Don't Touch Me; I'm Dirty All Over

Rolling Stone’s got an interesting story on the abstinence movement afoot in America, which totally confirms what one tends to think about people who abstain from sex—they are utter sex fiends. They think about sex exponentially more than anyone I ever met who clumsily, lustily, disappointingly, or fabulously lost his or her cherry sans any lifetime commitment.

Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.

(Insert your own “Master of Your Domain” joke here.)

No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. Even as a joke, it fails, because it reveals an ugly truth that the abstinence crowd holds dear—that sexuality is dirty, unless it is between two people bound by God, and, more disturbingly, the people who practice an unsanctified sexuality are dirty, too. To withhold touch from “a sinner” is a decidedly strange interpretation of Christian doctrine, in which its central figure, Jesus Christ, shocked his disciples by touching the sinful and the sick, and letting them touch him, too. Message lost, I think it’s safe to say.

I could spend all day deconstructing this article, or, rather, the movement on which it reports. Zany stuff. Check it out, if you’re in the mood for another exposé on how completely nutzoid this country is really getting.