Chastity On Campus
Thu Apr 03, 2008 at 10:59:35 AM PDT
I was just about to blog this! It is a good story. Thank you, Katherine! -Elisa
This past Sunday's New York Times magazine had a profile of a pro-virginity group at Harvard University called True Love Revolution. Their website states:
TLR is a new, non-sectarian student-run organization at Harvard College dedicated to the promotion of premarital sexual abstinence. We strive to present another option to our peers regarding sex-related issues, endorsing ideas of abstinence and chastity as a positive alternative for ethical and health reasons.
The website suggests that premarital sexual activity can result in a wealth of negative outcomes.
Saving sex for marriage, we believe, can contribute positively to your physical and emotional health and improve the quality of your current and future relationships.
Early sexual activity and having multiple sexual partners is strongly associated with increased depression, greater likelihood of maternal poverty, and higher rates of marital infidelity and divorce in future marriages.
TLR is co-run by a male and female student. The NYT magazine article portrayed the male student as something of a tortured soul; i.e. he finds his commitment to chastity a difficult path, and describes his difficulty rather vividly. The female student, Janie Fredell, doesn't report having much of a problem with it. She just goes for a long run if she's having urges.
Princeton also has a similar group, the Anscombe Society.
Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.”
The Anscombe Society at Princeton went on to embrace positions not just against premarital sex but also against homosexual sex and marriage. Founders have tried to spread its method to other schools, and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were the first to follow with another Anscombe Society.
Some disagree with the claims of these groups and suggest that they are providing misleading information to other students.
Martha Kempner, a spokeswoman for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, which promotes sex education, agrees that True Love Revolution performs a service in providing abstinent students a place to gather for support. “What is disturbing,” she says, “is that this club is using inaccurate information and distorted data to sell that message.” She strongly rejects suggestions that premarital sex leads to poverty, an inability to bond or to increased likelihood of divorce. “There’s no legitimate research that says premarital sex has all of these harmful consequences,” she says. “They’re completely baseless claims.”
In addition, the group's approach began mainly as an appeal to female students rather than to men and women equally.
True Love Revolution was denounced, however, after its first big outreach effort, on Valentine’s Day 2007. Members had sent out cards to the women of the freshmen class that read: “Why wait? Because you’re worth it.” Some interpreted the card to mean that those who didn’t wait until marriage to have sex would somehow be worth less. One writer for The Crimson concluded that “by targeting women with their cards and didactic message, they perpetuate an age-old values system in which the worth of a young woman is measured by her virginity.”
This year they sent identical cards on Valentine's Day to both the male and the female freshmen.
I don't recall abstinence having much of a foothold when I was in college. In fact, I distinctly remember having a calendar fall off the wall onto my face in the middle of the night in my dorm room when the next door neighbor's loft was rockin' (don't come knockin'). I guess this is an unsurprising outcome, though, for students who likely came up receiving abstinence education as promoted by the Bush administration.
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