Here’s a side of the Clinton administration you probably don’t remember. Just a few months into Bill Clinton’s second term, the federal government announced a major initiative to fund abstinence-only sex education.
As the L.A. Times reported back in March of 1997, Clinton’s administration allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to programs teaching that sex before marriage is, “likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” The Clinton-funded programs also taught that abstinence from premarital sex is, “the expected standard” of human behavior. That’s worth repeating: The Clinton administration said that abstaining from sex before marriage is the “expected standard” of human behavior.
That may sound surprising now, for obvious reasons. This was not exactly an administration that led by example on this front, or any other front. But at the time, especially in that pre-Lewinsky period, it wasn’t a particularly shocking move. From Reagan’s administration onward, there had been significant bipartisan support in Washington for teaching young people to wait until marriage before having sex. Democrats and Republicans agreed on this point: Hookup culture spreads disease and ultimately makes people unhappy. It wasn’t especially controversial, really.
As recently as 2010, CNN was running segments about how abstinence-education was effective. Watch:
You won’t find many reports like that on CNN anymore. Do a quick search of their website, and you’ll learn that abstinence-only education is “not evidence-based.” The science shifted, apparently, as we’ve seen so often.
Indeed, around the year that report aired — 2010 — federal funding for abstinence-only education began to wane under the Obama administration. Donald Trump brought it back to an extent. Then the Biden administration limited this funding again, though not as much as many Leftists were hoping.
Throughout all of this back-and-forth, pretty much the only group that’s remained consistent have been Christian conservatives. We’ve warned, for decades, that hookup culture will create many catastrophic problems in society. We promoted chastity and abstinence before marriage as the only workable alternative. That’s a position we took based on Scripture, based on thousands of years of human history, and based on plain old common sense. And for that, we were dismissed and mocked as out of touch and prudish and archaic and old fashioned, again and again, over the past several decades.
What’s interesting about all of this mockery is that now — at long last — many of the same people who dismissed Christian conservatives are now coming around to basically agreeing with us. They’re conceding that abstinence until marriage makes sense, actually. The catch is that they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.
New York Magazine’s “The Cut” just published an article outlining the new pro-abstinence trend that’s now so popular among young people. It’s entitled, “A Summer Without Sex: Celibacy is all the rage right now.”
The Cut reports:
Today, celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson, and Tiffany Haddish have touted the benefits of celibacy. Melissa Febos … is coming out with another memoir next year called ‘The Dry Season,’ about a year of conscious celibacy. Other women are celebrating their dry seasons too, even to the point of competitiveness.
The report continues:
This Great Abstaining comes amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people: They’re texting instead of hooking up, they’re getting off the apps, they’re forgoing marriage and children, they’re deemphasizing traditional romance and instead prioritizing platonic friendships like codependent but chaste Victorian pen pals.
Among the reasons for this “Great Abstaining,” according to the Cut, is that many women all over the world are drawing inspiration from the “radical-feminist South Korean 4B movement.”
Women who participate in this “4B movement” promise not to do four things: date men, have sex with men, give birth, or get married. Of course, attitudes like this are only making South Korea’s population crisis even worse. The country’s birth rate is well below replacement level, and dropping fast. That’s not going to improve if no one marries or has children. But the media is presenting this as some kind of feminist victory for South Korea, even though South Korea may not exist for very long if it keeps up. South Korea’s great achievement is embracing its own extinction, we’re told.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Take this article from Vogue, for example. They just came out with a similar piece praising women for their newfound love of celibacy. They wrote:
Is sex-free living going to be a thing? Could it actually be liberating to take the sex out of every equation? Are we entering a second wave of sexual emancipation in which one can simply opt out altogether? Maybe this summer can be a mini-break from the near-constant awareness of our own sexuality, of how (or whether) we attract. A vacation from transmitting and receiving sexual triggers. Will more of us be looking back on 2024 as the summer I turned sexless? No more afternoon delights, no more holiday romances—a veritable Celibacy and the City.
It’s kind of amazing to see Vogue discover that, in fact, women can “opt out” of having random sex with strangers. This is a whole new level of “sexual emancipation,” they say. No one has ever raised this possibility before. You can actually just not give yourself away to any random dude who vaguely shows interest. This is breaking news, courtesy of Vogue magazine: Women have free will. Can you believe it?
Several other outlets have been reporting on the same trend for more than a year now, in an equally shocked tone. The Independent, for example, wrote last year that, “Celibacy has become all the rage among young people.” According to the Independent:
In recent years, ‘self-love’ has been parodied as much as embraced. But the shift towards celibacy seems to have come from it. … The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless because, ultimately, it’s about self-development. And that’s a practice that will always provide some sort of enlightenment – regardless of your relationship status.
Imagine that. “The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless.” Again, across virtually all of the corporate press this is presented as something that’s just being discovered now.
The Guardian, to give another example, reports that “Sex-positive feminism had its moment – and now it has been replaced by voluntary celibacy.” That’s quite a headline from The Guardian, considering it was just a decade ago that The Guardian was running articles with titles like, “The moral case for sex before marriage.”
Reversals like this are everywhere all of a sudden. In recent years, outlets like The New York Times and The Sunday Times have published lengthy first-hand op-eds written by authors who have committed to celibacy. In particular, the Sunday Times declared that “Celibacy has had a reboot, with more people abstaining from sex than ever.” And it’s important to note, if it wasn’t clear already, that in virtually all of these cases we’re talking about unmarried people abstaining from sex — abstaining from hookup culture, in other words. This is the “reboot,” the “trend,” the bright new idea that the media is suddenly celebrating.
And the trend is not just a media creation. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been tracking the sexual behavior of high school graduates for the past two decades, going back to 2004. They’ve found:
Among 21-to-30-year-old males, abstinence rose significantly between 2008 and 2020, from 14.4% to 23.5% — an increase of nearly two-thirds. Among females of the same age, abstinence also rose, though by less, rising from 12.8% in 2008 to 16.5% in 2020 — an increase of just over a quarter. … Young adult males now have a considerably higher rate of abstinence than young adult females.
There are obviously many factors that might explain this change. A lot of it is likely attributable to so-called involuntary celibacy. We know that, even as celibacy is becoming more common, chastity is becoming less common. The proliferation of internet porn makes that very clear.
So what’s happening here in many cases, it seems reasonable to conclude, is that many young single people have given up on finding love and commitment. They’ve despaired of ever forming a real romantic connection with anyone. So now they’re retreating into celibacy like a form of surrender.
The point is that it’s not an embrace of traditional values in most cases. They’ve ended up at the same place — abstinence — but have gotten there from a place of despair and defeat.
In other cases, as in South Korea, people are apparently resorting to celibacy as some kind of strained, misguided political statement. Here’s someone by the name of Julia Fox, for instance:
As twisted as that logic is, it actually makes sense on some level. These people understand that abstinence until marriage is an expression of self-control. And they understand that there’s a lot of benefits to a society where people practice self-control. But because they’ve rejected the old code of sexual morality, they have to come up with these bizarre, incoherent rationalizations for returning to it. They have to pretend that “Roe v. Wade” is somehow relevant to whether they want to be sexually promiscuous or not. Or they have to pretend that celibacy is part of some newfound “sexual liberation” movement — that another wave of feminism is in progress, where women have discovered for the first time that they have free will.
Here’s the point in all of this. The old code of sexual morality that they rejected — the one that those Christian conservatives were promoting, while being mocked and dismissed for it — that code was grounded, all along, in the true and the beautiful: in human dignity, love, commitment, chastity. The great virtues.
Those who repudiated that message for the sake of lust and instant gratification now find themselves living sexless lives anyway. They chose the opposite lifestyle and found it unfulfilling, harmful, destructive, and severely depressing. This is precisely what Christian conservatives warned would happen. This is why we said that hook up culture is bad; that the correct order of events is to find someone, pledge your love and loyalty to them, marry them, and then be physically intimate with them. In other words, we were right all along.
But in all of the coverage of the “celibacy trend,” there is of course no acknowledgment of that fact. There’s no recognition that we had this whole thing figured out many generations ago — thousands of years ago, in fact.
Unless all of these newly “celibate” people realize that celibacy is more than a trend or a political statement — then the satisfaction that they all say they’re feeling right now will be short-lived. “The Great Abstaining,” as The Cut put it, will give way to more unhappiness and inevitably more hedonism in short order.
The only way out of this cycle is to recognize why Christian conservatives have been calling for abstinence until marriage for so long, and give them some credit for it. The Religious Right has been repeatedly and consistently mocked for predicting the future for the past several decades now. We’ve always been right. About everything. It’s time for everyone else to start listening.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
Here’s a side of the Clinton administration you probably don’t remember. Just a few months into Bill Clinton’s second term, the federal government announced a major initiative to fund abstinence-only sex education.
As the L.A. Times reported back in March of 1997, Clinton’s administration allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to programs teaching that sex before marriage is, “likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” The Clinton-funded programs also taught that abstinence from premarital sex is, “the expected standard” of human behavior. That’s worth repeating: The Clinton administration said that abstaining from sex before marriage is the “expected standard” of human behavior.
That may sound surprising now, for obvious reasons. This was not exactly an administration that led by example on this front, or any other front. But at the time, especially in that pre-Lewinsky period, it wasn’t a particularly shocking move. From Reagan’s administration onward, there had been significant bipartisan support in Washington for teaching young people to wait until marriage before having sex. Democrats and Republicans agreed on this point: Hookup culture spreads disease and ultimately makes people unhappy. It wasn’t especially controversial, really.
As recently as 2010, CNN was running segments about how abstinence-education was effective. Watch:
You won’t find many reports like that on CNN anymore. Do a quick search of their website, and you’ll learn that abstinence-only education is “not evidence-based.” The science shifted, apparently, as we’ve seen so often.
Indeed, around the year that report aired — 2010 — federal funding for abstinence-only education began to wane under the Obama administration. Donald Trump brought it back to an extent. Then the Biden administration limited this funding again, though not as much as many Leftists were hoping.
Throughout all of this back-and-forth, pretty much the only group that’s remained consistent have been Christian conservatives. We’ve warned, for decades, that hookup culture will create many catastrophic problems in society. We promoted chastity and abstinence before marriage as the only workable alternative. That’s a position we took based on Scripture, based on thousands of years of human history, and based on plain old common sense. And for that, we were dismissed and mocked as out of touch and prudish and archaic and old fashioned, again and again, over the past several decades.
What’s interesting about all of this mockery is that now — at long last — many of the same people who dismissed Christian conservatives are now coming around to basically agreeing with us. They’re conceding that abstinence until marriage makes sense, actually. The catch is that they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.
New York Magazine’s “The Cut” just published an article outlining the new pro-abstinence trend that’s now so popular among young people. It’s entitled, “A Summer Without Sex: Celibacy is all the rage right now.”
The Cut reports:
Today, celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson, and Tiffany Haddish have touted the benefits of celibacy. Melissa Febos … is coming out with another memoir next year called ‘The Dry Season,’ about a year of conscious celibacy. Other women are celebrating their dry seasons too, even to the point of competitiveness.
The report continues:
This Great Abstaining comes amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people: They’re texting instead of hooking up, they’re getting off the apps, they’re forgoing marriage and children, they’re deemphasizing traditional romance and instead prioritizing platonic friendships like codependent but chaste Victorian pen pals.
Among the reasons for this “Great Abstaining,” according to the Cut, is that many women all over the world are drawing inspiration from the “radical-feminist South Korean 4B movement.”
Women who participate in this “4B movement” promise not to do four things: date men, have sex with men, give birth, or get married. Of course, attitudes like this are only making South Korea’s population crisis even worse. The country’s birth rate is well below replacement level, and dropping fast. That’s not going to improve if no one marries or has children. But the media is presenting this as some kind of feminist victory for South Korea, even though South Korea may not exist for very long if it keeps up. South Korea’s great achievement is embracing its own extinction, we’re told.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Take this article from Vogue, for example. They just came out with a similar piece praising women for their newfound love of celibacy. They wrote:
Is sex-free living going to be a thing? Could it actually be liberating to take the sex out of every equation? Are we entering a second wave of sexual emancipation in which one can simply opt out altogether? Maybe this summer can be a mini-break from the near-constant awareness of our own sexuality, of how (or whether) we attract. A vacation from transmitting and receiving sexual triggers. Will more of us be looking back on 2024 as the summer I turned sexless? No more afternoon delights, no more holiday romances—a veritable Celibacy and the City.
It’s kind of amazing to see Vogue discover that, in fact, women can “opt out” of having random sex with strangers. This is a whole new level of “sexual emancipation,” they say. No one has ever raised this possibility before. You can actually just not give yourself away to any random dude who vaguely shows interest. This is breaking news, courtesy of Vogue magazine: Women have free will. Can you believe it?
Several other outlets have been reporting on the same trend for more than a year now, in an equally shocked tone. The Independent, for example, wrote last year that, “Celibacy has become all the rage among young people.” According to the Independent:
In recent years, ‘self-love’ has been parodied as much as embraced. But the shift towards celibacy seems to have come from it. … The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless because, ultimately, it’s about self-development. And that’s a practice that will always provide some sort of enlightenment – regardless of your relationship status.
Imagine that. “The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless.” Again, across virtually all of the corporate press this is presented as something that’s just being discovered now.
The Guardian, to give another example, reports that “Sex-positive feminism had its moment – and now it has been replaced by voluntary celibacy.” That’s quite a headline from The Guardian, considering it was just a decade ago that The Guardian was running articles with titles like, “The moral case for sex before marriage.”
Reversals like this are everywhere all of a sudden. In recent years, outlets like The New York Times and The Sunday Times have published lengthy first-hand op-eds written by authors who have committed to celibacy. In particular, the Sunday Times declared that “Celibacy has had a reboot, with more people abstaining from sex than ever.” And it’s important to note, if it wasn’t clear already, that in virtually all of these cases we’re talking about unmarried people abstaining from sex — abstaining from hookup culture, in other words. This is the “reboot,” the “trend,” the bright new idea that the media is suddenly celebrating.
And the trend is not just a media creation. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been tracking the sexual behavior of high school graduates for the past two decades, going back to 2004. They’ve found:
Among 21-to-30-year-old males, abstinence rose significantly between 2008 and 2020, from 14.4% to 23.5% — an increase of nearly two-thirds. Among females of the same age, abstinence also rose, though by less, rising from 12.8% in 2008 to 16.5% in 2020 — an increase of just over a quarter. … Young adult males now have a considerably higher rate of abstinence than young adult females.
There are obviously many factors that might explain this change. A lot of it is likely attributable to so-called involuntary celibacy. We know that, even as celibacy is becoming more common, chastity is becoming less common. The proliferation of internet porn makes that very clear.
So what’s happening here in many cases, it seems reasonable to conclude, is that many young single people have given up on finding love and commitment. They’ve despaired of ever forming a real romantic connection with anyone. So now they’re retreating into celibacy like a form of surrender.
The point is that it’s not an embrace of traditional values in most cases. They’ve ended up at the same place — abstinence — but have gotten there from a place of despair and defeat.
In other cases, as in South Korea, people are apparently resorting to celibacy as some kind of strained, misguided political statement. Here’s someone by the name of Julia Fox, for instance:
As twisted as that logic is, it actually makes sense on some level. These people understand that abstinence until marriage is an expression of self-control. And they understand that there’s a lot of benefits to a society where people practice self-control. But because they’ve rejected the old code of sexual morality, they have to come up with these bizarre, incoherent rationalizations for returning to it. They have to pretend that “Roe v. Wade” is somehow relevant to whether they want to be sexually promiscuous or not. Or they have to pretend that celibacy is part of some newfound “sexual liberation” movement — that another wave of feminism is in progress, where women have discovered for the first time that they have free will.
Here’s the point in all of this. The old code of sexual morality that they rejected — the one that those Christian conservatives were promoting, while being mocked and dismissed for it — that code was grounded, all along, in the true and the beautiful: in human dignity, love, commitment, chastity. The great virtues.
Those who repudiated that message for the sake of lust and instant gratification now find themselves living sexless lives anyway. They chose the opposite lifestyle and found it unfulfilling, harmful, destructive, and severely depressing. This is precisely what Christian conservatives warned would happen. This is why we said that hook up culture is bad; that the correct order of events is to find someone, pledge your love and loyalty to them, marry them, and then be physically intimate with them. In other words, we were right all along.
But in all of the coverage of the “celibacy trend,” there is of course no acknowledgment of that fact. There’s no recognition that we had this whole thing figured out many generations ago — thousands of years ago, in fact.
Unless all of these newly “celibate” people realize that celibacy is more than a trend or a political statement — then the satisfaction that they all say they’re feeling right now will be short-lived. “The Great Abstaining,” as The Cut put it, will give way to more unhappiness and inevitably more hedonism in short order.
The only way out of this cycle is to recognize why Christian conservatives have been calling for abstinence until marriage for so long, and give them some credit for it. The Religious Right has been repeatedly and consistently mocked for predicting the future for the past several decades now. We’ve always been right. About everything. It’s time for everyone else to start listening.
“}]]
