RESPECT & VIRGINS [Sat, 2-24-18]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…

I later learned that I wasn’t the only one in our high school, but I was the only one who thought everybody else was one, too. Every other one assumed there were only two of us. I was the only one who actually wanted to be one. Well, I didn’t want to be one, either, but I thought I had to be one, for reasons that in this day and age seem quaint at best.

Well, that’s confusing. I’m talking about virgins, that is. Like the best olive oil in my case, extra-virgin.

All the other virgins of the male persuasion thought I should be the only one, but they couldn’t get any girls to cooperate with that plan, especially since this was way before the pill, and the only place you could secretly get a condom was from a dispenser in the men’s room in the restroom of the gas station at “the junction,” a place so undesirable that even Tommy Houchins wouldn’t go in there.

The virgins of the female persuasion were adequately horrified at the thought of being required to “go visit her aunt in California for a few months,” despite apparently universal horniness [Remember that I learned all this later.] So they simply hung out with me, because they knew that with me there would never even need to be a discussion about abortion. Long before Obama, I got all the female vote—class president three straight years. [1]

Don’t get me wrong. There were girls in our school who weren’t virgins, despite the fear of being cast as the BVM in the Christmas play, where they figured no one would buy that immaculate conception story again. [2]

Without NV [non-virgin] girls there wouldn’t have been so many NV guys. However, an equal number of girls and guys was not necessary to produce the same number of NVs of each persuasion, since some of the girls were like the anti-olive oil, extra-sluttish. Even some of them voted for me. As I said, I learned all this later.

Those were good days, when the most obviously male virgin in the whole school could get votes instead of insults. I wish kids today could experience that kind of atmosphere. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, which seems to be a perfectly good double-entendre reference for this discussion.

So talking with kids about sex these days needs to be focused not on abstention—because that just doesn’t work, as Sarah Palin’s family has proved over and over, and I say that sympathetically--but on respect, treating other persons not as objects to fulfill your personal desires but as real human beings.

In fact, teaching kids, and ourselves, about anything, it would be good to start, and end, with just being a respectful human being.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Actually not all that impressive. This was in the day that the first person nominated got elected because we all knew one another and were embarrassed to say we preferred someone else.

2] We had good names in my town back in the day, like Blue Minnis, which my wife said sounded like a disease, and Ima June Bugg, and most importantly in this footnote, a real Mary Christmas, with whom I shared a school bus.