My Life with the Thrill—Kill Cult

Of all the criticisms from the bloggers and commenters who lashed out against the excerpt I published from my upcoming book The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, one struck me as the most bizarre.

It came from several people in response to my writing, "Likewise, when you become chaste, you'll notice for the first time that women who have sex outside of marriage don't really appreciate men." As voiced by Jill of Feministe, the criticism ran like this:

"... just as I would never tell [Dawn] that she must have premarital sex in order to appreciate men for who they are, I find it completely offensive that she would attempt to tell everyone else that we can’t possibly respect and love men as human beings unless we refuse to have sex."

What I find funny about this reaction is that it's in response to a line that I wrote to readers buying my book, who have presumably an interest in getting off the premarital-sex merry-go-round.

For the condoms-and-Cosmo coalition to say that it's wrong of me, in a book about chastity, to tell women the positive experiences they'll have when they become chaste — it's like the Fraternity of Fabulous Fatties berating a diet author. It's like unregenerate drunks ganging up on Bill W.

How can the wanton wags be so certain that I'm wrong? They can't. I'm their 9/11 widow; they can't deny my experience, because they've never been there.

If the concupiscent kaffeeklatsch really wanted to criticize my chastity advocacy, they could attempt to show empirical evidence that the unchaste live as happily as the chaste. That would take us into the seemingly bottomless morass of conflicting scientific studies — the pro-marriage and family side of which is displayed on MarriageDebate.com — but at least it would remain on the level of civil, reasoned, intellectual debate, and each side might learn something from the other.

The real problem that the lattes-and-latex lads and lassies have with chastity is not an intellectual one, but a spiritual one. They know that if chastity truly enables one to enjoy life, love and friendship on a deeper, more intense level than one can experience through nonmarital sex, then the mere existence of such a lifestyle invalidates their own.

None of this is to say that I live in any way a sinless life, or that my life is free from stress or loneliness. But, with the life I'm living now, I firmly believe that there is far more joy ahead of me than I ever could have found in the life I left behind. I wrote The Thrill of the Chaste not to make women feel bad about their sex lives, but rather to help them see that they are more, far more, than their sexual nature — and that their sexual nature is far more than biology.
10:38 PM