US teens celebrate 'purity day'
I love the quote
US teenager Melissa Millis, who says she will wear a white t-shirt to promote the Day of Purity at her Michigan state school, (said) she was tired of feeling pressurised.''The way sex is talked about, it's so casual, like it's an everyday thing, like going to McDonald's."
I know this subject has been done to death, and I personally think that sex is wasted on the youth, plus I have concerns about unplanned pregnancies, STIs and coercion, but I also think that this sort of thing is just storing up trouble for later.
A friend at mine at Uni believed that sex was only for marriage, although she never tried to impose her view on anyone else. When she split up with a boyfriend she posed the question, "How much worse would it have been if we had had sex?" I didn't answer, but I felt it an irrelevant question. Break-ups hurt, if you're emotionally committed. If having sex makes it more of an emotional wrench, surely that proves that sex is something that strengthens emotional attachment, and, is, therefore, a Good Thing.
Mind you, I noticed the front page of the Daily Star yesterday: "Abby Titmuss Why I Love Having Sex!"
Classy, I thought.
And I thought some more. I feel a slight contempt for minor celebrities who sell their sex secrets to the Press. On the other hand, I regularly read Cosmopolitan from mid teens to late twenties, and found the candid articles about sex immensely helpful. Not so much in 'put this limb here and move that one there' but in psychological terms, countering the prudish atmosphere of my upbringing which acknowledged that married people had sex in order to procreate, and for other reasons, it was, nevertheless, something that wasn't really talked about. A schoolfriend's mother used to warn darkly, "Even ladies can fall off their pedestal" and a former colleague was not allowed to have her boyfriend in the bedroom after 7pm (because, obviously, that is the time that sex begins...). The first time I saw a naked aroused man I was a little taken aback, not really knowing what to expect.
I'm all for open and candid discussion but I feel there is something desperately narcissistically attention-seeking in wanting to tell everybody so many details.
Like so many things, there is a balance to be struck to achieve moderation and even equilibrium.
