lewis admitted it was “the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.” Saint Augustine confessed in his Confessions that in his youthful days, he prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Not to be outdone, Madonna (the slutty singer from Detroit, not Jesus’s mom) said, “It is difficult to believe in a religion that places such a high premium on chastity and virginity.”
These days, if you do dare place a premium on chastity—and not even the church or dictionary definitions, but just as a yellow light of caution to say, “Slow down, don’t be so slutty”—you’re liable to get called “puritanical.” Or worse. Though there really isn’t any worse obloquy today, since in our sex-addled society, Puritanism is synonymous with being a joyless, sexless prude. (On campuses, for instance, abstinence advocates are often treated like lepers or College Republicans.) Never mind that this isn’t quite historically fair to the Puritans. It’s not like they were celibate Shakers, electing to nonbreed themselves straight out of existence. The average Puritan household used to be good for around seven children apiece—meaning that ol’ Artemus and Temperance were clearly up to more than just listening to Cotton Mather sermons, conducting witch trials, and singing rounds of “Grace! ’Tis a Charming Sound.”
Not that we need to ride too high in the moralist’s saddle. C. S. Lewis—nobody’s idea of a libertine—argued, “If anyone thinks Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.” Much worse, he wrote, were spiritual “pleasures”—backbiting, hatred, the joy of putting others in the wrong. He divided the two classes into sins of the flesh (“the Animal self”) vs. sins of the spirit (“the Diabolical self”), about which he added, “The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”
Still, even by the middle of his century, Lewis saw how the backlash against “Puritanism” was overcorrecting the train right off the rails: “They tell you sex is a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess.” Sexual desire in itself is the most natural of natural things, and in its proper place, even has a biblical seal of amorous approval, as anyone who has read the (Fifty Shades of) Song of Solomon knows: “Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.’”
Yet, as Lewis understood, “Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others…. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humor, and frankness. For any happiness in this world, quite a lot of restraining is going to be necessary.”
Sex, to Lewis’s thinking, was a lot like food: “There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.” He published these words in the 1940s, perhaps not even anticipating the terminus of the sex/food analogy. Now, we not only ogle pictures all day—Internet porn consumption is so commonplace that, according to Christianity Today, even 40 percent of Christian ministers are said to struggle with it—but we have become so sluttified that we don’t just smack our lips and dribble down our bibs. We ask for thirds and fourths, lick the plate clean, and then eat the flatware.
I should stipulate straightaway that calling America “slutty” is by no means implicative of a specific gender. It’s not just women. Calling a man a slut is, as all men know, very near a tautology. But I do so purely to inoculate myself against the rabid bites of sharp-fanged postfeminists at places like the website Jezebel, which dominate “the debate,” such as it is. They’ve made “slut-shaming” a fighting word, but the trick is, it’s not an insult leveled at sluttiness, but rather toward the shamers. (There being nothing more shameful than having shame.) Classic feminists used to cry for sexual liberation while decrying the oppressive objectification of a patriarchal hegemony (their words, not mine; I prefer English), whereas the new breed—the second- and third-wavers—are quite happy to “objectify” themselves under the guise of “empowerment.”
So with no remaining sense of chastity or inhibition, how slutty have we become as a culture? Let’s take a quick tour.
Celebrity sex tapes are now so pervasive (Paris Hilton, Hulk Hogan, John Edwards—the list is long and undistinguished) that it’s a buyer’s market. TMZ recently reported that there were no takers on Indianapolis Colts running back Trent Richardson’s orgy tape featuring the NFL player and three women. Perhaps the Kardashians had already flooded the zone. Remember, their whole seedy, tabloid cover-bait empire launched when the otherwise talent-free Kim Kardashian got “caught” on tape.
Even our former Disney stars behave like porn stars these days (see Miley Cyrus, she of the perpetually probing tongue, who has yet to meet a surface, inanimate or otherwise, that she won’t lasciviously twerk). On any given day, either Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, or any number of other former role models for young tweens are busy posting naked or nearly naked selfies online. A recent survey found one-third of all young adults have sexted or posted nude or seminude pictures of themselves. Even the guys want in on the action. Dylan Sprouse, former star of Disney’s The Suite Life of Zach & Cody, recently posted a nude selfie of him, in a mirror, cupping his manhood. He sounded just sick about it afterward, too, when tweeting, “Whoops, guess I’m not 14 and fat anymore.” He also noted that it helped him gain two hundred thousand more Twitter followers, Twitter-porn perhaps being the only porn more addictive than porn-porn.
Such ho-baggery on the part of young female celebrities even prompted a rare fellow-celebrity outcry from actress Rashida Jones, who tweeted #stopactinglikewhores, and who later penned a screed for Glamour magazine decrying the “pornification of everything.” Jones called 2013 the “Year of the Very Visible Vagina,” and suggested that cynically exploitative entertainment execs should seek ways to make women feel good about other qualities they possess, such as “I don’t know … our empathy, or childbearing skills, or ability to forgive one another for mean tweets.” For her troubles, Jones was practically drawn and quartered in the public square (mostly by other women) because, apparently, she had no shame at being a slut-shamer.
But celebrities, who are exhibitionists by trade, aren’t the only ones acting like porners. So are the rest of us. From tramp stamps to penis tattoos (yes, people get them), everyone gets inked like porn stars these days. (In the world of pornography, 45.5 percent of performers have tats; in the real world the figure is 36 percent, with women outnumbering men in some surveys.) We dress ourselves like porners. One designer recently came up with the “Backtacular,” a “gluteal cleft shield” to cover the plumber’s cleavage that rises like the moon over the low-cut pants favored by Cool Moms who can’t understand why their daughters dress so slutty (as they take off to the gym for stripper-pole classes in see-through Lululemons).
We dress our children like porners, in “babykinis” (string-bikinis for babies), or push-up bikini tops for girls too young to have breasts (courtesy of Abercrombie & Fitch), or a whole slew of “future porn star”–themed onesies and T-shirts—widely available on the Internet—for the slutty toddlers looking to get a leg up on the slutty teens and the slutty adults we’re teaching them to become.
In fact, we’ve become so accustomed to dressing like porners that now we even undress like them. Taking to its natural extreme last decade’s trend of wearing the sluttiest Halloween costume possible, one coed at Arizona State University recently arrived at a Halloween frat party dressed in nothing except a pair of heels. Pictures of the festivities spread across the Internet. As a writer named “Bacon” (not his Christian name, we assume) noticed from the website Total Frat Move, “There weren’t even a pair of ears to make her a Slutty Leopard or Slutty Rabbit. I guess she was just a Slutty Slut. Not sure, don’t care, because NAKED.” With feminist logic like that—feminism and frat-boyism are often indistinguishable these days—Bacon could have been angling for an internship at Jezebel.
How slutty are we? Well, in the old days, if you wanted a quick hit and didn’t have the skills to wow the ladies at the Greene Turtle happy hour, you could pay for a prostitute. But now, people are eagerly willing to prostitute themselves with “hook-up apps” such as Tinder and Pure, which help you get straight to the rutting with willing participants in your geographic vicinity, without any of the bother of having a conversation or learning their name. So rampant is the hook-up culture on most college campuses that Boston College offered a course on how to plan a date, dating being nearly as forgotten as chastity.
Middle-aged journalists, of course, love to bemoan the pro-miscuity of the college hook-up culture, since part of the fun of getting old is complaining how the youth of today are destroying civilization. But the hook-up culture doesn’t end when you graduate. A spokesperson for AshleyMadison.com, the world’s largest married hook-up service, where married folks go to cheat on their spouses (company slogan: “Life is short, have an affair”), announced they had 27,511 new sign-ups on New Year’s Day 2014—a 344 percent spike over normal days. This is like the entire population of Helena, Montana, simultaneously deciding on the same day that cheating on their spouse would be their New Year’s resolution.
You can see why marriage is becoming as endangered as dating. In fact, nearly four in ten respondents in a recent Pew Survey said they thought marriage was becoming “obsolete.” (There are presently thirty-one marriages for every one thousand unmarried women in the United States, down from ninety in the 1950s.) Not that this is stopping anyone from making babies. The out-of-wedlock birthrate in America now hovers just above 40 percent (it’s close to 50 percent for first births), which is bad news for a large swath of the newborns who hope their parent(s) are able to afford babykinis and future-porn-star onesies.
How slutty have we become? So slutty that people now try using chastity to sell sex. Hit the bookstore racks these days and you don’t see chastity talked about in the context of abstinence-promotion programs or purity rings, as was once all the rage. (Even Miley Cyrus wore one in her Disney days; it didn’t take.) Instead, you’re more likely to see Georgia Ivey Green, aka “Mistress Ivey,” prescribing chastity usage in her KeyHolder’s Handbook—A Woman’s Guide to Male Chastity and Sexual Teasing. The time-honored chastity belt, historically used as a rape-prevention device or to discourage childhood masturbation, it turns out, is now a vital part of BDSM role-play. As the Huffington Post reported, CB-X, the “world leader in male chastity,” now sells the lockable sheaths in wood, chrome, and camouflage finishes.
So oversexed are we that even good, God-fearing Christian women are aping porn stars. Out on the Web, a sect of gals calling themselves “Christian Nymphos” have taken to exploring, graphically, the fine points of marital relations and the connubial sacrament. I hear where they’re coming from, though as a Christian myself, I prefer not to spiritualize sex, even when playing Wayward Priest and Naughty Nun with the missus. The last thing I want to think about, as the Christian Nymphos do, is to “ask the Father to give you the heart of the Shulamite Woman (for Him and for your husband).”
But the Christian Nymphos go on, like most oversharing habitués of the Internet, getting into the literal ins-and-outs of every position from “The Pile Driver” to “The Italian Chandelier.” I don’t presume to speak for God, but by the time He gets to their spiritual forum on anal plugs, I suspect He’ll be regretting the divine grace of sex and wishing He’d settled for a gift card to Bed Bath & Beyond.
So oversexed have we become that even some secularists have decided to take matters in hand, so to speak. A popular subsite on the user-based aggregator Reddit is “No Fap,” where “fapstronauts” take the “Fapstinence Challenge,” attempting to shake their porn and masturbation addictions through total abstinence from both. Its organizers cite all manner of incentives to participate, from increasing self-control to freeing up hard drive space. (“Some porn collections can take up terabytes of information.”)
Fapstronauts, of course, are easy to make sport of. And yet, it’s a little harder to laugh at the fact that there are now over eighty thousand of them on this one little website. You don’t have to be a chastity champion or antiporn activist to recognize that something is seriously out-of-whack in the culture. I like sex as much as the next guy. But it’s getting strange out there. Our appetites increasingly know no bounds, running the gamut from dendrophilia (erotic interest in trees) to oculolinctus (a sexual urge to lick the eyeballs) to toxophilia (arousal from archery). Americans will do anything these days—and we’ve got nothing on the Japanese.
An acquaintance of mine, Ron Fuegobutt, says, “When sex is too indiscriminate, you don’t even enjoy it anymore.” At a dinner not long ago, he was seated next to the retired porn star Ron Jeremy, who is the John Gielgud of the genre. By Jeremy’s own estimate, he’s had sex with a good four thousand women on film. “He explained to me,” Fuegobutt says, “that after all those years in porn, he can still get it up, but he can no longer finish. He’s like Sisyphus—the task is never completed. It’s horrible.”
With so many of the stigmas gone, so, too, are many of the thrills. As it is written in Proverbs, “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But good luck finding a secret place anymore. In our orgiastic pursuit of instant gratification, few mysteries are left. All of our appetites are known and celebrated and unrestrained. Want to see a man love up on a tree? A two-second Google search will show you images you can never unsee.
All this thinking about chastity—and tree huggers—had me turn to a priest friend. His porn-star generator name is Father Chuck Looselips. He holds that people are mistaken, getting intimidated by thinking of chastity as something that has to be taken as far as the Mother Church requires him to take his. Instead, Father Looselips says that we should think of it as a worldview, as balance, as just enough. “In a culture of obese, depressed people with attention deficit disorder, we know what too much does.” What does just enough look like when we apply it throughout our lives: “How much do you eat? How many televisions do you watch at the same time? How many people are you talking to simultaneously? We are overdoing it to our own destruction. We lose the sense of taste, the sense of appreciation, the sense of pleasure. How do we break this cycle? By a ‘less is more’ philosophy. By balance. By just enough.”
Everyone and everything, says Father Looselips, “has a chance for excellence.” But to attain it, we have to observe laws. The laws of our creation. “A chair is excellent if the wood is hard enough to hold a person. If it obeys the laws of gravity. If the seat is horizontal to the earth and is cut to the contours of the butt. All of this requires obedience on the part of the carpenter. Obedience to wood. Obedience to gravity. Obedience to comfort. It requires obedience to laws we did not create, and the smarts of knowing what these are through discovery.”
The same, he holds, applies to sex. How much truer this is of people than chairs. In regard to chastity, he says, “It means less is more, just enough, just right, the right person, the right time, the right closeness, and the right distance, and no more than that.”
For the married, that means, “I strive to be the best friend, the best lover, the best husband and father, with the family we create.” This is a tall order, he concedes. “Human life is messy. We are neither angel nor devil (usually), but we have both influences and need to balance them all the time. Life is a long tightrope walk between two skyscrapers. Modernity is a constant consumer and has no use for the idea that less is more. It has no concept of just enough. And we are seriously suffering on every level—physical, emotional, psychological, mental, and spiritual—from our own excesses. But we are all better off knowing the obedience that is required to live healthy and excellent lives.”
Without these principles, we’re not really living at all. We trade the beautiful expectancy of Christmas Eve for the perpetual anticlimax of Christmas morning. We lose mystery and wonder. We fail to cultivate and appreciate. We hunt for constant novelty, failing to rest in the fullness of our own passions. We are no longer making the simple, beautiful music of man/ woman song, with its harmonies and melodies and rhythms. We’re not even making an atonal loveless racket, the racket Paul described, in his letter to the Corinthians, as that of a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. Instead, no matter how much sex we’re having, we as a culture are making a lonely, sad, muted sound. The sound of one hand fapping.