I Regret My Virginity

I wanted to give this a better title - something subtle and intriguing which would avoid alienating any reader. And then I realized that this is an issue for which subtlety and intrigue have gone way, way too far. So, women of the world, please hear me again, ever so loudly and clearly:

I. Regret. My. Virginity.

This is a critical statement. In any logical, coherent setting, this is utterly earth-shattering evidence. Why, asks the good secular reader who did not grow up in the shadow of the epitome of chastity? Because, I respond, this one statement invalidates the cornerstone of youth groups around the world:

You will never regret waiting.

Now I must be fair; there is plenty I do not regret. I do not regret the absence of pregnancy scares. I do not regret my freedom from STDs. I do not regret my platonic friendships. I do not regret the pain I avoided in stock of breakups. I do not regret my goody-goody label, and still prefer it to slut. I count my lucky stars that I was never among those for whom the choice was not their own. In short, I'm grateful to have completely missed out on emotional, physical, and social turmoil - that which the church relentlessly associates with pre-marital experiences.

Caveats aside, my regrets remain.

I regret that I will never be as interested in sex as I was at 15. I regret that the core portion of my formative sexual years is...blank, at least relationally. I regret my membership in a culture which has so seriously fucked up her youth's sexual identities.

Let's do a side-by-side of modern and traditional culture.

Successful Modern 14-year-old
Prospects: 8+ years of education
Social life: 7+ hours/day mandatory exposure to hundreds or thousands of identical peers inside and outside school
Family life: Barely existent

Traditional 14-year-old
Prospects: Brink of marriage
Social life: Community holidays and events
Family life: 90-95% of interpersonal contact

See the difference? When safe, risk-free, financially-feasible, committed, respectable sex is imminent, a moral code of conduct which actively guides toward abstinence and penalizes impatience is the clearly logical form of society. But modernity has succeeded in engineering the absolutely most defective environment possible for healthy teen sexuality. In the prime of sexual development, we do not foster youth's maturity under the influence of elders but forcibly immerse them in a toxic community of peers for the majority of their waking hours. We do not give them sexual outlets but instruct them to exercise superhuman control, entertaining discussion only long enough to reprimand their failures. Alternatively, we encourage "safe" sexual exploration - as though the rare teen with enough sense to carry a condom is safe from the mind-altering hormonal deluge and harsh slap of social labels. Our society has systematically eliminated all chances of quality sexual development and offers no useful alternatives. We are destined to failure through problems of our own creation.

I am left with no answers; the church and culture have utterly failed. I regret my virginity, knowing that my regrets would not be lessened for having relieved myself of the condition. I believe there is room for improvement on all sides. The church must awaken to the burden it has bestowed on her youth, realizing the havoc wreaked by good intentions and the drastic historical shift in the developmental and social implications of marriage. The secular world must overcome the idiotic belief that today's teens are in a position to begin making useful sexual decisions; we have all but guaranteed that they will be ill-prepared and devastatingly immature.

I have no idea what I will tell my own children, because I have no idea what to tell myself. I can only hope that natural selective pressures will at some point work against the blatantly unsustainable disaster we have fabricated. I have hope that one day, the youthful years will once again be equated with productivity in place of frivolity; with meaningful sensuality in place of promiscuity; with fruition in place of egoism.

Where there will once again be a path I would not regret.