17 is nothing.
celibacy
Anonymous: “I just remembered the scene from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" where Indiana is supposed to take a Leap of Faith over a wide (and very deep) chasm that he has to cross to save his father's life. His eyes and head tell him it's impossible, but his father lies dying and the Holy Grail across the chasm is the only thing that can save him. So he closes his eyes, puts his foot out in front and falls forward. What was a tense moment ends when his foot immediately hits a hard surface: a bridge that wasn't visible becuse of an optical illusion. He then simply walks across and then throws sand back across the bridge to kill the optical illusion so others may cross. This "I Got Laid" section is my attempt to throw sand back across the chasm for my fellow adult virgins to see that the path is a series of unremarkable steps and no great leap.”
I'm attributing this as anonymous because while it is attributed to a user called "FreeBSD", it is evidently a cut-and-paste job from elsewhere.
The article details how adult male virgins suffer shame from their peers, especially if the virginity continues past their college years, and suffer that shame in silence. (“Because no one, anywhere, ever, would pretend to be a 44-year-old virgin.”) The middle section could have been a good candidate for rejection from ASSM, not that I would know anything about that, but the basic point is that the American writer was a virgin up until he paid for an escort while on a trip to Canada exclusively for the purpose of buying sex. And that sex is really not that big a deal. This article can be read in conjunction with (and almost as a potential case study for) "Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis" by Donnelly et al.
Denise Donnelly et al.: “involuntary celibacy is more than one event, it is a combination of the timing, sequencing, and duration of sexual behavior. A life course perspective suggests that persons who become off time in regards to life transitions involving sexuality begin to feel as though they are no longer traveling the same path as their peers [...] Once this happens, it may be difficult (but not impossible) to conform to the normative sexual trajectories that their age peers are following.”
Eli Kintisch: “As a self-declared asexual — someone who doesn't want to have sex, doesn't plan to, and doesn't see anything particularly wrong with that — David is part of a small-but-distinct community that has begun to mobilize online. On websites and mailing lists, they discuss the unique challenges asexual men and women face in a hypersexual culture. Chief among them: getting people to understand their point of view.”
Elizabeth Abbott: “I happened to be celibate because I was not in a relationship. From the outside, my decision [to be celibate] changed precisely nothing. Yet to me, the transition from circumstantial to convinced celibacy felt transformative. As for so many others, in history and in the present, the element of choice made all the difference in how I experienced celibacy. Instead of burdensome and frustrating, it now felt joyous and liberating.”
Both quotes are presented without endorsement or comment other than I don't really fit either category: I want to have sex, but my plans are based on the assumption that it's not going to happen any time soon.
