I just read The Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden. I agree with the message of this book entirely. I am 100% behind Dawn Eden not having sex before she gets married. I don’t think words can express how much I am in support of Dawn Eden’s abstinence lifestyle choice. Judging from the evidence in The Thrill of the Chaste, I am more certain that abstinence is the right lifestyle for Ms. Eden than I am of evolution, atomic theory, and the theory of gravity. Combined.
I am just slightly confused why she is generalizing from herself to all women. (No, I’m not.) So I will now present a guide to how to know if you, like Dawn Eden, would benefit from not having sex until you get married.
1) All you want is marriage. I mean, there are less effective husband-finding strategies than casual sex. Joining a nunnery. Complaining on Reddit that there are no good men left. Axe murder. And it’s certainly possible to find a spouse from casual sex (in fact, that’s how one of my boyfriends and his fiancee met). But most of the advantages of casual sex are things like “having sex with lots of attractive people.” If you’ve never daydreamed about a zipless fuck with the hot guy on the bus, you will probably not enjoy casual sex. Might I suggest a book club? You could meet lots of guys at a book club.
2) You don’t quite get the ‘casual’ part of casual sex. If you tend to have casual sex with people, make up personality traits about them, fall in love with the imaginary them in your head, and then be heartbroken when it turns out– surprise!– the casual sex was casual… yeah, Dawn Eden, you really shouldn’t have casual sex.
3) You can’t have casual sex without objectifying people. Ms. Eden says that casual sex is, to her, inherently objectifying. I am like “buh?” because I have had lots of casual sex and I do not generally treat my sexual partners like objects. You can treat someone like a person with desires and agency and a rich inner life, and still only see each other once a week for two hours of torrid fucking. In fact, that’s what makes casual sex better than a session with your favorite sex toy. Not even to get into the issue of “sex with friends” (which, by the way, is highly recommended). Turns out, you can hang out, get Chinese, talk about what sins the Slug God would damn slugs to the Pit of Eternal Salt for, and then fuck! Miracle of miracles!
4) You feel sick and bad and violated after sex. Life rule: you should absolutely never ever ever ever ever have sex that makes you feel sick and violated afterward. If you feel sick and bad and violated after any sex that isn’t with your life partner, because to you sex is something special and sacred and romantic, then you should absolutely not have sex with anyone other than your life partner. I and the rest of the Sex-Positive Mafia have your back here. (I was going to put something like “as long as you admit that other people don’t feel sick and sad and violated after casual sex” but you know what? Fuck that. Everyone has the right to not have sex that makes them feel violated. Even dickheads.)
The necessary corollary: any person who tries to get you to have sex that makes you feel sick and violated afterward is, at best, so much of an asshole that it is a wonder they manage to spew words instead of fecal matter. (In the worst-case scenario, of course, they’re a rapist.) Secure adults recognize that other people have different opinions about sex and that doesn’t mean that they’re bad, wrong, uncool, or somehow threatening to the validity of your sex life.
5) Casual sex makes you more attracted to players and less attracted to nice g… okay this point doesn’t even make any sense. I know lots and lots of people who have casual sex! All of them are nice people! I do not know why Dawn Eden finds it so difficult to find nice people who have casual sex. Are they all hiding in Florida? Maybe geeks are better at casual sex? (Ms. Eden does not like geeks very much: she reassures the reader that not every guy you meet at trivia night will be a geek and defines “fanboy” using Wikipedia as if fanboys are these strange exotic creatures normal humans never encounter.)
Honestly, I think the problem is that Ms. Eden’s definition of “nice guy” is entirely unrelated to actual niceness. Being a “nice guy,” in Ms. Eden’s world, seems to mean paying for dates, giving flowers, opening doors, and not wanting casual sex. It’s true that people you’re having casual sex with very rarely give you flowers and usually want casual sex. But I am unclear on why I should prefer that definition over the “treats people well and respects boundaries” definition.
I have a final two points that aren’t connected to anything but I’m just going to say them:
1) Dawn Eden really sucks at Christianity. She seems to view it as a sort of dating service. If she prays enough and is a good enough Christian, God will give her a husband. Apparently the Fruits of the Spirit got mistranslated and they actually ought to say “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and a really hot husband who’s sensitive yet also manly.”
Also she seems to think of volunteering as something Dawn Eden does to improve Dawn Eden’s own personal soul as opposed to, you know, the lives of people in need. While generally I’m in support of any motivation to get people to help people, Jesus is pretty clear on the “help people for its own sake” thing. Besides, people who help people to improve their own personal souls have a bad habit of doing things that make them feel warm and fuzzy rather than things that actually help.
2) OXYTOCIN ABUSE! That’s right, it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, the Hot Showers Game!
When a man or woman [takes a hot shower], a hormone called oxytocin is released into their bloodstream. In women, oxytocin is known as the “cuddle hormone,” because women’s oxytocin levels go up when they’re simply cuddling. For that reason, and also because it’s released in nursing mothers, oxytocin is believed to facilitate emotional bonding. If the hormone is released during [hot showers] and there’s no one with whom to bond, then of course one is going to feel bereft.
Bonus points to the first commenter who guesses what I replaced with “hot showers.”
Thing of Things 
“Bonus points to the first commenter who guesses what I replaced with ‘hot showers.'”
Eats some eggplant?
Confession: I love sex but I can’t wrap my head around casual sex on an etiquette level. How do I propose it? What does one do after? How do you make it Not Awkward?
Inquiring minds really want to know.
LikeLiked by 3 people
i love casual sex and i can’t completely wrap my mind around it on an etiquette level. i was raised in a very southern family, and although all but the trappings of that are obviously gone, i feel very weird about the fact that hookups don’t send each other thank-you notes afterward.
now that i live with my partner, it doesn’t really make sense to send a note, but i do say “thank you” for my orgasms.
LikeLiked by 4 people
This comment is wonderful and I want to make sending your fling a thank-you card a trend now. XD
LikeLike
“there are less effective husband-finding strategies than casual sex Axe murder” [citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybristophilia
LikeLiked by 1 person
There is the whole Yandere thing, but this sometimes leads to regret if pursued seriously.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Fun fact: I translated this strip from Russian a year ago:
http://nya.sh/pic/2690
LikeLike
OK but what sins would the slug God damn slugs to the eternal pits of salt for? Lettuce theft? Being the one who bites off the other slug’s penis during slug sex? (yeah, that’s an actual thing, Google it)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clearly, it’s eating Chinese food with too much MSG.
LikeLike
“Confession: I love sex but I can’t wrap my head around casual sex on an etiquette level. How do I propose it? What does one do after? How do you make it Not Awkward?
Inquiring minds really want to know.”
Bath houses. They are about as civilized a way as it gets. The rules are simple and respectful.
You make the proposition simply by showing interest and you turn it down simply by not returning it. Since the understanding is that people go to bath houses to have sex, there is no reason to shame anyone propositioning you – it makes you look like an idiot. The Little Miss Hard-To-Get ploy is sneered at in a bath house. But while being in a bath house may mean you are saying you want to have sex, but it absolutely does not mean that you want to have sex with just anyone who shows an interest. And it also doesn’t mean once you start you are obligated to go all the way to orgasm, not at all you can stop any time, just by saying thanks to the other guy. And he’s an asshole if he quibbles, and can get thrown out if he refuses to get the message.
That means you can have very brief encounters, hand sliding along a thigh, down a chest, and the move on. The encounter can be quite anonymous, or not, or even kind impersonal, and that’s what the glory holes are for.
So you learn to ask graciously, reject graciously and accept rejection graciously. And no one is interested in hearing your judgments on anything or anyone.
There is a little dance of exchanging phone numbers, but it’s more to say that you really enjoyed the fling than that you actually ever want to get together again. it took me a while of returned calls to figure this out, but no harm done. Phone number or not, bath houses are rarely where you meet a life partner.
Although that is exactly how I met mine. Fifteen years this May.
Sorry straight people. I doubt you will ever develop anything similar.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Did you mean to reply to ninecarpals?
“Sorry straight people. I doubt you will ever develop anything similar.”
😦
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh God no. If she were straight, that would be way too snarky to say directly.
LikeLike
@Ginkgo
Between this and your other comment I should probably clarify: I’m a trans man, not a trans woman, so the difference between me and a cis gay man wouldn’t be all that obvious in some cases.
LikeLike
I think I read recently that gay bath houses were disappearing, is that true?
Also, I wonder why there’s never been an equivalent for straight people. I know straight men would love it. I guess you have swinger clubs, but all the men and most of the women present are coupled.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thankfully not straight, but I am trans, and that’s enough for me to be cautious. Any advice there?
LikeLike
You have very, very good reason to be cautious. The danger you face is an order of magnitude greater than a gay man approaching a straight man faces, if only because the situation is clear from the outset and can be escaped before it escalates.
LikeLike
Riffing off the last comment, I am actually quite impressed with how gay men handle flirting and such. Which, I mostly hang out at dance clubs and queer fetish events and things like that, so I am no doubt seeing a particular cross-section of gay men, but still. I like how open they are about their attraction. I like how *easily* they seem to handle rejection.
There is a certain level of cattiness. I do from time to time get an eye roll when I smile at a man. (Which, I guess there is no point in explaining to such men that I am not cruising, I just like to smile, and that actually I mostly like women and if I ever did get a man to come home with me he would likely get annoyed with the cuddling. But never mind.)
Anyway, I’m not saying it’s perfect, cuz obvi. But it seems to work well. Yay gay men!
(Lesbian spaces are much harder for me to navigate, for all kinds of reasons. Probably cuz I’m a lesbian.)
I’m not sure if this *could* work as well in straight spaces. There’s just too much impedance mismatch between women and men.
LikeLike
“There’s just too much impedance mismatch between women and men.”
I think this explains why there are no straight bath houses. There is still the question of why there are no lesbian bath houses.
“Riffing off the last comment, I am actually quite impressed with how gay men handle flirting and such. Which, I mostly hang out at dance clubs and queer fetish events and things like that, so I am no doubt seeing a particular cross-section of gay men, but still. I like how open they are about their attraction. I like how *easily* they seem to handle rejection.”
A gay by is going to internalize so much rejection just growing up around straight guys that it isn’t going to be much of a heavy lift later on.
On the cattiness, it is so much a thing that clubs are age-sorted and tribe-sorted. If a smooth young guy is into bears, he is going to have to go to a bear club because those guys will never hang out in the kind of dance clubs those smooth young guys frequent.
Playing hard to get – “peek and pose” – is ridiculed (if gently) rather than celebrated.
LikeLike
Estrogen libido is different from testosterone libido. Which, trust me. I’ve done both.
On the other hand, there are lesbian fetish groups. Plus I’ve been to a few all-women sex parties, so it does happen. That said, it’s very different from bathhouse culture — near as I can tell. (I’ve never actually been to a bathhouse. I wouldn’t know what to do!)
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Also she seems to think of volunteering as something Dawn Eden does to improve Dawn Eden’s own personal soul as opposed to, you know, the lives of people in need. While generally I’m in support of any motivation to get people to help people, Jesus is pretty clear on the “help people for its own sake” thing.”
Right, but Dawn Eden’s perspective on this is literally the predominant view of Christian theology over history including the present. So to the extent that Christianity is “the way of life practiced by Christians,” she’s really good at it.
I agree that it’s a complete inversion of the gospel, but watchagonnado.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This. I swear that was EXACTLY what Jesus was warning the Pharisees about! They’re basically doing one of the biggest things Jesus was sent to stop.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If Jesus wanted people to be more concerned with others and less concerned with their souls not sacking, he shouldn’t have told people that he would torture them forever if their souls sucked.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah. One time, back when I debated this sort of stuff (it was part of the whole “finding out who I am” process), I was talking to a Christian who believed all the usual stuff about how if they didn’t have Jesus and God, they wouldn’t have any reason not to rape and murder people.
I tried to explain that the core of the gospel message was NOT a set of rules on how to live, but rather, a request that people start valuing certain things (e.g. love thy neighbor). I explained that if you actually loved your neighbor, you wouldn’t need Jesus to tell you not to murder your neighbor. You wouldn’t want to murder your neighbor in the first place. So if Jesus turned out not to be real, your point of view on murdering your neighbor wouldn’t change, because nothing about you or your neighbor would have changed.
This got nowhere. I tried an analogy about flying kites- Imagine that you are dating someone who loves kites. So you go kite flying with them all the time. Then you break up. If you valued kite flying, you might keep doing it. If you only valued your date and were flying kites only to spend time with them, you’ll probably stop.
Nothing I said made any impact. I’ve had this conversation a few times; its always like I’m speaking a foreign language.
LikeLiked by 4 people
>I swear that was EXACTLY what Jesus was warning the Pharisees about! They’re basically doing one of the biggest things Jesus was sent to stop.
This happens – and has happened, historically – all the damn time in Christianity. It’s amazing.
LikeLike
Christian here – my personal opinion is that both are true.
Christ calls us to minister to the needy both because (1) the needy need help (and everyone is needy), and (2) because it’s good for the person doing ministry – that connections to other people and charitable service are good for the servant as well as the served.
I agree it’s a trap to stereotype the poor (or Christians, or probably Pharisees, barring an implied no-true-Pharisee codicil), but IMHO xians do as well as most other mortals at trying to help people, and as badly.
LikeLike
“people you’re having casual sex with very rarely give you flowers”
i beg to differ
LikeLiked by 1 person
>Bonus points to the first commenter who guesses what I replaced with “hot showers.”
I bet it has something to do with slugs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was thinking recently about the arguments made by Catholic abstinence programs. So many of them seemed to show premarital sex as the result of emotional manipulation. The boogeyman was a boyfriend saying “If you really loved me you would have sex with me.” Theology of the Body portrays Christians as the only ones who see this as bad behavior. They consistently gave the impression that casual sex only happened in the context of lies and objectification. If the Catholic image of premarital sex was accurate, then of course it would be something to avoid. It wasn’t until after deconverting and learning about sex positivity that I realized that the rest of the world called this behavior “abuse” and agreed that it was shitty.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I can’t help but think that this disproves Ozy’s post a few posts back about what objectification really means and how it is totally not “feminists hate your boner”. It apopears that this person did, indeed, interpret objectification to mean that one should hate the female equivalent of a boner. (I suppose you could say that she didn’t blame it on feminism, but it seems clear that she has internalized ideas about objectification that come from *somewhere*. And feminism seems to be the ultimate source of that idea.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have no idea why you’d think feminism was the ultimate source of that idea; it’s much, much older than first-wave feminism. People didn’t use the word “objectification” for it back in the day, but the idea that men can’t respect women who have casual sex with them goes back a long, long, long way.
LikeLike
Okay. So replace “ultimate source” with “the major immediate soirce”. I’ll admit this is one of the areas where feminists are saying things that are similar to things that the right says or used to say, only dressed up in new language. Compare feminist opposition to porn (which is also associated with “objectification”). But I’d suggest that if someone phrases it as “objectification”, she’s probably heard about it from feminists and the left, or by people who have absorbed teachings that trace back to feminists and the left, even if the feminists themselves also got it from somewhere.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dude, you Kant be serious.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m pretty sure Ozy – or at least past!Ozy – would say that this was Dawn Eden misinterpreting feminists, the same as the people mentioned in that post.
However, there are actual feminists who make the same misinterpretation, so I’m not sure if present!Ozy would make the same generalizations.
LikeLike
> If you’ve never daydreamed about a zipless fuck with the hot guy on the bus…
This may be a stupid question, but what exactly is a “zipless fuck” ? How is that different from a regular fuck ? Does it involve compression algorithms, or possibly eggplant, in any way ?
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s Googlable, but to sum it up in the words of Erica Jong, who coined the phrase: “The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ozy, is this an old post? You seem to be dismissing what you said in your Anti-Heartiste FAQ. See Jerks number 5 (If women don’t like assholes, how come assholes have more sexual partners?)
LikeLike
I think Ozy said a while back that all their posts for the next month or two would be reruns of old posts from a previous blog that was deleted.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh! So these could be old ideas ze has rejected?
LikeLike
From the title of this post alone, I assumed that “Dawn Eden” was the name of some kind of hypothetical utopia, not the name of a person.
LikeLiked by 2 people
>I am 100% behind Dawn Eden not having sex before she gets married. I don’t think words can express how much I am in support of Dawn Eden’s abstinence lifestyle choice. Judging from the evidence in The Thrill of the Chaste, I am more certain that abstinence is the right lifestyle for Ms. Eden than I am of evolution, atomic theory, and the theory of gravity. Combined.
>I am just slightly confused why she is generalizing from herself to all women. (No, I’m not.)
OK, so … I haven’t read “The Thrill of the Chaste”, nor shall I ever do so, but is this a fair dismissal of it?
It seems to me that it would be typical-minding right back to dismiss someone saying “hey people, casual sex can suck, here are reasons you might not want to do it and being chaste can actually be awesome” as a weirdo who could only possibly be referring to some strange emotions only they feel.
I mean, if this a real thing people feel, then isn’t this book a valuable source of information to people who might go “yeah, that’s me!” – who may well constitute a sizeable majority of the population?
I just feel like this is unfairly dismissing a list of common failure modes of casual-sex-culture with “these never happened to me, so they can’t possibly mean promoting casual-sex-culture as it currently stands is a bad idea.”
>Bonus points to the first commenter who guesses what I replaced with “hot showers.”
Sex, one assumes. No, wait, “orgasms” and “orgasm”.
Do I win a prize?
But, um, whether or not this is attributable to oxytocin – which is hardly a mistake you can blame the author for, considering how often “scientific” publications promote it – are you implying people aren’t designed to bond with their sex partners?
Because that … doesn’t really seem to fit with the evolutionary biology involved. Humans’ mating strategy is kind of centred around pair-bonding and long-term childrearing based on that.
LikeLike
Ozy’s post literally says,
Now, maybe the tone is sarcastic. I’m not sure. But the literal meaning is that not only do people like Ms Eden exist, there might even be some of them among Ozy’s readers! That’s a far cry from implying that Eden is a unique weirdo.
LikeLike
Did you actually read Ozy’s post? Where she repeatedly says that if you dislike casual sex or have had bad experiences with casual sex, then you are absolutely right not to have casual sex?
LikeLike
I totally buy flowers for my casual sex partners.
LikeLike
But what if you get turned on by feeling sick and bad and violated? Not that you *like* it, exactly, but a few weeks later you get really turned on thinking about how sick and bad and violated you felt, and then you regularly masturbate to that thought for the next several years, and eventually start planning ways that you can feel that awful again. Except it’s kind of hard to feel violated by something you planned, and although you come close, you can never really recapture that original feeling.
LikeLike
We interrupt this program for the following probabilistic hygiene advisory from the Surgeon General.
(The Surgeon General:) “It may appear at first glance as if the statement I am more certain [of X] than I am of evolution, atomic theory, and the theory of gravity is strengthened by adding, Combined. However, this addition actually makes the statement weaker. For example, consider the following three statements:
“I am more certain of X than I am that Linda is a feminist.
“I am more certain of X than I am that Linda is a bank teller.
“…Combined! I am more certain of X than I am that Linda is a feminist bank teller!
“Although it may superficially seem as if third of these statements is stronger than the first two statements, it is in fact implied by either of them.”
You may now return to your scheduled discussion of casual sex.
LikeLiked by 2 people