What in God's name

has gotten into all these abstinence nuts?

When Jami Waite graduated from high school this year in this northeastern Texas town, her parents sat damp-eyed in the metal bleachers of Bobcat Stadium, proud in every way possible. Their youngest daughter was leaving childhood an honor graduate, a band member, a true friend, a head cheerleader — and a steadfast virgin.

Maybe it's a sign of our society's total lack of self-control that the controlling adults believe the only way for the youth not to get drawn into temptation is to make a steadfast decision that "no, I will never do this."

JP really hates that kind of attitude. Repression is the mother of disastrous binge-style freedom. As we all grow up, the rules fade away. Quoth David Sedaris:

When I was young, we weren't allowed to say "shut up," but by the time [his brother] Paul reached his teens, it had become acceptable to shout, "Shut your motherfucking mouth." The drug laws had changed as well. "No smoking pot" became "No smoking pot in the house," before it finally petered out to "Please don't smoke any pot in the living room."

Most people reading this probably encountered the sheltered bombshells at their undergraduate institutions: The kid who starts fall semester saying he'll never drink and finishes it in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, for example. Rules for the sake of rules make you resent them; experience for the sake of experience at least allows kids to understand why some decisions are good ones (and should be repeated) and why others are bad ones (and should be avoided).

Example: When JP was growing up, he had a bedtime until he started high school. I don't remember when it was or why I didn't fight it to the death, but it was always there: I grew up going to sleep because there was a rule saying I had to. Now, JP has awful sleeping habits and trouble convincing himself that it is, in fact, time to go to bed. Why? I think it's because I never properly learned that you go to bed early because you don't want to be tired tomorrow: I learned to consider bedtime as an artificial rule, and now I break it constantly. Congratulations, me.

So, I guess I'm saying that strict abstinence isn't going to allow kids to develop a healthy relationship with sex. I'm not saying we should encourage every high schooler to be a slutbag, but, if you're dating someone for a year or whatever and want to try the horizontal polka, for fuck's sake, you should probably do it. If you don't, you'll end up resenting that rule in the future by breaking it in situations that you actually shouldn't.

At least this girl is cuter than the British one. Her choice not to have sex may actually cause her not to; the girl with the ring could choose to be a megahobag and her life would probably be exactly the same (minus one stupid little ring).