The 25 Year Old Virgin

I’ve noticed a trend going around, and it’s bothering me.  Let’s call it “Puritanism” – derived from “Purity” not “Puritanical” (though the Cunning Linguist in me suspects that they might somehow be related).  It’s something I’ve noticed appearing here and there in comment sections, you can even find the occasional blogger who will engage in it: the claim to moral purity.

We all tend to be a bit idealistic around this deep, dark corner of the Internet; we speak in absolutes, we write about archetypes, and we simplify for the sake of explanation.  We’re trying to create new models for human behaviour – sexual, political, generational, you name it – and in a lot of ways our models are more like Rutherford’s plum pudding, than the mathematical vagueries of Quantum mechanics.  These are but the growing pains of any enlightenment, dark or otherwise.

Thankfully, we understand that the map is not the territory.

Or do we?

The Rutherford model is simple, easy to understand, mathematically absolute – and it’s wrong.  Quantum Mechanics, like the real world, is messy, indeterminate, and it doesn’t predict a perfect path to achieve a desired future state.  And yet it seems to me that we have many Rutherfordians amongst us.

Look at the Libertarian party: Ron Paul, as a physician and a Christian, was personally opposed to abortion – a stance many Libertarians found objectionable.  Furthermore, he was willing to play the game – to get his face and his ideals out there for the general public, willing to negotiate on sacred cows (public education and federal highways, for instance) for the opportunity to shrink government; many Libertarians renounced him for this.

And the consequences of their renunciation?  They remained “pure” in their beliefs and behaviours, but in the process removed critical support from the Hypocrite Ron Paul… a Hypocrite who managed to push Libertarianism into the mainstream.

The Puritanist will argue that they hold to their ideals above anything else, and are willing to die for them, even lose because of them, if need be.

I argue that their ideas are incoherent.  Ergo, the title of this post: the 25 year old female virgin.

We’re all familiar with the statistics (if you’re not, Free Northerner has been kind enough to compile them): virgins make the best wives.  They’re less likely to cheat, and they’re less likely to divorce.  So to any red-blooded, God-fearing, Civilized Man, who’s faithful to Her Majesty, it’s but a single step from Moral Obligation to find a virginal wife.

Assuming, of course, that you’re marrying her in your early twenties.

In an ideal world our social institutions would hold strong: parents would help select their childrens’ partners, men would pursue with the testoronic vigour they learned from their fathers, the brides would play coy, thanks to their grandmothers’ wisdom, and both would anticipate the wedding night with a fevered lust tempered by love.

Instead, we live in a world of broken institutions, absentee parents, and mixed messages, where most marriages don’t occur until people are in their late twenties; all of which is compounded by the fact that our species has a sex drive that is eclipsed only by that of the bonobos, our degenerate chimpanzee cousins.

It is in this world that I ask the question “What does a 25 year old female virgin look like?”

Nine out of ten times, should you encounter one, you’ll find out that she’s a freak: cold and robotic, emotionally traumatized, or strangely asexual.  All of which disqualify her from wifehood.  But forget about those cripples, for the nut of my argument is in the last ten percent: what about the Good, Christian girls who’ve abstained for all those years out of love of the Good?  What do they look like?

These are women who’ve been looking for Good Men – oh Lord, have they ever been looking – while simultaneously shying away from dating, because they sense the temptation that comes along with it.  They’ve met plenty of Nice Guys™ whose masculinity has been bleached away, they’ve met plenty of Alpha Cads, who are sexy but dangerous, and they’ve even met a few Real Men – but they’ve yet to meet a Real Man who was financially and emotionally prepared to enter into a serious relationship.  Like her, all the Real Men were infantilized and indebted by the educational institutions, postponing their full-maturation until their late twenties.

Now, without a doubt, the majority of women such as herself do find a Real Man early on, and they do get married; that’s a given.  But this girl is the one who’s slipped through the cracks.  Thanks to a lack of guidance, and the prolonged adolescence we now force upon our youth, she’s remained unmarried and virginal up to the age of twenty-five.

What will this have done to her?  What is the cost of resisting a pair of ovaries that are screaming for fertilization?

First of all, she will have deeply suppressed her sexuality.  In rejecting the bitter aphrodisiac of the hook-up culture, a certain natural denial of healthy sexuality will have formed.  In focusing on the abstract teleos of sexuality – love, family, and children – she will have blocked out the proximation of sexuality – how to let loose and be lustful with her husband.  Secondly, in rejecting the Gads, Cads, and Soon-To-Be-Dads, she will have gradually come to envision an uber-masculine fantasy, a perfect He Man of a future husband who is a Green Beret, Entrepreneur, and Globe-Trotting Philanthropist.  Each time she rejected a man, she did it for all the right reasons – but her method of rejection was to imagine a better, more perfect man than the one who tempted her.

In other words: the 25 year old female virgin, even the one who started with the best of intentions, will inevitably result in a woman with an aberrant sexuality, who’s a demanding harridan.  What springs to mind is the trifecta meaning of “Get thee to a nunnery!”(1) Personally, I’d far prefer a woman who’d made a couple of mistakes and learned from them, than one who’d learned “perfectly” – and had the holier-than-thou attitude to match.

I fully expect to hear some harsh words on this post, about how I’m an anti-reactionary degenerate, so I’ll simply leave you with a quote from General Patton:

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
~George S. Patton

ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ

1. From Hamlet, the eponymous protagonist addressing his girlfriend Ophelia: this phrase has three interpretations:

a) “You’re a whore, redeem yourself by going to a convent!”
b) “You’re a whore, go to a whorehouse!” (“Nunnery” was slang for whorehouses at the time.)
c) “Listen, babe, life makes whores out of all of us – just admit it to yourself, drop the pretensions, and keep moving forward.