It's Never Too Late To Be a Virgin
It's never too late to be a virgin.
The New York Times
August 4, 2002
By ELIZABETH HAYT
WITH three months
to go before her wedding, Nicole Ratliff, 24, is deep into her prenuptial
regime. She exercises with a personal trainer so her arms will look buffed
in a strapless gown. She works on her tan to get rid of the swimsuit lines
across her shoulders. She exfoliates her face and guzzles 124 ounces of
water daily to hydrate her skin. And since July 26, three months to the
day before she will say, "I do," she has been abstaining from sex with her
live-in fiancé, David Crawford, and plans to continue until after they are
married.
"No more showers together,"
said Ms. Ratliff, a pharmaceuticals sales representative in Charlotte, N.C.
"No sleeping in the nude. We'll kiss, and that's it."
Ms. Ratliff said she
hopes that a period of abstinence will ensure that sparks fly during her
honeymoon in the Fiji Islands, and help clear her conscience about having
strayed from the expectations that her church and family hold about premarital
sex. "The closer you get to the wedding, and you're looking for a preacher
and a church, you start to feel guilty," she said of no longer being a virgin.
These days, a period
of "secondary virginity," as it is sometimes called, is increasingly the
norm for many brides-to-be across the South, an accommodation to the modern
reality of premarital sex and the traditional disapproval of it in the Bible
Belt.
Whether fresh out
of college or older, Southern women say the decision of when and how long
to stop having sex ‹ as little as a month or as much as a year ‹ has become
standard girl talk at sorority houses and bridal showers. "My daughter
has said to me that all her friends do this," said Cynthia Goodwin, a former
schoolteacher in her 50's who lives in Monroe, N.C. "Twenty-five years
ago, it may have happened, but we didn't talk about it."
Kim Burgess, 38, a
medical staff supervisor in Newnan, Ga., who married in May after abstaining
for a month, said: "It's nothing your mother teaches you, because you're
not supposed to be having sex. The holding out makes you feel like you've
been a good girl."
The practice seems
to have gained momentum over the past 5 to 10 years as an outgrowth of the
abstinence movements in sex education and evangelical Christian churches.
Delaying sex until marriage is the only sex-education practice taught in
55 percent of school districts in the South, according to a 1999 study,
compared with 20 percent of districts, for example, in the Northeast. "True
Love Waits," a campaign begun by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1993,
encourages teenagers and college students to sign abstinence pledges, and
it says that more than a million have done so.
"The campaign has
carried over to influence dating and courtship behavior of Southern couples,"
said Bradford Wilcox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University
of Virginia whose research focuses on the influence of religion on marriage
and cohabitation. "It has had success in delaying the onset of sex among
teenagers. It has also had an effect on people trying to rededicate themselves
to this kind of idea. When these couples go for premarital counseling, the
pastor suggests they do this."
Many conservative
Christian clergy members are asking couples to abstain. "More than
not, there's a sexual relationship," said Luke Witte, an evangelical Presbyterian
minister at Forest Hill Church in Charlotte. "I will ask them to cease and
desist until they're married. I won't marry a couple who is sexually active."
"There are biblical
reasons," he continued. "We're asked not to fornicate."
But not every clergyman
takes Mr. Witte's approach. As the Rev. Chuck Williamson, the minister at
another Charlotte church, Steele Creek Presbyterian, put it: "I assume that
most every couple who comes to me is sexually active. I don't advise them
about sex ‹ more marriage problems are due to money. I'll talk about the
importance of communication. If they are sexually active, it doesn't have
any moral standing to 'revirgin' themselves."
Sexual abstinence
is nothing new, of course: it is prescribed for Muslims from sunrise to
sunset during Ramadan, Roman Catholics during Lent and Orthodox Jews during
a woman's menstrual period. As a subject of popular culture, it dates to
the Aristophanes play "Lysistrata," in which the women of Athens go on a
sex strike to protest the Peloponnesian War, and it continues today, in
the recent movie "40 Days and 40 Nights," starring Josh Hartnett.
But a period of "secondary
virginity" for engaged couples seems to have caught on primarily in the
South. "The reason why these practices are more common in the South is that
Christianity is so strong in Southern culture," said Dr. R. Albert Mohler,
president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
"Abstinence has permeated beyond those in church life. It is not really
class-based, but is regionally emphasized where there are more conservative
Christians."
On top of that there
is the influence of the age-old myth of demure Southern womanhood, personified
by Melanie Hamilton in "Gone With the Wind."
"There has been this
tradition of putting a white woman on a pedestal," said Walter Edgar, a
professor of Southern studies at the University of South Carolina. "She
was supposed to be chaste and pure and worshiped from afar. Long before
the 20th century, this symbol justified the double standard, with the man
straying outside the marriage to slaves or prostitutes so he didn't inflict
his bestial desires on the Southern holy woman. The irony is, it used to
be totally abstinence until marriage. Now, this self-rejuvenating virgin
is an open admission that this isn't how the real world operates."
"I find the mental
gymnastics incredible," he added. "The horse is already out of the gate.
You're either a virgin, or you're not."
In June, as part of
a wedding celebration in Monroe, N.C., a Saturday luncheon was held for
the bridesmaids and out-of-town guests. Over fried chicken, biscuits and
iced tea, the conversation turned to temporary abstinence. "It's about being
prim and proper and perfect," said Lauren Ward, 23, the party's hostess,
who works as a nanny and is single. "It's an ideal we live up to. I've grown
up thinking that you're not supposed to sleep together, but since everyone
does, you stop when you get engaged for two to three months before the wedding.
I'll probably do it. Just for the tease."
"It's about guilt,"
countered the bridegroom's sister, 24, who ~ like the bridal couple and
their families ~ did not want to be identified to protect her privacy. "What
I think is so funny is that all these guys go along with it. It fulfills
their fantasy of marrying a Southern belle."
The bridegroom's mother,
a Pilates instructor in her 50's, said she thought it was ridiculous for
a bride to demand a period of abstinence. "Who ever had sex and then stops?"
she said. "The brides are cutting themselves off, too. It's presuming that
women don't enjoy sex. It's not a service they're providing for income.
If I were a guy giving a girl a diamond ring, and then it took a year to
plan the wedding and there was no sex, I'd take back the ring. It's a power
trip, but who gains anything?"
Women seeking secondary
virginity try to avoid temptation by doing things like giving up their nighttime
teddies for frumpy sweats, ordering boyfriends to sleep on the couch and
temporarily moving back in with Mom and Dad. Rhonda Webb Carroll, 33, a
stay-at-home mother in Newnan, Ga., said no to sex with her fiancé ‹ a widower,
35, with twin girls ‹ for seven months before their marriage last summer,
even though they were living together, sharing the same bed and raising
his two daughters. She refused to do anything more than kiss, and stopped
undressing in front of him.
To hear most of the
men tell it, they don't mind. "It was a mutual decision," said a medical
student in Birmingham, Ala., who didn't want his name used because he didn't
want his parents to know he and his wife had ever had premarital sex. "We
decided it would be better to hold off till the wedding night so it would
be new and exciting. We originally planned for eight weeks and then decided
it was too long, so we did it for four weeks. The wedding night and
honeymoon were definitely better."
But he added that
there was temptation along the way, especially after he and his fiancée
went out to dinner and had a few drinks.
One recent bridegroom,
an Army officer and graduate student in Atlanta, was the one who suggested
that he and his fiancée stop sleeping together six months before their wedding
last year. "With all the past relationships I had, sex always seemed to
be, in the end, this big focus," he said. "I thought it would be a positive
thing to try. There was a religious aspect to it. We didn't just view the
wedding ceremony as a social gathering, but a promise we'd made to each
other before God."
"Our wedding night
was really magical," said his bride, a medical student, who, like her husband,
insisted on anonymity. "All the good stuff about being intimate with someone
for the first time, with all the security of having a lifetime commitment,
made sex the way your parents said it should be."
Daye Walker, 28, a
pharmaceuticals sales representative in McKinney, Tex., who was married
two years ago, said that three months of chastity did more than just spice
up her wedding night. Married in Jamaica, she and her husband honeymooned
at a resort, spending time at a nude beach. "We would never have done that
had we not abstained," she said. "We wouldn't have been as risqué. We got
pregnant on the honeymoon. So the three-month lag worked. God works
in mysterious ways."
Copyright 2002 The
New York Times Company