Winning the War on Chastity

I was overcome with a deep sense of pride when I read the Atlantic Monthly article about how adolescent girls are more apt than ever to engage in fellatio and that they don’t even consider it sex. This comes many decades too late for me, but I like to think that the small part I played in the War on Chastity back in the 1970s contributed to this glorious moment. The campaign that my cohort waged to convince the mothers of these girls that fellatio was (a) not sex and accordingly not Biblically prohibited and (b) not disgusting seems to have paid off. To the teenaged boys of America, I say “You’re Welcome”. No, don’t thank us. There is no need to publish tomes about our being the “real greatest generation”; just knowing that teenage fellatio has reached “epidemic” proportions is thanks enough.

You see, we never blamed the girls. They were simply victims of a massive propaganda campaign. It was the propaganda that we attacked; ideas versus ideas. I like to think that we convinced the girls of the righteousness of our cause and that, although they themselves never overcame the revulsion that the act incited, they decided to let their daughters decide for themselves.

The War on Chastity was particularly hard fought in the Bible Belt where I grew up. The “sexual revolution” had passed us by, and we were up against preachers that exhorted abstinence from all coeducational contact of any kind before marriage (and most contact after marriage). No dancing, no swimming together, no kissing, no nothing. We resolved to fight this tyranny using the Bible itself, and we became adept at Biblical scholarship and exegesis. We had to, or we would explode.

We were taught that thinking about a sin was just as bad as actually engaging in it, and this was an enormous hardship for libidinous teenage boys. We had already overcome the bogus prohibition against Onanism. Onan was smitten not because his seed was spewed on the ground per se; rather, he refused to impregnate his older brother’s widow as required by the Levirate. So auto-erotica was OK, but we had to solve the thorny issue of how to engage in it without sinning “in our hearts”. So we scoured the Good Book and came to the conclusion that adultery and fornication involved actual intercourse and that anything else was not sex, just “fooling around”. Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he denied having “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky.

Having solved this problem, it didn’t take long to extend this reasoning to activities with non-imaginary girls. As to fellatio, I never succeeded in my high school days in getting girls to grant me that favor to completion, despite my brilliant arguments. The disgust factor was too strong.