May 17, 2006

I'm a straight guy, 17-and-a-half. I have a Catholic Christian girlfriend and we've been going out for more than four months now. She is still a virgin. I've been patient and have been waiting for her to be okay with the idea of sex through the whole relationship, but there's been almost no advancement or anything. I've tried to make sure that I'm not pressuring her into anything, but after being at a sexual stalemate for months, it's starting to get a little old. Should I just keep waiting? Am I expecting too much? Please help.

Clever Acronym

First off, CA, no one who gives his age as "whatever-and-a-half" is mature enough to be having sex himself, much less sitting in judgment over someone else's decision not to have sex. If a good-looking guy told me he was "27-and-a-half," CA, I wouldn't fuck him until after he produced some ID proving he wasn't actually a 12-year-old with a glandular problem. Once a dude has hair on his balls, CA, he's supposed to drop the "and-a-half" thing.

On to your Catholic Christian girlfriend: It's too bad there aren't any Catholic Zoroastrians where you live—those bitches really put out! But Catholic Christian girls are made of more virtuous stuff, and if this one has managed to resist your manifest charms for four long months, nothing I write here will inspire her to lose her virginity with you. I'm sorry, CA, but this sounds like a lost cause… unless…

Have you considered asking your girlfriend to take a virginity pledge? It sounds crazy, I know, and you want her to fuck you now, while you're still 17-and-a-half, not save herself for marriage! But a Harvard study found that half of all teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until they marry have sex within a year. Harvard interviewed 14,000 virginity pledgers in 1995 and again in 1996 and 2001. "They ranged in age from 12 to 18," reports the Chicago Tribune. "[Researchers] found that 52 percent of those who said they had signed virginity pledges had had sex within a year."

Convince your girlfriend to take a virginity pledge, CA, and you'll have a 50/50 chance of getting into her pants. You may have to wait a whole year, but you can always mess around with one of those cheap and easy Catholic Scientologists while you wait.

I am a gay student at the University of Iowa and there's this one guy that I see as we pass each other on our way to and from classes. One day he caught me staring, which was fine, except that he seemed to take my stare as an "OMG, there's a handicapped person in a wheelchair!" He gave me a "fuck you" grimace. I wanted to scream, "No, it's not that! I think you're hot!" But I'm not sure if he is gay. I have horrible gaydar, which has caused me to chase after straight guys and kept me nice and virginal.

Every subsequent time seeing him has been a little better (we're up to friendly nods), but I don't know how to go up to him and engage him in a conversation that would let him know that I am interested in him and not some weird Christian trying to make him feel accepted so he'll join my bible-study group.

Waiting To Roll

I'm sure the guy in the wheelchair will be relieved to know that you're not some weird Christian who wants him to join your bible-study group, but instead a nice, normal gay boy who wants to pull him out of his chair and fuck the living shit out of him right there on the quad. That should come as a relief.

Look, WTR, you're going to have to grow a set. You've gone from stare-and-glare to nodding, but you're not going to get anywhere else if you don't have the balls to walk up to him and introduce yourself.

STRAIGHT RIGHTS UPDATE: I've been running around with my hair on fire trying to convince my straight readers that religious conservatives don't just hate homos. Their attacks on gay people, relationships, parents, and sex get all the press, but the American Taliban has an anti-straight-rights agenda too. As I wrote on March 23: "The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no lifesaving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're going to have those babies, ladies, and you're going to make those child-support payments, gentlemen. And if you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that's too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut."

After raising the alarm for months back here in the sex-ads section, I was intensely gratified to read Russell Shorto's brilliant cover story, "The War On Contraception," in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. To readers who think I'm being hysterical: So you don't think the religious right would seriously go after birth control? Fine, don't believe me. But maybe you'll believe Shorto when he lays out the American Taliban's plan to deny access to birth control—any and all types, folks, not just emergency contraception.

"In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex," Shorto writes. "Contraception, by [their] logic," Shorto continues, "encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality), and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage." Shorto quotes Judie Brown, president of the American Life League: "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion. The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set. So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception." And there's this from R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: "I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill… Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation."

I'll say it again, breeders: The American Taliban is not just opposed to straight premarital sex, with their abstinence education and hilariously ineffective virginity pledges, or gay sex, with their "ex-gay" campaigns and their anti-gay-marriage amendments. The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom—not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have—you need to read "The War On Contraception." And don't comfort yourself with the notion that these are just some anti-sex religious wackos: The Bush administration not only listens to these wackos, it appoints them to important positions all over the federal government—and let's not even think about the members of the American Taliban that Bush has already appointed to lifetime positions in the federal judiciary.

This is some serious shit, breeders. You're being attacked. It's time to fight back.

Got problems? Oh, yes, you do. Write [email protected]. Illustration by Misako Takashima (misakorocks.com)

© Dan Savage

 
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