The Unforgettable Fire
Jezebel Moe had a series of posts the other day, regarding an article in the New York Times Magazine about Ivy League virgin groups (first glance: how pretentious can you get? “My lack of sex is better than your sex.”) with a predictable counterpoint from a harlot.
Her first post mocked the virgins in the unending quest for pageviews, and the second one took the opposite tack and expressed a sincere respect for the participants in recounting an exchange between them. Actually, she did Virgin Leo a big favor by letting the world know that, indeed, journalism isn’t always as it seems and that Leo is not unflatteringly horny, but that he is indeed thoughtful and principled when it comes to chaste living. (Or, more appropriately, “never comes”. Ugh.) Once again, Moe demonstrates that she is a very good (meta)journalist and that she has an enlightened and morally sound worldview that is endlessly admirable yet often lost among her angry blogger screeches. (If she wrote cock jokes instead of rants, she’d be the female Alex Balk)
Here’s why I like this Leo guy, even though I personally find great fulfillment in my vices:
About the way that [the reporter] manipulated the quotations from me: describing my lust as an “untamed beast” was a comment on the nature of lust itself, not the strength of my own. It’s untamed precisely because it is lust, and if given free rein it considers nothing but its own gratification. It seeks to use another person to gain personal pleasure, which is why you have to take away constant fuel for it if you want to love and respect women for who they are, and not just how they turn you on. Also, the ways in which things like a touch, a glance, or a random thought can bring arousal is simply an observation about manners in which it can happen. The actual occurence of such stimulation goes down at the same rate as the willful input of lustful stimulation, and while such things (like a thought) may occur regularly, they rarely bring any arousal at all if you learn to let go of them and ignore them—like a fly buzzing around. Basically, it’s not a huge deal! I’m frustrated that Randall didn’t make any of this clear, because I said all of this to him, and more. It would have been easy for him to pain a picture of me as someone who had fought a battle and emerged free, happy, and comfortable with his sexuality, but instead he makes me seem like a repressed weirdo. All this does is perpetuate the myth that men have no choice except to be horny, and if you act like I do then you’ll go crazy and salivate at every little thing that crosses your path. Our culture so badly needs role models of the opposite lifestyle.
It is also revealed that the pictures used of the subjects were purposely staged to give them dour faces, as if they had not yet discovered joy in the world simply because they’d refused to yet have intercourse. Or maybe the other way around, they’d refused because they were joyless. Anyway, neither is true. They laugh, they enjoy the company of others, and they’ll have great sex someday, they hope.
If you ask me, Russell is really the repressed weirdo here. I mean, as a journalist, what are the odds that he isn’t?
Leo also makes a fine point in his quote that hormones beget more hormones. With spring fever about to descend upon us, we should carefully consider how our own hormones act as a prism when we view our relations with your particular gender of interest… and how they can often lead us down a rough path in life.