For the record, I think there is nothing wrong with people who choose abstinence. Furthermore, I think there is nothing wrong with people who so choose to band together and even proselytize. I even think there is a certain legitimacy to Ms. Fredell's view that, in our current climate, the choice of abstinence has a certain counter-cultural cachet. Whether one bolsters one's view through the Bible or John Stuart Mill, there is no doubt that in a society in which Girl's Gone Wild seems destined to ever more editions, the fact that some young women and men are willing to save themselves for marriage should be applauded (as well as ridiculed; I do not believe in sacred cows).
Yet, Tbogg notes that Ms. Fredell is less than enlightened concerning the power of the sexual drive.
Perhaps I'm just being naive here (even more so than Ms. Fredell) but I have a hard time imagining a twenty-something woman who appears to be fairly bright, bright enough to be accepted into Harvard at least, who is shocked, shocked by the plainly stated fact that men (or women) look at other men (or women) on the street or wherever and think, "I'll have an order of that with nothing on it".
This is in response to the following from this piece in The New York Times:
The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. “The biological drive can be overcome,” she said. “It’s not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex.”
“And you don’t go down the street thinking you’d like to have sex with him, him, him and him?” I asked.
“No!” she said, abruptly. “Is that what men do?”
It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something “breathtakingly powerful” that “lights all of your body on fire.” He spoke of his lust as “this untamed beast.”
Fredell was incredulous: “Leo said that?”
He told me that he struggles constantly against “physical lustful temptation” — that he can be aroused just by a woman’s touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by “thoughts that just come out of the blue — basically pornography in my head.” They come to him when he’s merely walking around campus, or even when he’s alone in the library — “like a fly buzzing around.”
To the matter of masturbation, he said, “This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s hard to stop.”
Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, “Oh, God, no!”
So . . . she has no idea that some people actually think about sex a lot. She is horrified at the notion of self-gratification (or self-abuse, depending upon your perspective, I suppose). Her boyfriend's honesty in that regard is refreshing, especially the whole "habit that's so deeply ingrained" part.
A student at Harvard who has no idea that the sex drive is so powerful it actually makes some people distracted as random thoughts enter one's head as they sit in Houghton Library reading John Stuart Mill or Martin Heidegger. Is it any wonder we have folks who have never been to Harvard who believe that sex is ultimately a selfish act (I tried to find the link to Marshall Art's actual line in which he stated his firm belief that sex is inherently selfish, but couldn't)?
