"At 35, I still want to save sex for someone who is mutually in love with me and who accepts my virginity as a gift."

"After so many years of holding out, I can’t change now. I just hope my hopes don’t go stale before he shows up or, perhaps more important, before I recognize that he’s been hanging around, waiting, the whole time."

Writes Amanda McCracken in a NYT op-ed, which also contains the sentence, "I like being naked with boyfriends." And "I’ve happily taken on a dominatrix role and men have enjoyed it." So take that into account as process her evidence of the psychology of preserving virginity. Maybe this shouldn't be called "virginity" at all. It's more of a sexual orientation that excludes intercourse. Which I'm not knocking, by the way.

What if young people stopped having sex?

Case study: Japan.

The term is sekkusu shinai shokogun — "celibacy syndrome."

Think it won't happen here or that if it did, it would be good?

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060....

[A relationships counselor has clients] who have taken social withdrawal to a pathological extreme. They are recovering hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first steps to rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term parasaito shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s without managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million unmarried people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around three million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."

And these are the people who are seeking counseling. There must be far more who are not going to admit they have a problem.

Well, in fact, is it a problem to live the solitary life? The government — and society — may want you to pair up and form a family unit for the sake of the whole, but for the individual? Perhaps many people are discovering a great truth in living the life of solitude and simplicity.

(Consider: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.")

Those who portray solitude as a problem may say the individual isn't having a fully dimensional, deeply satisfying life. But that might be the propaganda, and the truth could be that we need to exploit the individual to generate wealth and new human beings so that the group can thrive. If it is not actually a problem for the individual, then those who see and fear the disastrous dysfunction of the group are tasked not only to cure a nonproblem but also to convince individuals to perceive a nonproblem as a problem and to submit to the cure.

"In some ways, writing about sex seems more easily accepted in the contemporary literary world than writing about being a person of faith."

"What has been your experience in trying to explain why you believed for so long?" an interviewer asks Nicole Hardy, author of "Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin." She answers:

The sex part is difficult to write about. The verbs are terrible, and the nouns are worse. But the emotional act of writing about faith is difficult, more exposing. Anyone who has had a positive experience in any religion understands the ways that faith can be a buoy and a comfort and a joy. But it is sometimes hard to explain the exact feelings you have when you’re having a sexual experience.

I was surprised by Hardy's answer, which wasn't at all what the questioner was trying to elicit. The truth is it is hard to write about sex. The verbs are terrible, and the nouns are worse. 

Ha ha. Have you ever tried to write about sex, like actually describe a sexual experience in detail? It's hard. The adjectives too, as well as nouns and verbs. That's why there's that annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, where they embarrass writers of prestigious novels for writing things like "Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."
Now, actually I don't think that's bad writing about sex. It's writing about bad sex. And the author of that winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award agrees with me:

[Rowan] Somerville says he was actually trying to paint a picture of bad sex in his novel....

"He has no idea how to actually make love. It's totally cold and inhumane... His sexual identity is profoundly scarred by his trauma."

When writing sex scenes, Somerville says, jokes come with the territory.

"I think you're never going to be able to integrate sex into a novel in a way that cannot be ridiculed," he says. Even citing sex scenes from Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel Lolita sound silly out of context, he adds.

Even? Especially! That's the point. Too blunt?

"Back in Paris, friends asked if I'd met someone new and assumed I must have fallen in love."

"But the reason I was so radiant was that I'd decided to be celibate."

Does celibacy make you "radiant" because you decided to undertake it? Will radiance not ensue if celibacy simply befalls you?

Was she really "radiant"?

"Radiant" is a funny word, lobbed automatically at brides, and therefore suspicion-provoking when aimed at the celibate woman.

"Radiant" means — according to the unlinkable OED — "Sending out rays of light; shining brightly" or "Of the eyes, a look, etc.: bright or beaming (as with joy or love). Of a person, esp. a young woman or bride: giving off an aura of joyfulness or health; glowingly happy." Amongst the OED quotes is one from a book that we once reveled in here at the Althouse blog, "The Great Gatsby":

1925   F. S. Fitzgerald Great Gatsby vi. 132   Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl.

Authentically. Oh! There's that adverb. Celibate sounds so pure. But authentically? Who on earth knows when she has achieved authenticity... especially in the radiancy department. Those auras must emanate from real joy.

That book about celibacy is "slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume..."

"... filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra. It’s also gauzy and episodic and not particularly well written, yet it drifts along on a kind of existential bearnaise of its own secreting."

From the NYT review of "The Art of Sleeping Alone," which we were just talking about here.  The review makes the author's celibacy seem like a reaction to negative sexual experiences, not a positive pursuit (which is the aspect of celibacy that interests me).

12 years without sex, or as Sophie Fontanel calls it, 12 years of insubordination.

Fontanel did not forgo sex for any moral or religious reason or out of a lack of desire. She was only 27 at the outset. She wasn't prudish, but she rejected the way she'd had sex without being "present" and because it was the thing to do.

I wanted to recover my body. My real desire was to re-want having sex....

She decided: "I will return to sexual activities when it is worth it — and it took more than ten years."

When her book — "The Art of Sleeping Alone" —  came out, "a lot of people — a huge amount of people — began to say that they had the same experience."  That was in France. It will be out here next week. Expect a lot of confessions from people who've gone without sex for a long time. If you've voluntarily gone for years, will you admit how long? It's nice of Fontanel to open the floodgates on this topic, which I think many people are embarrassed to talk about, afraid of looking pathetic or undesirable.

Here's her advice:

I recommend being true to yourself. If you are making love and you’re disappointed, then stop. Recover your freedom. Don’t be afraid of being single, and don’t be afraid of being single for a long time.... It’s very important to learn that it’s not a sin to be alone.

Funny to get to the end of the article and see the word "sin." I think she's being humorous, not revealing secret religiosity. Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but I suspect that she is saying that people have sex out of habit or to seem normal to themselves and others, and the sex is often worse than nothing.

You know my old aphorism: Better than nothing is a high standard.

"[W]hen the votes of 2.6 million voters were counted and announced, the scandal-plagued outsider Rino Sashihara toppled the seemingly secure incumbent Yuko Oshima..."

"... to become the new 'president' of AKB48, Japan’s most popular female musical act ever."

AKB48 is a massive and massively successful conglomerate, with many local franchises. Group members start off as awkward amateurs and end up skilled professional entertainers...

The girls of AKB48 are sexual chimeras. Although often they are in fact young adults, they are made to look much younger thanks to outfits derived from school-girl uniforms and rehearsed childish mannerisms. The resultant child-woman is then resexualized....

That looks like this:



"The normally circumspect Japan Times denounced the group for framing 'women’s nature as responsive to male desires rather than as active and independent'...."

And to feed these fans’ fantasies some more, the group prohibits, by contract, its members from having sex or dating....

Most legal experts agree that AKB48’s contractual ban on sex has no force. But that didn’t keep Minami Minegishi, once among the group’s inner core of 20, from shaving off her hair in contrition and apologizing to fans after she was seen leaving a young male pop star’s apartment one morning.

That head-shaving + apology was discussed here on this blog back in February. Back to the first-linked article:

Voters in Saturday’s election seemingly rallied to upset these rules.... The race was tight, but in the end, voters rejected rules preventing young women from enjoying their freedoms. They elevated the disgraced Minegishi, her hair still boyishly short, to 18th place. And they crowned Sashihara, who had been banished from the core Akihabara group to an affiliate in Fukuoka after her own dating scandal....

AKB48 may be sexist and prey on prurient tastes....

Oh? Is it? What's the prurient taste for? Cake and jell-o, judging from the video. I thought it was very wholesome. It seemed perfectly clean... but also perfectly dirty in your dirty mind. Shame on you!

"Boyfriend Bears is a non-profit organization that encourages pre-teen and teenage girls to live a life of purity."

"Our bears serve as a reminder that we promote purity to be a lifestyle. Boyfriend Bears provides the opportunity for girls to make a stand for what they believe in and to stay strong in their morals."

Via Metafilter. Sample comments from there:

"It's like Japanese body pillow girlfriends, but not as creepy, because it's pure."

"This is what killed Timothy Treadwell."

"Wow, that part about writing letters to your future husband, tucking it into a special pocket in the teddy bear and then giving them to him on your wedding day...that squicked me out."

"Does this mean the purity rings are not working?"