Virgin Territory
With the canker on the Clinton
presidency finally healing (or
at least in temporary
remission), the time has come to
seek out new sexual role models
for the men and women (and their
bastard children) of America.
Never again—or at least not
until the 2000 presidential
election—can we expect to look
to the leader of the so-called
Free World for tips on how to
manage our love lives. Gone
forever are them good old days
when US citizens confidently
turned to the White House and
drew romantic inspiration from
the likes of Lyndon Baines
Johnson, whose very initials
suggested illicit pleasures
sodomites enjoy, and Tricky Dick
Nixon, whose presidency ushered
in an age of sexual carnival
that is still being plumbed in
film, fiction, and epidemiology.
Two possible role models
immediately present themselves
for consideration in our debased
age. Not surprisingly, they come
from two traditional, reliable,
and highly respected sources for
moral guidance: professional
sports and the right-wing youth
brigade. They are, respectively,
the National Basketball
Association's A. C. Green and
Wendy Shalit, author of A
Return to Modesty: Discovering
Both are high-profile
virgins and both embody the
time-tested adage, "Those who
cannot do, preach." A third
possible role model from an
equally respected moral
wellspring, the entertainment
industry, fell by the wayside
when rage-aholic/ex-child star/
security guard Gary Coleman
got hauled into court for
assaulting a "fan." In the
ensuing flush of publicity, the
Diff'rent Strokes mascot
angrily announced and lamented
that he was a virgin (well, if
you don't count sitting on the
lap of TV housekeeper Charlotte
Rae as sex).
If good things come to those who
wait, then it's certainly long
past pay-off time for Green,
who's currently boosting the
karma of his next life by
playing forward for the
offensively celibate Dallas
Mavericks. Green has gained some
small measure of fame as the
Iron Horse of hoops: He holds
the record for consecutive games
played and should, barring
injury, appear in his 1,000th
straight game come 13 March.
While this effort has earned the
36-year-old journeyman a line in
the record books, he is rightly
better known for being the only
NBA athlete who willingly plays
the game with blue balls. More
remarkable still, in a league
where fathering illegitimate
children is now part of the
standard players contract, Green
not only shuns safe sex but sex
altogether. Indeed, one can only
marvel at how he managed to
endure the strike-induced layoff
period earlier this season
without suffering either a
stroke or high-profile,
pants-staining episode.
As Green, who broke into the
pros with the Los Angeles Lakers,
the former team of Wilt
Chamberlain (who claimed to have
bedded 20,000 women and who was
dubbed "the Big Dripper" by
teammates due to persistent
bouts with the clap) and Earvin
"Magic" Johnson (whose nickname,
alas, turned out to be mostly an
exercise in unintentional
irony), has recalled: "I
remember my first trip with the
Lakers, riding on the bus.
Everyone was saying, 'A. C.,
you're not going to believe how
wonderful the girls look who
hang out after the game. You
won't be talking about saving
yourself for marriage after you
see these girls. We'll give you
six weeks before you give in,
man.'" In fact, Green has done
more than hold out. Through his
group, Athletes for Abstinence,
he has spread the word about not
spreading his seed. For the most
part, Green plays his celibacy
shtick much like he plays
basketball these days: quietly,
unassumingly, and occasionally
with a broken cheekbone. Such a
generally low-key approach is
somewhat ingratiating, though he
has also done a little
trash-talking at times, such as
when he produced an
athlete-filled rap video titled
It Ain't Worth It. Such a
confident assertion on Green's
part raises questions of
authority: Who is he, after all,
to know what "it" is worth?
While he may well be right that
"it ain't worth it" (especially
after 36 years of doing
without), precisely what sort of
comparison shopping has he been
up to?
If Green's declarative price
check on the relative value of
chastity suggests a credibility
issue, then Wendy Shalit's
youthful, widely disseminated
musings on the topic undress a
more revealing contradiction in
the open virginity movement. If
pride goeth before a fall, it is
also true that modesty goeth
before aggressively public
displays of supposedly private
behavior. For the 23-year-old
Shalit, whose writings on heated
topics such as unisex toilets
have appeared in
neo-conservative pubs such as
Commentary and City Journal, the
main problem of contemporary
society is that sex is on
display everywhere. "We're not
flocking to Jane Austen movies
because we want the facts [of
sex] but because we're sick of
having the facts shoved in our
faces all the time," she writes,
ignoring the box-office appeal
of films such as Wild Things and Anal
Volcano II, the only reason
anyone downloaded the Starr
Report, and the thousands of
strip joints that do bang-up
business even in the smallest
towns of this sweet land of
liberty precisely by shoving
facts in faces.
Regardless, Shalit ultimately
shafts herself on the horns of
her horny dilemma. "Though there
are many women who conduct
themselves 'modestly' in their
personal lives, no woman has
ever attempted a systematic
defense of modesty. One has to
admit there is a very good
reason for this: A woman who is
reticent about matters sexual is
unlikely to step
forward and squawk, 'Hey,
everybody, look at me! Boy, am I
modest!'" But there she is on
C-SPAN and elsewhere, yakking
about her book and the benefits
of ankle-length dresses, all the
while tossing her hair and
licking her lips like a jiggle
queen in a late-night ad for a
900 sex line or a teenaged model
in a Calvin Klein underwear ad.
Such relentless exhibitionism is
wearing, be it fully clothed
or clean shaven. Indeed, by the
end of her book, Shalit seems to
be having some of those
morning-after doubts she
ascribes to the sexually active,
low-self-esteem crowd. "I have
defended modesty, essentially,
in the most obscene way, but I
did it because I had a hunch
that this was the only way our
culture would ever consider it,"
she confesses. Thus, taking a
page from the oh-so-successful
Vietnam playbook, she destroyed
modesty in order to save it.
Which, if nothing else, suggests
that a return to modesty ain't
worth it. And if nothing else,
it underscores the fact that we
cannot expect virgins, any more
than whores, to guide us when it
comes to our sex lives.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.