The summer after the sixth grade I went to one of those Christian summer camps, one with workshops on various topics throughout the week. On one of the days there was a workshop on relationships, a.k.a. the sex talk day (strange how the two are often seen as the same thing in Christian circles).

The speaker decided to begin the talk with an illustration. He pulled out a rookie Michael Jordan basketball card worth about a $1000 and asked if anyone wanted it. Every hand went up, including mine.

Now, I was not a huge basketball fan or really much into sports cards (I had a few that had been given to me), but there was one athlete I really liked: Michael Jordan. In fact, my favorite basketball card was of another player just because it had half of Michael Jordan in the picture on the front. I had no interest in selling the card; I just really wanted a card of my favorite player. But just my luck, another boy was called up to receive the card.

Just as the boy reached the front, the speaker addressed the audience, “I am going to give this to you, but let me just take a little for myself first.” He took the card and ripped a small piece off from the corner before handing the rest of the card to the boy.

As most know, this completely destroyed the economic value of that $1000 basketball card. The young boy, saddened by the lost of his prize, returned to his seat. The speaker went on to talk about the importance of our virginities. No matter what else he said, the message of his illustration was clear: if you lose your virginity, you are worthless.

This is the message about sexuality that pervades Christian culture. Youth are told that the key to maintaining one’s purity is preserving one’s virginity until marriage. Growing up, we are supposed to pray for our future spouse, that he or she might “keep pure,” for the highest good is that both are virgins on that special wedding night.

Our virginity is a gift that should be presented, unstained, to our husband or wife, because “wouldn’t it be sad if you didn’t have that gift to give?” And this issue is even a bigger deal for women, whose virginity is so strangely tied to self-worth. Indeed, in the not so distant past, a woman’s virginity was considered her virtue.

But there is something seriously wrong with this view of sexuality. First of all, there is a problem with the idea of virginity at all. Virginity, the state of never having had sex, is something that once lost can never, by definition, be restored.

However, Christians hold the belief that Christ redeems all things. Therefore, if something cannot be redeemed, it is not a thing, at least not in a Christian’s understanding. So, virginity has no value since Christ’s complete redemption will not restore it. It has no consequence to the life of a Christian. How could it, it stands in total opposition to a gospel that speaks of forgiveness and new birth?

There are no permanent marks in the Christian faith save the wounds of Our Savior. How could the loss of virginity ever contend with the nail marks in his hands or the spear piecing in his side?

What is more, virginity is a legalistic concept. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the question, “Am I still a virgin if we only…?” There is constantly a questioning of how far is too far before one’s virginity is lost. And there has to be: anything that so absolutely and incurably separates the innocent from the “slut” has to be legalistic.

But does not God look at the heart, at the intention that causes the action? Virginity pays no heed to intentions, and so it cannot really be a marker of holiness. It can only be a cause of pride for the one who has and shame for the one who does not. This is why virginity is simply not important.

But, one might argue, if we don’t think of virginity as important then we will all engage in promiscuity. There is a flaw in that thinking: virginity is not the opposite of sexual promiscuity, chastity is. Chastity is the virtue of turning one’s sexuality towards love. It is a holistic virtue that actively seeks to bring the full sexual dimension of one’s being into self-giving love. Chastity can, if lost, be fully restored just like honesty, courage, and all other virtues. The loss of chastity leaves no permanent stains.

With chastity we need no longer be concerned with absurd and hurtful questions such as, “Am I still a virgin if I am raped?” Your chastity can never be stolen from you, for it is something you actively do. Your chastity is a declaration of love, not a history of past actions.

God has not given you your sexuality to be a burden that you fearfully hope to guard against any taint until you can get to marriage. Instead, God has given your sexuality to you so that you might more fully give yourself in love.

Understanding chastity, it is clear that it is wrong to use our sexuality for selfishness. That is why sex can only be truly loving within marriage, for only within marriage can one’s sexuality be given totally, freely, fruitfully, and faithfully in sex. In this way chastity, unlike virginity, should be preserved even within marriage. Whether married or unmarried, we are all called to direct our sexualities towards love, but only in marriage can this self-giving truly manifest itself in the act of sex.

It is this understanding of the meaning of our sexualities that not only speaks of love but of grace as well, that helps us move beyond the shame and guilt that is brought by seeing our sexualities through the lens of virginity. Our identity should not be in our sexual histories. We should not strive to be virgins until married, as though we trade one identity for another. Rather, we should find our identity in being lovers loved by God, in which chastity is one part of the love we express for all creation and its Creator.

As I left that auditorium after the talk on “relationships” that day, I looked down one of the aisles. On the floor lay that Michael Jordan rookie card, crumpled and ripped, left for the trash. What value could that boy see in it when society told him it was now worthless? I almost walked over and picked it up – it was still a Michael Jordan card after all – but I noticed other kids standing behind me and got embarrassed. How I wish I had picked up that card that day! I have long since gotten rid of all my other sports cards, but that card would have stayed with me. It would have stood as a testament to the redemptive work of Christ who restores all things.

For it is Christ who makes us completely whole again that we might love fully without shame. This is why virginity is not important, but chastity is: because in Christ the old has gone, the new has come, we are a new creation, created in Christ Jesus to give ourselves in love as he did. That is our identity. That is what really matters.

This post was written by Stephen Kenyon of George Fox Universtiy.  For the original article, go to:  http://www.gfucrescent.com/why-virginity-is-not-important-but-chastity-is/

BE HOLY.
BE A MAN.

There is a storm coming. I can feel it as I stand on a street corner in south London, thinking about my daughters. Lily and Rose are both 11 years old. One is crazy about dogs, the other loves owls.

They are at that tender age when the hormones have begun to stir, and they could be stomping around the room like furious teenagers one minute but snuggling up for a cuddle the next.

The girls are fast approaching 13, the age that Chevonea Kendall-Bryan was when she leaned out of one of the windows on the fourth floor of a block of flats on this street. A boy she knew was down here on the ground, but this was not Romeo and Juliet. Far from it.

Chevonea had been pressurised into performing a sex act on him, and he had shared a phone clip of her doing so with all his mates. She threatened to jump from the window if he did not delete it. Then she slipped and fell 60 feet to the ground, dying from massive brain injuries.

Her mother says she will now campaign against what is happening to young girls in our society. They are certainly under extreme pressure, having to cope with a world more brutal, more demanding and far more overtly sexual than anything their parents knew.

"Never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault – from ads, alcohol marketing, girls’ magazines, sexually explicit TV programmes and the hard pornography that is regularly accessed in so many teenager’s bedrooms,” says the psychologist Steve Biddulph, currently touring the country to promote a book called Raising Girls.

It is a follow-up to his best-seller Raising Boys – and they are under pressure too, being led to believe that girls will look and behave like porn stars. Our children are becoming victims of pornification.

“It is usually girls who are on the receiving end of some pretty degrading stuff,” says Claire Perry MP, who has just been appointed David Cameron’s special adviser on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. “We’ve got young girls being asked to write their names on their boobs and send pictures. Parents would be really shocked to know this is happening in pretty much every school in the country. Our children are growing up in a very sexualised world.”

So this is the storm my girls will soon face. I can already hear the rumblings. For their sake, I want to know, how bad is it? How widespread? I ask to speak to Mrs Perry, and while I’m waiting for the call back I read a report by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which suggests it is very bad indeed. Researchers who carried out an in-depth study of the lives of pupils at two London schools in 2010 say that year eight was when they began to feel confused and overwhelmed by sexual expectations and demands.

Claire, who must be 12 or 13, is quoted as saying of the boys in her class: “If they want oral sex, they will ask every single day until you say yes.”

Kamal, a boy in the same year, says: “Say I got a girlfriend, I would ask her to write my name on her breast and then send it to me and then I would upload it on to Facebook or Bebo or something like that.” The profile picture on his phone, seen by everyone to whom he sends messages, is an image of his girlfriend’s cleavage. Some of the boys at his school have explicit images of up to 30 different girls on their phone. They swap them like we used to swap football cards. If they fancy a girl, they send her a picture of their genitals. As one teenage girl said after the report came out, sending pictures of your body parts is “the new flirting”.

Boys have always tried their luck, but now they have the technological means to apply pressure, on phones with cameras and messenger networks that no adult ever sees.

Chloe Combi, a former teacher who began her career in “a pretty posh school”, has written in the Times Educational Supplement about when it goes further: “The hardest conversation I’ve ever had was with a distraught, confused man of about 45. I had to explain to him that we had to exclude from school his seemingly non-abused, non-disturbed, well-loved daughter because she had been caught administering fellatio to a line of young men in the boys’ toilets for cash.”

Ms Combi went on: “A friend of mine, who teaches at another school (much more posh than mine) said that it had got so bad they had to go on patrol every lunchtime to prevent similar incidents.”

What is the cause of all this? We need more research, the experts say. But to a dismayed parent, it seems like the horrific result of a massive experiment. Thanks to the internet, our boys and girls are the first children to grow up with free, round-the-clock access to hardcore pornography. Porn has become part of the adult mainstream, colouring everything from advertising to best-selling books like Fifty Shades of Grey. Of course our children are affected.

Diane Abbott, the shadow public health minister, said last week: “I want to highlight what I believe is the rise of a secret garden, striptease culture in British schools and society, which has been put beyond the control of British families by fast-developing technology, and an increasingly pornified British culture.”

It starts young, with pencil cases that carry the Playboy bunny logo and Bratz dolls that look like they have just finished a shift at a strip joint. High-heeled shoes are sold to girls at the age of eight, along with knickers bearing slogans that on an adult would be meant to sound saucy. Campaigns by concerned groups like Mumsnet only stop products like these for a while, until new ones are pushed out.

The pop industry, which aims at hooking kids before they hit puberty, teaches little girls to bump and grind. I’m not a prude, but I have been called one for asking why a 10-year-old was copying the moves in a video in which Rihanna prowls like a dominatrix and sings, “Come on rude boy, boy, can you get it up? Come on rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”

Working backwards, Rihanna is inverting the more extreme imagery used by some male hip hop stars, whose videos effectively show women as sex slaves. They, in turn, offer a polished version of the behaviour in hardcore porn, which is only a click away, on imitations of YouTube.

It’s not hidden behind a paywall, it’s free. And you don’t even have to claim to be 18 to watch it. This is not the cheesy porn on the newsagent’s top shelf, which was all we could get our hands on when I was a boy. The extreme, violent stuff our children can see so easily now would make a Seventies porn star blush. Or throw up.

The ubiquity of such material has shifted the understanding of what is normal. Three-quarters of teachers surveyed for the TES last year said they believed access to porn was having a “damaging effect” on pupils. One said girls were dressing like “inflatable plastic dolls” while another said some pupils “couldn’t get to sleep without watching porn”.

However, there is also disturbing evidence that hardcore pornography has become so commonplace that some children see it as “mundane”. The pioneering NSPCC study in 2010 found that watching professional porn was seen by boys as a sign of desperation. They would rather watch – and circulate – home-made porn shots on phones with girls they knew.

This is part of the phenomenon called sexting, the exchange of sexual messages or images by text, smartphones and social networking sites. Chevonea Kendall-Bryan was a victim of it, and worse. She had been bullied by boys since the age of 11, a coroner heard earlier this month. At 13, she was forced to perform a sex act on an 18-year-old after a party. A boy of 15 later demanded the same treatment – or he would smash the windows of her south London home. When she obeyed, he filmed her on his phone and shared the clip around her school.

Sexual pressure can cause girls to contemplate suicide, self-harm, develop eating disorders, or try to lose themselves in drugs or alcohol. But does sexting only happen in the most troubled inner-city schools? No, says Prof Andy Phippen of Plymouth University, who led his own research in Cornwall, Somerset and Devon. “I’ve been into all kinds of schools – including inner city, rural and semi-rural – and I can’t remember a single one where sexting was not an issue,” he says. “It’s not a class thing either. I visit elite schools, and the kids there talk about it just as much.”

However, it is important to say that children may be telling the truth if they insist they have never come across it. Estimates of those affected range from 15 to 40 per cent of pupils, depending on where you are. And when I speak to Claire Perry, she admits: “The answer is we don’t know. I think it is a growing problem. My sense is that even in the nicest, leafiest part of the country, this is something that children are doing.”

Hadn’t we better find out? “Yes. That is why it is good that the debate is happening. Bullying has always taken place, but technology means we have given our children a space where there are no adult eyeballs watching. We have to do something about that. I expect there will be lots of difficult conversations this weekend.”

Over the past few days, she has been accused of being a snooper, after suggesting that parents should read their children’s texts and emails. “If your child was going out with somebody you thought was taking drugs, you would feel you had the right to intervene. Somehow, we don’t feel we have the right to do that in the online world. We are on the back foot. But I think that this week’s reaction shows that parents do want to be able to do this.”

Her first job, though, is to focus on the internet. Last year, Mr Cameron backed an “opt-in” system to block adult content on home computers. The idea has now been dropped, however. A consultation showed that the majority of people thought it too draconian, admits Mrs Perry – but she is now working with internet service providers on a series of changes, including a block on adult content on public Wi-Fi. In the home, customers will have to verify that they are over 18 and want access to adult content, or else restrictions will apply. “You will have to say, 'I don’t want that filter.’ Once we have this, we will lead the world in online child safety.”

All of which is fine, except it won’t do a thing about sexting. In any case, technologically savvy boys like my 15-year-old will find a way round it if they want to. Of course, he will seek out pictures of people having sex. Boys do. I’m just scared of the effects of the tsunami of hardcore he must see any time he tries. As Claire Perry says: “Porn is a terrible sexual educator and that is not where our children should be getting their information.”

As for his sisters, I shudder. I don’t want them to live in a world in which romance means boy meets girl, boy sends a picture of his genitals. Lily and Rose are not their real names, by the way. I’m that afraid of their being drawn in. We clearly need to talk, awkward as it may be.

As adults, we also have to be clear where the blame lies. I’m reminded of that as I travel home to hug the girls, and a text arrives from a 14-year-old friend of the family. Responding to the call to talk about the pressure she’s under, she texts: “DON’T bash the kids. We don’t sell porn. Grown-ups do. YOU FIX IT!!!!”

This post was written by Cole Moreton.  The original source can be found at:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/9828589/Children-and-the-culture-of-pornography-Boys-will-ask-you-every-day-until-you-say-yes.html

BE HOLY.
BE A MAN.