Guys, I’m a little late on this one, but if you needed more proof that Joshua Rogers is the Pajama Boy of Boundless, then go read “Stop Worshiping Your Virginity”.
Yes, we’ve reached the point where mainstream Christian thought has been reduced to this:
If you’re a Christian virgin, you are no more righteous than anyone else (regardless of how long you’ve been wearing that promise ring). And if you’re not a virgin, you are no less righteous than anyone else — the only thing that makes you righteous is faith in the perfect blood of Jesus. Whatever you did (or didn’t do) in the past simply isn’t part of the Christian equation when it comes to your worth, so you can go ahead and stop obsessing over your virginity now.
I don’t know how many adult Christian virgins Rogers happens to know, but generally speaking, there aren’t a whole lot of virgins, even in the church, past 25 or so. Most of them aren’t proud of it. Most of them wish that they could find someone to lose it with (in marriage or otherwise). And most of them don’t go around telling others about it. Even among people that it would be “safe” to discuss it with, they don’t talk about it. Where does Rogers live that he is knowingly running into haughty adult virgins???
Most people who survive well into adulthood still virgins don’t do so because so many people were offering up sex and they, out of immense moral superiority, were about to deny all of the would-be sexers. Usually, it’s more like “I couldn’t get a date, and when I could, the other person wasn’t that attractive, so….nope.”
Anyhow, regarding the quote above: yes, in a spiritual sense, we are all “equal” in that we have all been forgiven of our sins. And no, remaining a virgin doesn’t in and of itself make you more virtuous than someone else. But let’s be real, sex has pretty obvious and life-altering consequences, in a way that is significantly different from uttering a swear word or having a selfish thought, and we, being human, tend to assign different weights to actions whose consequences tend to have different weights. Why is this a fundamentally bad thing? I mean, we live in a Christian culture where you can have a man sobbing because he realized that he hasn’t been as nice to his wife as Christ would be to the church…….but try to say that there are real-world consequences for sexual sin, and one of those consequences may be that men, on the whole, will find you less desirable for marriage, and suddenly you’re a tool of the devil spreading lies??!?!?
No one is saying that sexual sin will absolutely prevent you from finding a spouse, but Christians respond AS IF you had said that when you say that sexual sin (especially for a woman) makes it harder to get married to the type of person you would want to marry. It’s like the concept of sexual market value and sexual options cannot exist in Christian-world, even though we see that reality play out in every church in America. But if the Boundless commenters are a microcosm of the church, then there is a very strong will within the church to deny the reality of SMV, or that sexual history matters….which is pretty much exactly the same thing you could read on a feminist website.
Haley's Halo 
Interesting. Usually these types of articles are written by women, not men. Speaking only for myself, I can’t say that I’ve met any “haughty virgins” amongst the Christians I have encountered.
“Most people who survive well into adulthood still virgins don’t do so because so many people were offering up sex and they, out of immense moral superiority, were about to deny all of the would-be sexers. Usually, it’s more like “I couldn’t get a date, and when I could, the other person wasn’t that attractive, so….nope.”
Well, this is kind of the problem. Not being able to get a date does not make one chaste or virtuous. Virginity is our default position, but if one has never had to resist or flee from the opportunity, it’s not necessarily virtue.
But I will say that I recall a peer from college sharing with a group of young women her story of lost virginity and in later conversations learned that some friends had separated themselves from her. She was completely sorrowful and repentant about it too. So I think there can be a looking down upon others that takes place in some Christian circles.
I might also take the implications about SMV a little differently and say that the article seems to indicate that this question of virginity is, in fact, becoming less important to many within the church. It has certainly happened in secular society, and the Church is impacted by secular trends if only because people are being drawn into the Church from the world. If Christians are truly going out and making disciples in the broader culture, given today’s sexual mores, successfully converting souls to Christ will mean that there will be a lot of people in the church with histories that don’t fit the ideal. That fact might put this Boundless piece in the best light. But I have to admit I find the tone a bit dismissive and am surprised that it came from Boundless.
As much as women wouldn’t like to believe, they are affected more by having sex(see the divorce rate by partner count chart). And, I find more and more that evangelical women 18-22 do not respect male virginity at all, as ungodly as it may seem. The fact is, as you mentioned, they only see value if you are a hot virgin. It’s especially interesting considering that Christians are “supposed” to value virginity in a wife(moreso than in a male), that many of the non-virgin girls(80%) are on a mission to make their sexual competition illegitimate.
Why do most women hate virginity? It’s because of their herd morality. Contrary to EvoPsychoBabble in the manosphere, hypergamy and the rest of feminine morality doesn’t come from evolution, but from the feminine herd that a woman belongs to. Women want to be seen by other women as having the most desirable guys (whether as a husband or having sex with them). There are a couple of large herds of women nowadays–the largest, youngest one that promotes promiscuity and a smaller, older one that promotes chastity. The largest herd engages in shaming virgins and the smaller one engages in shaming sluts. You will find the smaller one dominant in many church circles and this is the one that PajamaBoy was addressing.
Some men (like me) are verrry picky about who they marry–we strongly prefer virgins. When I was younger, looks were very important. I married a 10 who was new off the lot (a cough-virgin-cough). I had had only had one partner (a 9) before marriage. We never had any adultery issues in our marriage.
Now, when it comes to women whom I like to be around and have as friends, I prefer those who are sweet, warm, fun, and chaste. If I were looking for romance, looks would only get you in the door. For a LTR, I’d be looking for someone who was sweet (likes to do stuff for me), emotionally warm, fun (in bed, at parties, whatever), and chaste. Virginity would be a BIG plus. I’d be happy with a 7 or even a 6 if she had the right personal qualities in abundance.
maybe all those mythical adult virgins live in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood?
This is one of the common flaws of Christian “thinking.”
Love rejoices with virginity because that’s honoring to God and does not rejoice with promiscuity. It is not jealous of someone else’s virginity, nor does it seek to belittle virginity or act unbecomingly towards it as many Churchians do.
But love does not brag or is not arrogant about virginity in self-righteousness.
There’s a balance. Typically, neither side of the “debate” gets it right.
Oh yeah, I went around bragging about my virginity and saying I was better than other people because of it. /sarcasm. No, I totally didn’t. Saying I was a virgin in public was the second fastest way I could get a group of women to turn on me. The fastest being to mention I can eat whatever I want and not get fat.
Society does not value virginity overall and there are many women who will go to great lengths to say the virginity is worthless or even detrimental. One of the saddest stories I ever heard was about a group of girls who drugged a virgin girl and handed her over to a group of men, because they hated her virginity that much.
“It’s like the concept of sexual market value and sexual options cannot exist in Christian-world, even though we see that reality play out in every church in America. “
The dirty little secret of North American Christianity is that Christians are still human, and really aren’t any different than their nonChristian counterparts when it comes to attraction triggers. Christians so desperately want to gloss this over, as if it doesn’t exist. Well, in reality, everyone knows it exists, but no one wants to talk about it. I guess there’s a feeling that acknowledging the role of attraction means you’re not really a Christian, or it makes you shallow; or you’re a “bad person”.
Christians so badly want to ignore the fact that Christian guys like tight butts, firm breasts and pretty faces; and shame Christian men mercilessly for this. Considerably less shamed, but still glossed, is the fact that Christian girls want – and feel entitled to — George Clooney with a Bible.
Slumlord over at Social Pathologist has been riffing of late about Eros and Christianity. Christians have somehow come to believe that romance, eros, the attractions of the flesh, are somehow “bad”. This is why we have Christian men shamed into dating women they aren’t attracted to; while Christian women still pine away for their perfect The One.
I think he is just going for the Glenn Stanton award. This is just pathetic white-knighting for the women.
Which is all that these effeminate, prissy, losery, unmasculine wimpy lickspittle men are capable of.
Most of the men in the Church ARE pajama-boy.
I’m a middle-aged virgin. It’s easy to be one, just be (a) extremely undesirable to others without the chance or work ethic to improve and (b) have high standards upon which you won’t compromise. (In other words, have caviar tastes and a pizza face.) There is nothing virtuous or righteous about it.
I think it was last year or the year before last that Slate.com had an article on the virginity issue and to what degree does it objectify women. One commenter wrote that they would be horrified if their adult children had married as virgins as that would be unfair to the spouse to have a sexually inexperienced partner to deal with. If you spend enough time reading Slate it will inevitably lead to enlightenment followed by a deep depression.
There is an embedded sense of uncertainty in the Boundless article which also seems to have infiltrated Christian thinking. We can be certain that God loves us and that Jesus died for us, but can we be certain that God’s plan for our lives is what we really, truly want? Or, put more succinctly: if I don’t like God’s plan for my life then I”ll just do it myself.
I place extreme value on the action of choosing to commit to a singularity of vision in which purity of heart would so important than there would no other rivals in the life of the individual. Rivals who masquerade as popular catchphrases as ‘you only live once’ and ‘sow your wild oats when young’ or my personal favorite ‘make the most of every moment’ as if the moments actually belonged to us and not to Almighty God.
I prize the purity of heart which would compel someone to protect their virginity from foolishness and I hold myself to the same standards which I would expect of Christian women. However painful or unpopular that may be.
Modern Christians may consider this to be a fool’s errand in which I am assigning myself a strange kind of self-glorification, but I would remind the Modern Christians that I value God’s blessing and affection an infinite amount more than I do the acceptance of selfish, whiny, milkfed children who just want to “fit in”.
Allow me to translate the article.
Scumbag attempted to use the “can’t get laid” attack on someone only to have the person “agree and amplify” with the Proud Virgin nuke. He is buthurt and whining that his little girl “can’t get laid” argument didn’t work out as well as he would have liked. He is so buthurt that he is actually trying to argue the facts of an Agree and Amplify nuke. That’s how buthurt he is.
All sustainable cultures have mating rituals. Churchianity, specifically Focus on the Family / Boundless, seems hell-bent on preventing Christians from forming couples.
While I respect a person who can admit mistakes upon further study (e.g., The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman’s mea culpa on the H1-B program “http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/”), I really ache for the Christians who tried to live their lives in order to glorify God and to be prepared for a healthy Christian marriage and were given such horrible advice.
While some have identified feminist strains in Dobson’s writings going back to the 1970’s (“Straight Talk for Men and Their Wives”), in retrospect I notice a definite shift from the 1970s – 1980s mindset, as expressed in “Preparing for Adolescence” (which might have been too critical of “infatuation”: what’s so bad about enjoying the early stages of a relationship), which seemed to be “Be a Southern California Preppie, just don’t take drugs or have sex before marriage and go to church” to the 1990s (after the move to Colorado?), when they began to promote home schooling, then Josh Harris “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” (which, while arguably appropriate to the ultraconservative folks who were early adopters of homeschooling, was grossly inappropriate when applied to a group of working adults living away from their parents who were graduates of public schools and public universities). Then the whole Bethany Torode “virginal lips” episode, and approvingly publishing a letter in the regular FotF magazine from a father which read like this:
“My daughter attends a Christian college; a young man asked to date her, and she, as instructed, directed him to me. I asked him if he were prepared to support a wife and family, and he thoughtfully replied ‘no’, so I told him he was not prepared to court my daughter”.
(Genius dad just blew $$$$ on a Christian college education and denies his daughter the opportunity to even hope for a Mrs. degree.)
Then they promoted Neil Clark Warren (an advocate for compatibility and later marriage) and eHarmony, then they stopped supporting eHarmony.
Now back to virginity: even as a male, there was so much advice about how to avoid “sexual temptation”, coming out of the Churchian media (FotF / Josh Harris / Boundless / Youthwalk / Josh McDowell / Elisabeth Elliot / True Love Waits), and some of it is even reasonable on some level (e.g., “don’t date anyone you wouldn’t or shouldn’t marry”, “don’t put yourself in tempting situations, i.e., don’t spend time alone with a member of the opposite sex”), then Stephen Arterburn’s “Every Man’s Battle” (apparently Mr. Arterburn’s has been extremely successful with the ladies) that it often did seem so EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, so important that it took precedence over normal social development and the opportunity to form relationships.
But now, after all that shame, awkwardness, possible missed opportunities, to come out with “well, maybe it is OK to sleep around a little” is really confusing and definitely hurtful to those who have tried to remain pure.
I disagree with Haley that virgins remain so due to lack of attractiveness. Even those who didn’t explicitly turn down many sexual offers will probably find that they structured their lives in ways that reduce those opportunities. For instance, a lot of Christian college men spend time in single-sex Bible studies rather than around drunk girls at parties. The former is much less likely to lead to sexual temptation than the latter.
My N would be be at least 30 40, and that was in the depth of my beta blue-pill days.
Here is more evidence, thought, that respecting women is unsexy:
http://www.justfourguys.com/this-woman-embodies-nearly-every-cliche-in-the-sphere/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=this-woman-embodies-nearly-every-cliche-in-the-sphere
Women have gone feral, and are no longer capable of learning love for anyone but themselves, and sometimes their children. The narcissistic and hedonistic attitudes they display are indicative of someone who cannot be trusted.
I would agree with this somewhat. It is how they keep score. They don’t compare N counts. That is not how they keep score. Instead, they compare how many AMOGs they have bedded because only those count, so to speak.
Anither reason why they may hate virginity is that if they are virgin, they assume (because society assumes) it was not of their choice. They are virgin because no one would have them. Yes Chastity is valued in Christianity, but society at large would regard them as lepers! No one likes it when no one wants you.
Sex before marriage, I think there is two seperate issues here:
#1) If a Christian virgin states that he or she is ONLY willing to marry another virgin (because if would make them feel sad/terrible to know that some other person “had” their spouse before they did) then that is okay. Those people should NOT be made to feel that their spousal discrimination/red-flag (for lack of a better term) is in anyway wrong.
#2) Thank God for Christ. Seriously. And thank Christ our Savior as He saved us all from our sins. We are broken. It is not just those who had sex before marriage that are broken, all of us are (including virgins.) We are all sinners. And we can all be saved. That doesn’t mean that we are all entitled to marry virgins. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t shame virgins for only wanting to marry virgins. They are seperate issues.
Erk. Who writes such evil? When did modesty become a vice, and virtue something to be ashamed of?
I have read, over time, a number of young women (Alla, Butterfly Flower) being mocked because they are virgins until married. And I have always said “good on them”.
This society has moved into the zombie state of devolution, and not in a good way.
As I have stated elsewhere, I think that the only way to win a woman’s heart now is to get her in the sack first. The original “right” way works so seldom that it is a statistical non-factor.
Besides, the Church is loaded with fornicators, what harm will one more do?
I can see the finish line from here, lol.
“Then they promoted Neil Clark Warren (an advocate for compatibility and later marriage) and eHarmony, then they stopped supporting eHarmony.”
I can agree with that decision – eHarmony caved to the homosexual lobby, so I don’t blame them for cutting ties.
Proud virgins? They must hang out with Elvis and Big Foot. Or is that the name a Rock Band?
No, a non-virgin, depending on number of partners (especially a guy; in my experience, the majority of Christian women, including those who are virgins themselves, want their husband to have had 1 or 2 serious sexual relationships in their past for growth, experience, and yes, sexual skill/knowledge), extenuating circumstances, presence/absence of children, and level of chastity at the present is not totally worthless as a mate–but surely, most people (especially Christian guys) will prefer a virgin as a spouse if one is available. That’s just plain fact.
It is wrong for virgins to lord it over those who have made sexual mistakes–but in my experience, this is really rare. As AH said, there are really very few virgins, even in the church, past the age of 25, and they are often looked down upon even in the church–especially guys. This columnist is a liberal idiot.
This columnist is a liberal idiot.
Rogers just posted a weepy new article today about being abandoned by his father as a teenager and therefore having no male affirmation in his life. No wonder he’s obsessed with ordering other guys to man up.
@Martin L.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “sexual mistakes”. A bad moral choice is just that: a bad moral choice which is the the fault of the individual for thinking that they knew better or that somehow, someway they can beat the odds.
The excuse of “oops, I accidentally had sex with all of these people, but I really didn’t mean to, heck, it was an honest mistake, really, I had no clue about what I was doing, I was in love, I thought they were the one…but I’m all better now and I don’t do that anymore” sounds like nonsense because it is nonsense.
Frank,
Let me put it this way–if someone totally whored/man-whored their brains out before they got saved, and after coming to know Christ truly and meaningfully killed that part of their past and really made a point of saving themselves for marriage from that point on–I would not hold it against them. Granted, there would be very real issues to consider from a relationship standpoint (i.e. potential existence of children, STDs, psychological damage, etc.), but I would be much more forgiving and respectful of one of them than I would a so-called lifelong professing Christian who has just “happened” to have fooled around for several years before being ready for a serious commitment.
Look at ex-porno star Crissy Moran; you notice she had no problem whatsoever getting a guy…
Martin, a very well defended point. Thank you for responding.
Has anyone actually seen one of these “proud virgins” putting down others? Was he riding a unicorn ? What color Unicorn?
QUOTE: the majority of Christian women, including those who are virgins themselves, want their husband to have had 1 or 2 serious sexual relationships in their past for growth, experience, and yes, sexual skill/knowledge)
What say to this Haley?
True or not, and if so, is it the skill they want, or the preselection?
I think it is likely both, Jack (although several of these women aren’t willing to explain their motivations). If they are going to be with one man for life, they want him to be reasonably good in bed, and also, the ability to have a sexual relationship demonstrates a certain base desired level of social skills and panache.
How does a man know if that perfect virgin he marries isn’t going to turn out to be frigid or infertile?
If he is an alpha, she wont be frigid. If beta………
Galloper it doesn’t matter how hunky and “alpha” the guy is, if she has been brainwashed for years into thinking all sex is bad there will be an adjustment time.
Exactly; fathers are especially good at being virginity guardians (purity balls and such). Parents are not as eager to prepare their daughters for the sexual aspect of marriage.
“How does a man know if that perfect virgin he marries isn’t going to turn out to be frigid or infertile?”
I’ve pondered this myself. I’ve read some depressing honeymoon horror stories of virginal women who were literally traumatized on their wedding nights because they were inexperienced and rushed into things too quickly.
I was very focused on seeking out a marriage mate a few short years ago and found myself getting mad at God when I was having no luck. Then it dawned on me that I never had the desire for children or to “make children” either. He saved me and a woman a lot of grief in the long run.
Women don’t value male virginity for the simple reason that it is unfalsifiable; there is no male equivalent to a hymen. Nearly all men have ejaculated before ever having sex with a partner, anyway.