Vow of Celibacy

Here's a counter-argument to the proponents of abstinence-only sex education: the strip of condoms I found in my dresser drawer that are, as of today, past their expiration date, and the profound wave of unfulfilled, celibate depression that washed over me as I threw them out. They're not fish, you know — they have a lifespan of years, apparently. Even counting that Summer of Mono, I still had fifteen hundred nights, mornings, and lunch hours of potential carnality wasted.

I should've taken one of those virginity pledges with my church back in my younger days, before I turned jaded — apparently a sexless quarter-century will do that to you — and when it was okay to have sex with anything, regardless of whether it was inanimate. The virginity pledge route would've been a win-win for me: seventy-five percent chance I'd get laid, and if that fails, when I get to the Pearly Gates, I could tell Saint Peter, "I may have raped the earth and shown antipathy and callousness to my fellow man, but at least I kept my virginity oath." James Dobson says that's what counts. "So, Pete. There any loose women here in heaven?"

And there'd have to be, cause otherwise it wouldn't be heaven, would it?

Not that the opportunity hasn't quite presented itself — once. I was hesitant. I could get pregnant. The pill's ninety nine point nine nine seven percent effective. I knew all the erotic stats, plus in ninth-grade health, they showed us that Lifetime movie where the teenagers do it and there are Consequences. You know the one: Dermot Mulroney gets that late eighties' chick knocked up and she tells him and he's totally like, "I thought you couldn't get pregnant the first time," and the whole entire sex ed class bursts out laughing because even if you didn't know that you could get pregnant the first time, what kind of wishful-thinking dumbass would you have to be to say with a straight face that you thought you couldn't get her pregnant the first time. It's this constant being talked down to that turns young people to... well, drugs.

But our health teacher was — clearly not too squeamish — but too busy promulgating her paranoid Wilson Bryan Key theories to warn me that condoms are lubricious. Rip it out of the package (teeth help!) and the damn thing slips across the bed. Maybe I wasn't ready then and I needed a minute to get used to the idea of rubber condom grease all over my cock, like I'd been eating fried chicken and ribs off of it.

Bad metaphor.

Abstinence by default, the overwhelming sense of sexual hibernation, now fills me with disenchanted deadness. Purposelessness, in an evolutionary manner at least, watching the world slowly populated by Tom and Katie's crazy Scientologist alien children. Pining, the whole lubrication thing — and yes, I know, it's a convenience for (I guess) her pleasure — now seems trivial, and I'd die to slather my dick in lard and spermicide, maybe disinfectant, and just have a big old life-affirming slobbering food fight with some girl's vagina slime.

Worse metaphor.