Status Updates From Chastened: The Unexpected S...

(2/2) For some, chastity is inherently problematic, allied too closely with the notion that women want sex less than men. But here’s the thing: most of us do want sex less than men — a certain kind of sex that is. Plenty of men would rather not have that kind of sex either (253).

(1/2) What I am for is reinstating Chastity as an option, reclaiming it from the religious and political zealots, who are so adamantly for or against. Chastity belongs back of the mainstream as a valid form of sexual expression, as a positive, rather than negative, defined not by what it declines but by what it bestows: romance, sensuality, emotional intimacy (252).

Why is it so much more shocking to withhold sex in order to make a man love you than it is to go to bed with him, hoping against hope for the same outcome? Let’s face it, neither tactic is wise (252).

Clearly, understanding that “no” means no it’s not the same thing as feeling you have the permission or the safety to say it in the first place. We’ve lost any sense of healthy, emotional entitlement, leaving us with fewer and fewer reasons to say it (252).

(2/2) Yes, it works for some, but for the rest of us can feel as if equal rights as morphed into the right to the exact same things that men have — subtly but profoundly different from giving us the right to the things that we as women need (250).

(1/2) Our desire for, and right to, sex has been it into an enslaving necessity that has too many women making do, taking with they can get rather than holding out for what they might secretly yearn for: love (250).

Sex is becoming more and more of a performance… Blame it on the Internet, blame it on porn, blame it, if you like, on Internet, porn – but whatever the cause, this apparent need for external validation suggests that people are failing to fully and have it their own most intimate experiences (249).

It also told me about emotional self – efficiency. In a consumer society, our desire is constantly being manipulated…it’s our more intimate hankerings, too… In tuning out those subtle and not so subtle come ons, I have found within myself some of what I formerly looked to sex to provide. Ultimately, this makes relationships more fulfilling — you have more to offer as you get back will you put it (257).

If you hold back physically, I learned, it makes it easier to open up emotionally. There are some conversations that you feel too vulnerable to have naked; slow the pace, and you’ll find you can risk a little more candor… It takes the pressure off those bewitching early stages of relationship, and yes, it helps support the cards from the keepers(247).

My 20s had created a disconnect between what I hoped for from sex and what the men in my life seemed willing to offer. I had begun to doubt my own expectations, but those 12 chaste months reaffirmed my faith in romance, and taught me much else besides (246-247).

… Female desire, psychologists say, necessarily contains elements of narcissism. While men want women, women want to be wanted.

(1/2) I can see that before my vow—when it seemed to me that in obsessing ad nauseam about the men in my life, I was neglecting my own dreams and desires — this was its own form of self obsession. Having been flattered into bed, I would, from then on see men only in terms of their relationship to me…(241)

… All these wishes feel acutely physical, which is perhaps why I tended to confuse them with sexual urges. Sex did dull them — or appear to, but afterward, it would turn out only to have sharpened them (232).

(1/2) While sex can make you feel at one with your body…not having sex connects you to your body in a different way… I’ve become tune to other needs: the longing for true intimacy, the desire for a connection capable of enduring across distance and time, and aching loneliness that has nothing to do with sex, because it’s gripped me in the past with another sleeping just inches away… (232)

My vow has become… a child’s security blanket. It’s something I cling to — a reason to say no. Saying “oh, I’m on this crazy quest” is somehow a whole lot easier than explaining that you’d rather take things slower and get to know each other a little bit — than explaining what it is, you really want (231).

…Orgasms, it turns out, do not have a great deal to do with what I’ve been missing this past year… I’ve since craved [sex] erratically, but insistently, a deep hunger that makes every euphemistic cliché ring true. But it’s not that alone I’m looking for. It’s a fuller, or multidimensional experience. And the longer I hold out, the more determined I become to wait for it (231).

(2/2) Sex, you’d imagine, must be the only thing I absolutely want… Everyone agrees I must be longing for it to be over, and in someways, I am, but it’s a very mixed kind of longing. I want sex, but only in the right circumstances.There was a moment back in April… when I have settled for far less, but resisting has made me stronger (230).

(1/2) Want is something I’ve been wrestling with these past 12 months — the kind that can be seated in the kind that count, the point at which it intersects with something more enduring, something like need or Westshore love. In the context, I figured out what I don’t want, but I’ve yet to pin down what it is I do want (230)…

“In all enjoyment, there is a choice between enjoying the other, and enjoying yourself through the instrumentality of the other…“ Two people who tumble into bed together in such a way “do not meet as persons at all; their reality is lost. They meet as ghosts of themselves, and their pleasure is a ghostly pleasure that cannot begin to satisfy a human soul, and which only vitiates its capacity for reality.”

[Chasity] is about being true to yourself and frank about what it is you want. A social rule was no substitute — only emotional integrity couldn’t power of person to differentiate between a “mutual want” and true love, to resist “self – deception in the face of desire” (225).

This year of chastity has taught me many things about relationships, but it is also taught me how to be alone. I’ve always thought that was something I was good at, but I now see that so much of my energy back, then was spent in pursuit — of things, ideas, and, yes, man. Without sex, my relationships are at once less complicated, and more complex (224).

It’s tempting to reveal my own shocking, sexual status, but the conversation rushes on, while I’m still mulling it over. It’s right that I stayed quiet, I decide: Chasity has returned to me a sense of the private, of an inner space that is mine and mine alone.

(2/2) …So many of these lessons, rest on the notion that there are differences… In the way men and women, experience, sex, and that notion itself seems to have become the taboo.

(1/2) Much of what my chaste experience has shown me seems to fly directly in the face of feminist teachings… The idea that it’s more empowering to be the pursued rather than the pursuer, for instance. Or that as women, sex is something to use as a bartering chip, withholding it to win compliments, courtship, commitment…

Sex has been disguising something, and it’s only in the middle of the night, Midway across the Atlantic, that I’m finally forced to acknowledge it. Despite making the final base off-limits, I’ve never the less spent two–thirds of my chest year and pursuit of the emotional to turbulence that went with it. Perhaps it’s not my relationship with sex that is the problem, but my relationship with male attention.

Ellipses, pop culture has apparently manage to strip love from sex, but we still don’t really believe in love without sex. In a marriage, nonconfirmation remains ground for annulment in certain situations. Friendship has an escape sexualization, either (196).

I can see the sex was a distraction that allowed me to ignore pretty much everything else in my life that wasn’t quite well it should or could have been. I became fixated on relationships to the exclusion of friendships, family, or any sense of where I was headed. It wasn’t so much about the sex itself, but it was the sex that gave those affairs badly needed substance (196).

Intellectual, emotional nearness tends to be nurtured with time and care. Sex always stopped us and our conversational tracks. It made anything we tried to say, some trivial by comparison; it short-circuited friendship (155).

(3/3) Once you’ve unplugged the connection to your heart, how easy is it to reconnect them when you finally settle down? I’ve been desperately trying to keep the faith, I now realize, cling to the idea that sex is never just sex.

(2/3) it becomes hard, not to depersonalize it, not to notch up those shivery thrills as mirror, biology, as one body responding the way a body will. and yet those feelings, play a crucial role in love.