Lolo Jones is an Olympic athlete and Christian who has committed to keep herself sexually pure until marriage. She says, “It’s just a gift I want to give my husband.” In my youth, this was considered an admirable commitment, but hardly unusual.
But in 2012 Jones’ lifestyle is not only bizarre enough to merit a week’s worth of news coverage, but it has drawn the outrage of a very small and bitter woman named Alexandra Gekas:
Virginity is not an object, it is not a possession and it is not a gift you can give someone. It is a state of being, and the transformation from that state to the state of not being a virgin isn’t something that can be owned by anyone except the person to whom it applies, and even then it is less possessive and more existential.
I’m sure Jones and I would agree that at its best, sex is one of the deepest, most profound ways two human beings can connect. And I’m sure that is one of the reasons why she has chosen to wait until marriage. But to “give” it to a man is to suggest that it is about him more than it is about her and that’s what irks me.
I have no idea what this woman is talking about, but she’s clearly mad about more than just what Lolo Jones is thinking about while she flips through Brides magazine. Creative Minority Report sums it up pretty well:
What Ms. Gekas and others like cannot understand is that purity is a gift to us, a gift that has value. When someone chooses to steward that gift so that they can gift it in love in the setting of marriage that is something truly wonderful and valuable.
But it makes some people very angry when you speak like this. Not because of some silly notion of “exclusive rights to the womb” nonsense. It makes people angry when someone ascribes such value to something they themselves gave away without any thought. They don’t want to think about what they threw away.
Purity is a gift. Innocence is a gift. Life is a gift. Who you share them with matters. And Gekas is mad at Jones in the same way a drunk is mad at a person who declines to drink with him. “How dare you make decisions that highlight how badly I’ve screwed myself up?!”