RollingStone.com (of all media!) on The Young & the Sexless

Chastity makes a comeback. Purity is the new Lady and Gentleman for today's Christian young men and women. Rolling Stone lets the story tell itself. It's refreshing for any icon of MSM to do that.

What I found interesting was how Love and the gift of sexuality informed these young men and women's understanding of abstinence:

(one caveat. There is a brief excerpt of profanity. Normally, I don't include it in quotes from sources. It coarsens the language and deadens the heart. Here, however, it fits too well in context to exclude. It provides the antithesis of these young virgin's ideal of purity in straigh and certain terms. Please be advised, and don't let the kids see it! Please note that you've been advised. Proceed at your own risk.)

Food, in fact, is the opposite of sex among most Christian virgins. Food, after all, belongs to the material world. Sex, on the other hand, is supernatural. They read the biblical Song of Solomon -- lovers rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts like "two fawns" and her "rounded thighs like jewels"; she with his legs like "alabaster columns" and his lips like lilies, "dripping sweet-smelling myrrh" -- not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion strikes them as empty, even if love is involved. Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord. Without that, it's just fucking.

They grasp sex as the unique gift of love between man and women committed in lifelong love--marriage! This is counter-cultural by definition.

If they were Catholic, they could almost grasp the sacramentality of sex in this context. Man and woman share their complementarity with each other and unite in an embrace of love so self-giving that they literally become a part of each other and incarnate love and life. They become that living symbol of the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church! They co-create Holy ground.

The article also shows the diversity on abstinence that's found in the new Virgin scene:

Broadway views the Every Man books and Dobson's precise approach to sexual regulation (Dobson offers a ten-stage scale in which pretty much everything after stage one -- holding hands -- is off-limits) as bad theology. She doesn't want a sexuality that's controlled and contained, and after much consideration, she's decided that a sexless wet dream isn't very hot. Broadway longs for a chastity that isn't so much a denial of desire as its embrace. One of her favorite verbs is "savor," and she talks about sex like it's a food she is waiting for.
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The world, she says, is pulsing with sex. Some of it ugly; some of it, like the Song of Solomon, very beautiful; and most of it stupid and sad. Most people, she says, can't help but look at the world through what she calls the "flesh-colored lens." But Christians, she says, see a different reality. Like The Matrix, she claims. The Wachowski brothers' trilogy of women in black latex and men with big guns have become cult films to Christian conservatives, drawn by the Christ story at the movies' core, the search for "the One" - i.e., the Messiah. The fact that the series portrays the everyday world as not only in a state of decay but ruled by evil forces makes for an easy parallel to the theology of Christendom.

Ok. The Matrix Trilogy as "cult films to Christan conservatives"? I'm not sure if this is the writer's characterization of Ms. Broadways. Sure, there is a definite Christological theme that runs through the Matrix films, especially evident in the richness of the first film. But to call it a cult classic of the Christian conservative? Naahhh! Don't get me wrong, I liked the film. The metaphor and symbolism work for me. It even helps me to conceptualize the insidiousness of Evil in the world. Still, I haven't watched all three films in a dark, smoky basement decked out in my leather trenchcoats and shades while fast-drawing loaded 9MMs. None of my friends have, either. In short, we enjoyed the films, but we don't keep coming back to them. (Though there are those days when I marathon the first one. Plus, the invasion of Zion in The Matrix: Revolutions is just too nice!) Still, she presents a different interpretation of how to pursue abstinence, one that's in harmony with the young men previously interviewed but by no means the same.

If more and more young men and women witness to Christ through the testament of countercultural lives like these, then the sexual revolution may finally gasp it's last, dying breath. If Rolling Stone covers it, it's already making an impact in popular culture at some level. A Fool can hope that the fence-sitters on the issue of sex (those coarsed but unwilling participants, or those lured to participate) may give a fair hearing to other witnesses of Christ's Gospel on intimacy.