Sex Day: Abstaining from the Unabstainable

WARNING: The following posting contains information about sex. I didn't want to put that information in, but the situation called for it so it was unavoidable. I'm very sorry. If you're offended by public discussion of sex that doesn't conclude that sex is a terrible, awful thing, you might want to go here, where no approving discussion of sex is likely to occur. On the other hand, if you're like me and you really like information about sex, especially if that information says, "Yes! Sex is OK! Have it right now!" read on. Because every Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent, and this Friday is no different.

Let's pretend we don't want to have sex. By that, I don't mean we, as in you and I, specifically, don't want to have sex together, because that's really kind of a safe bet. First of all, we haven't even met, and I don't kiss until the third date, not even with my wife. By we I mean all of us, on our collective own. So: Let's pretend we don't want to have sex. No more smooching, cuddling, biting, slapping, tickling, penetrating, sucking, licking, poking, spanking, inhaling deeply, stroking, bending, thrusting, withdrawing, thrusting, blindfolding, swallowing, or picking hair out of our teeth sex.

Why would we do that? We wouldn't. But for the sake of having a Sex Day posting this week, work with me. Pretend we would decide not to have sex so that we can come to the real question at hand: How would we not have sex? How would we, fairly normal adults on the verge of a hard-drinking weekend and fully knowledgeable of the sexual capabilities of our spouses or significant others or that person down there at the end of the bar with the dark, haunting eyes...how could we stop ourselves from doing what we all so clearly want to do, soon, right here on the pool table when our quarter comes up?

Well, speaking just for myself, I couldn't. At least, I couldn't all by myself. I'd have to have help. Fortunately, there's a lot of help out there.

First of all, we need to define what not having sex is. This was, you remember, a great national controversy back when Bill Clinton was President. Clinton, who insisted he did not have sex with "that woman," defined not having sex as getting a blowjob in the Oval Office from a much younger girl who did not swallow. (Think, for a moment, how different history would have been if Monica has just swallowed. A lesson for us all.) I, for one, was excited to discover that getting a blowjob was not having sex. For one brief, shining moment, I thought I could get blowjobs without violating my marital vows, which I take as seriously as the next guy.

The reason that this excited me is that I, like most middle aged married guys, go through life imagining that there are millions of attractive young women out there who would love to have sex with me if I just weren't married. Now, in my clear-thinking moments, I realize that this is likely untrue. But being a guy, I don't have many clear-thinking moments, so it's not really much of a problem. For a couple of days after Clinton's announcement that blowjobs weren't sex, I spent a lot of time planning how I was going to explain this new paradigm to my wife.

"Honey," I planned to say, "I'm going to go out and get blowjobs from attractive young women. But it's not having sex. The President said so."

After much thought, I decided not to pursue this strategy. First, because I love my wife. Second, because she would have laughed at me. See, she's way more attractive than I am and, if I could get blowjobs without it being sex, she could give blowjobs without having it be sex. And I knew, down in my heart of hearts, that she would have a lot more luck out there in the sexual wilds than I would.

Which brings me back to my point: What is not having sex?

There are two basic schools of thought on this: The celibate crowd says not having sex is essentially doing completely without sexual gratification of any kind. The abstinence crowd defines not having sex as, basically, not having intercourse.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to define "not having sex" as "not having orgasms, at least deliberately."

The most effective way to avoid having sex, in my experience, is to act like an ass. Certainly, within the confines of my marriage, acting like an ass means no sex. I have also heard the same thing from other people -- men in particular, for some reason. For example, a friend of mine once returned home after drinking too much. For reasons not disclosed, he had a Darth Vader mask with him. He stripped off his clothes, put on the mask, and jumped on his sleeping wife. He thought, he explained later, that it would be fun.

He learned, instead, that getting kicked in the balls is never fun. He had acted like an ass, and was thus able to abstain from sex for a whole week.

Experts in sexual abstinence, most of whom are Republican, suggest that the best way to avoid sex is to concentrate really hard on avoiding sex. According to the Detroit Free Press, abstinence is a full-time job:

Several steps help teens to abstain, health educators say. Among them: have a goal, stay focused on it, surround yourself with friends who think as you do or who support your decision, avoid drugs and alcohol and avoid being in situations where you're easily tempted.

"Abstinence is not a decision; it's a lifestyle," says Antonio, who wants to be a computer engineer.

Antonio is, obviously, on the right course, and by becoming a computer engineer his odds of having sex are way, way low compared to, for example, being a cable installer or even a homeless aluminum recycler. Computer engineers, as far as I can tell, almost never have sex.

Advocates of sexual abstinence are many, particularly during an election year, but my personal favorite is Robert Baden-Powell, the Brit who founded the Boy Scouts. In the first Boy Scout Manual, Baden-Powell included this tract:

You all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private parts, and there comes an inclination to work it up with your hand or otherwise.

“Well, lots of fellows, from not knowing any better, please themselves in this way until it often becomes a sort of habit with them which they cannot get out of.

“The practice is called self abuse and the result is that the boy after time becomes weak and nervous and shy.

“He gets headaches and probably palpitation of the heart, and if he still carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot.” …

He wrote: “The use of your private parts is not to play with when you are a boy but to enable you to get children when you are grown-up and married.

“But if you misuse them while young, you will not be able to use them when you are a man.

“Remember too that several awful diseases come from indulgence - one especially that rots away the inside of men’s mouths, their noses and eyes.”

Lord Baden-Powell, clearly, was nuts. But the sentiment he was expressing -- restrain yourself! -- lives on among the abstinence advocates, who refer to themselves as "Wait Trainers." What they lack, however, are the concrete steps to make abstinence a possibility for people who are more geared toward having sex all the time. For example, something like this would be helpful to me when I'm feeling like having sex:

When you begin to feel the sense of anticipation and tightness of sexual arousal, pack your genitals with ice and think about Brazilian waxing Vice President Dick Cheney.

Or, even more practically:

Play golf a lot.

That would work, at least for me, and I'm guessing it would work for my wife as well.

Me: "Honey, can I play golf today so we won't have sex."
My Wife: "Yes."

Rather than giving this kind of practical abvice, the abstainers assume that people are rational when it comes to sex. They believe we can all abstain if we just think about how fearsomely horrible sex is:

About 15 million American acquire sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) each year. Twenty-five percent are younger than 20. One in five Americans 12 and older has genital herpes.

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is shockingly common among young people. It causes over 90 percent of cancer of the cervix, which, in turn, is causing the deaths of more than 4,000 women yearly. One study found that 60 percent of co-eds at Rutgers University, for example, were infected at some time during the three-year study.

And there has been a 500 percent increase in the prevalence of genital herpes in white adolescents over the past 25 years.

Aim For Success, an organization that has a business plan that is a strong metaphor for not having sex ("We don't give anything away for free!") will cheerfully sell you materials to help you help others to keep from having sex. Among the precious few not-having-sex dating tips previewed without charge on their website, there is this helpful suggestion:

Get two or three friends together at 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning and spend the day playing Monopoly. Stop for a picnic lunch in the backyard or at a park. Return to the Monopoly game and take a dinner break at a local fast food restaurant. Return to the Monopoly game and play until 9:00 p.m. at which time you declare a winner.

This is the kind of brilliant work that earned Aim for Success commendations from both Texas Governor George W. Bush and President of the United States Geoge W. Bush.

Our nation depends on education and instruction from caring citizens to help our students develop strong characters and make positive choices about their future.

Now, if I might take a moment here to be snotty, please notice that President Bush screwed up even the simple grammar of this letter. Our students, in fact, should develop strong character, not characters, which makes it sound like he's urging them to adopt method acting as a craft. I also have questions about the children sharing a single future, which they will develop together, rather than having their own futures.

Sorry for the interruption.

Through the Abstinence Education Program, my administration is committed to teaching America's youth that abstinence is the most effective means of preventing pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted disease.

Which is true, or at least as true as saying, for example, that traveling to Venus by bus is the most effective way of avoiding long lines at airports.

The Aim For Success program has performed a highly scientific survey to find out whether it's a success, and by golly it is. Here's what one 11 year old had to say:

I was thinking of having sex, but now I will wait.

That must be one hell of a program if it can talk an 11 year old out of having sex.

For an overview of Aim For Success's programs, here's a reprint of an article from the Dallas Morning News, which I link to only because it was written by someone named "Steve Blow." I can just imagine that morning in the newsroom:

City Editor: I got this story on a sexual abstinence group. Get on it, Blow!
Depressed Looking Writer: Why do I get all the sex things?
City Editor: I don't know, Blow. But it could be worse.
Depressed Looking Writer: How?
City Editor: Ask Jack Sniffer over on the sports desk.

Apparently, one of the least effective ways to not have sex is to take an abstinence education program sponsored by the Federal Government. The L.A. Weekly recently cited a study of teenagers living disturbingly close to Canada, which uncovered this seemingly contradictory fact:

Minnesota Department of Health study of the state’s five-year, abstinence-only program found last year that sexual activity by students taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent.

Must not be playing enough Monopoly. Still it shows what we're all up against, should we not want to have sex.

For those of us who can't control ourselves some outside restraint is necessary if we're not going to have sex. Some of us, to not have sex, need to put our genitalia in a cage and keep it there, safely under lock and key. Yes, we're talking chastity belts, and here's a brief history of the things from "A Young Person's Guide to Chastity Belts."

The common myth about the first occurance of chastity belts in the strict meaning is that the chastity belts where used by crusades, knights travelling to free Jerusalem and the holy land, while their wives rested in their castles locked in a chastity belt. This seem hardly plausible, since those first chastity belts were very uncomfortable, and it seems very unlikly that they could be worn long periods. Another theory suggests that the belts were used by the women themself to protect them against rapes. Maybe the belts were invented for some kind of (nonconsentual) bdsm play from the beginning: the thing is older than its description. In any case, it seems that the oldest chastity belts are mostly not products of the middle age, but of the renaissance, that means, that chastity belts are an invention of modern times and their belief in machines.

The first chastity belts were horrifying contraptions involving lots of cast-iron teeth and locking leather straps. As seen in this drawing, they were often worn by women who would seem not to be a major threat to go out and pick up some strange nave for a knight of sex. But, apparently, in the old days ugly women were considered attractive, so they had to have their parts locked up. Or maybe they had to have their parts locked up to protect other people from ugly women.

In the modern world, of course, we have advanced technology chastity belts. For example, the Locking Rubber Penis Prison, which looks a lot like a thumbless boxing glove attached to a man's groin but is made of lightweight, space-age polymers. I, myself, think it looks kind of sweaty and would ruin the line of my pants. Daunting as it appears, however, for the man who's really trying not to have sex, the Locking Rubber Penis Prison has its drawbacks.

The man who's wearing it could get it off if he made a concerted effort. However, in most cases, if the lock stays locked, he will not be able to get it back on, so that makes the device "tamper evident."

Now, I'm not sure how much of a "concerted effort" I'm willing to make to get my genitalia out of a tightly belted boxing glove. I have a certain fear that putting too much effort into a thing like that might strip my balls right out of their little holding pen, and I don't want that to happen at all. Better to call the Fire Department.

Fortunately, for both men and women, there are many more options than their used to be, and it is no longer necessary to do business with a blacksmith to keep from having sex. Chastity belts are now made of plastic and breathable fabrics, so that you can wear them around, as this women is, without attracting too much notice.

Female chastity belts basically put some kind of barrier plate over the vaginal opening. The simplest model is essentially a pair of tin, lock-on thong panties. Men, on the other hand, pose a real dilemma for chastity belt designers. Where the female belt fits over the female parts, the penis has to fit inside its confinement. That means detailed measurements must be taken to assure that the belt will be large enough to contain the penis but not so large that the penis might slip out and go for coffee.

Tollyboy is a leading manufacturer of male chastity belts. Located, somehow not surprisingly, in England (where not having sex has been raised to an art form) Tollyboy personally tailors belts based on 14 separate measurements, including "penis length (relaxed)" and "waist to base of penis (top of)". Taking the measurement alone would make a pretty good weekend for a typical guy, since it requires various erectile states that are entertaining to achieve and maintain, especially given the old carpenter's adage, "Measure three times, cut once." One must be careful, and it would be best, when taking these measurements, to have a trustworthy helper.

The end result of all this calculation is the industry-leading MB/100 belt set, which can take up to six months to fabricate and prevents sex in two ways. First, by containing the penis in a tight sheath, the MB/100 prevents erections by making sexual excitement excruciatingly painful. Second, if you took your pants off in front of a typical woman while wearing the MB/100, she'd either run like a gazelle away from you or pull a gun out of her purse and kill you. Either way, no sex. And, if you were actually dead, no jury would convict her of a crime.

Which is where all of this gets kind of complicated, the modern world being what it is. You see, the more rugged chastity belts -- for both men and women -- are designed for people who have sex by incorporating into their sex lives devices designed to preclude them from having sex. Here's a web denizen who goes by the name Altarboy, who has really thought this through.

The male chastity belt has been the subject of much of my fantasies. I've been intrigued with the sexual power implications of having my genitals toyed with, yet out of reach, and under lock and key. The thought of having my penis LOCKED up by a secure device, and my not being able to touch myself or masturbate is highly erotic.

Which leaves me, as a person not wanting to have sex, afraid that not wanting to have sex is, in itself, having sex, at least of a kind. And if I'm going to be having sex anyway, well, maybe I just ought to have sex.

Assuming, of course, I don't act like an ass.

That's it for Sex Day! I hope you all have a good weekend. I'll be hanging around the house, trying not to not have sex.