Here’s an aspect of the Clinton administration that you probably don’t remember: Just a few months into Bill Clinton’s second term, the federal government announced a major initiative to fund abstinence-only sex education.
According to the LA Times report In March 1997, the Clinton Administration allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to programs teaching that premarital sex “can have harmful psychological and physical effects.” Programs funded by the Clinton Administration also taught that abstaining from premarital sex is “the expected standard of human behavior.” Again, it’s important to note that: The Clinton administration said abstaining from sex before marriage is the “expected standard” of human behavior.
Now, that may sound surprising, for obvious reasons. This administration was not one to lead by example, in this or any other way. But at the time, especially in the pre-Lewinsky era, it wasn’t a particularly shocking move. From the Reagan era onwards, there had been huge bipartisan support in Washington for teaching young people to wait until marriage to have sex. Democrats and Republicans agreed that hookup culture spread disease and ultimately made people unhappy. In fact, it wasn’t particularly controversial.
As recently as 2010, CNN aired a segment on how effective abstinence education is. Check it out:
You hardly ever see that kind of reporting on CNN anymore, and a quick search of their website tells you that abstinence-only education is “not evidence-based.” As we’ve seen so many times before, it seems the science has changed.
In fact, around the time the report was released in 2010, federal funding for abstinence-only education began to decline under the Obama administration. Donald Trump restored it to some extent. The Biden administration has since limited this funding again, but not by the extent that many on the left had hoped.
Throughout all of these debates, the one group that has remained consistent has been Christian conservatives. For decades, we have been warning that hook-up culture would cause many devastating problems for society. We have promoted premarital chastity and abstinence as the only viable alternative, a position we base on the Bible, thousands of years of human history, and plain old common sense. And because of this, we have been scorned and ridiculed time and time again over the past few decades as outdated, snobbish, old-fashioned and outdated.
What’s interesting about all this ridicule is that many of the same people who dismissed Christian conservatives are now finally beginning to agree with us in principle. They acknowledge that abstinence until marriage makes sense. The problem is, they’re doing so for all the wrong reasons.
New York Magazine’s “The Cut” article We outline the new trend of asceticism that is currently very popular among young people. Qualified“A Sexless Summer: Singlehood is Now All the rage.”
cut Report:
Today, celebrities like Khloe Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish are touting the benefits of sobriety. Melissa Febos will release another memoir next year, “The Dry Season,” about a year of conscious sobriety. Other women are enjoying the sobriety, even becoming competitive.
Reports Continue:
The Great Abstinence Movement comes amid a number of moral panics about sex that primarily concern young people, who are substituting text messages for sex, quitting apps, forgoing marriage and childbirth, and scorning traditional romance in favor of platonic friendships like codependent but chaste Victorian pen pals.
According to The Cut, one of the reasons for this “mass abstention” is that many women around the world are drawing inspiration from “South Korea’s radical feminist 4B movement.”
Women who join the “4B Movement” vow to not do four things: not date men, not have sex with men, not have children, and not get married. Of course, this attitude only makes South Korea’s demographic crisis worse. The country’s birth rate is well below replacement level and falling rapidly. If no one marries or has children, the situation won’t improve. But while the media is presenting this as a victory for Korean feminists, South Korea may not survive much longer if things continue this way. South Korea’s great achievement, we are told, is that it accepted its own extinction.
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Take, for example, this article from Vogue: They recently published a similar article praising women’s newfound love for the single life. I have written:
Will a life without sex become a reality? Is it actually liberating to remove sex from every equation? Are we entering a second wave of sexual liberation where we can simply opt out altogether? This summer could be an opportunity to take a break from the near-constant awareness of one’s sexuality, how (or whether) one attracts. A vacation from sending and receiving sexual stimulation. Will more people look back on 2024 as the summer they went sexless? No more afternoon fun, no more holiday romance. Truly single and urban.
It’s kind of amazing that Vogue magazine has actually found that women can “opt out” of having sex with strangers. This is a whole new level of “sexual liberation”, they say. Nobody has ever pointed this out before. You can actually not give yourself up to strange men who only seem vaguely interested in you. This is a news flash brought to you by Vogue magazine. Women have free will. Can you believe it?
Other media outlets have been reporting the same trend in similarly shocking tones for over a year now. For example, The Independent reported: I have written Last year it was reported that “singlehood is becoming a big trend among young people.” According to The Independent,
In recent years, “self-love” has been both embraced and parodied, but the shift to asceticism seems to be coming from there. … The benefits of asceticism are limitless, because it is ultimately about self-development. And it is a practice that will always offer some enlightenment, regardless of relationship status.
Imagine that: “The benefits of abstinence are limitless.” Again, this is presented as something just recently discovered in virtually every corporate press report.
The Guardian gives another example: Reports “Sex-positive feminism was fashionable for a time, but has since been replaced by voluntary celibacy,” The Guardian wrote a decade ago. title For example, “The moral justification for having sex before marriage.”
This reversal phenomenon has suddenly become ubiquitous. The New York Times and The Sunday Times There was a long op-ed in the Sunday Times written by a single author about his first-hand experience, which proclaimed, among other things, that “singleness is being rebooted, with more people than ever before abstaining from sex.” And if it’s not already clear, it’s important to point out that in almost all of these cases we’re talking about unmarried people abstaining from sex — in other words, abstaining from hook-up culture. This is the “reboot,” the “trend,” the shiny new idea that the media is suddenly celebrating.
And this trend isn’t just media-invented. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been tracking the sexual behavior of high school graduates for the past 20 years, since 2004. They found:
Among men ages 21-30, abstinence rates increased substantially between 2008 and 2020, from 14.4% to 23.5%, an increase of nearly two-thirds. Abstinence rates also increased among women of the same age, but at a lower rate, from 12.8% in 2008 to 16.5% in 2020, an increase of just over a quarter. …Currently, abstinence rates among young adult men are significantly higher than among young adult women.
There are obviously many factors that explain this change. Much of it can be attributed to what might be called involuntary singlehood. It is no secret that singleness is becoming more common while chastity is becoming less common. The proliferation of Internet pornography is a clear example of this.
So it seems reasonable to conclude that what’s happening in many cases here is that many young single people have given up on finding love and commitment. They despair that they’ll ever be able to have a real romantic relationship with someone, so they retreat into singlehood as a kind of surrender.
The point is, in most cases, it wasn’t an embrace of traditional values. They ended up in the same place – asceticism – but they got there from a place of despair and defeat.
In other cases, like South Korea, people are clearly relying on celibacy as some kind of far-fetched and false political statement, like Julia Fox.
The logic is perverse, but in a way it makes sense. These people understand that abstinence until marriage is an expression of self-control. And they understand that there are many benefits to a society in which people practice abstinence. But because they reject the old sexual moral code, they must come up with some bizarre and incoherent justification for returning to it. They must pretend that Roe v. Wade has any relevance to whether they want to be sexually promiscuous. Or that celibacy is part of a newfound “sexual liberation” movement; that is, that there is a new wave of feminism afoot that is discovering, for the first time, that women have free will.
The key to all this is that the old sexual morality they rejected – the norms that Christian conservatives promoted even as they ridiculed and dismissed it – was based from the beginning on truth and beauty – on human dignity, love, devotion, chastity, the great virtues.
Those who rejected that message for lust and instant gratification ended up living sexless lives. They chose the opposite lifestyle only to find it unfulfilling, harmful, destructive and deeply depressing. This is exactly what Christian conservatives warned about. This is why we said hookup culture is bad. The right order is to find someone, pledge love and loyalty, get married, and be physically intimate. In other words, we were right all along.
But in all the reporting about the “celibacy trend” there is of course no acknowledgement of the fact that we had all this figured out generations ago, actually millennia ago.
Unless these newly “abstinent” people realize that abstinence is more than just a fad or a political statement, the sense of satisfaction they say they now feel will not last. As The Cut puts it, “the great abstinence” will shortly give way to more unhappiness and, inevitably, more hedonism.
The only way to break this vicious cycle is to recognize and evaluate why Christian conservatives have long called for abstinence until marriage. The Religious Right has been repeatedly and consistently ridiculed over the past few decades for predicting the future. We’ve always been right. In everything. It’s time for everyone else to start listening.
