perpetual virgin syndrome

I have a friend who has been with her boyfriend for about two years. The relationship is kind of a big deal in that she liked him an awful lot for quite a while before they were together. Their union was delayed by shyness, maybe some social awkwardness, anxiety, I don’t know, some sort of cocktail of those ingredients.

But they had a big romance-movie moment one night on a porch when, while soft music played, the two found themselves slow dancing with quiet giddiness, and he said something like, “I’ve liked you for a really long time.” And she gushed and said the same thing back to him, and, though not currently a fan of the idea of raising a child, she eventually developed a desire even potentially to have his baby. So it’s serious love.

But, like so many stories of relationship problems go, sex is an issue. Or, rather, how sex is thought of and initiated. He seems to avoid the topic in conversation and his modus operandi for getting things going is to retardedly grab one of her boobs and make a sort of boyish “huh-huh” laugh. Apparently, as if a freshly pubescent boy were saying, “huh-huh, boobs, huh-huh.” Like Butthead.

Like a virgin.

And I realized this is a perfect example of Perpetual Virgin Syndrome. It’s true he had limited sex experience before this relationship, and it’s true he has confidence issues that could explain some instances of shying away from sex. But that doesn’t keep everyone from acting so virginy.

There are scores symptoms, many of which seem like those tip-of-the-tongue descriptions you try to share in discourse where the person you’re talking to gets it and says, “yes, exactly!” Not knowing how to go about having sex, never-ending callow awe with genitalia, watching porn like there’s going to be a Q and A after, acting as though the opposite sex is altogether some unapproachable Pandora’s Box, asking a few too many “is it true that...” questions, not giving a very learned response to all those stupid sex-themed jokes that get tossed around, coming off as too much of a nice guy, possessing more memories of video games than of sex, talking about love like your only basis for philosophy is a Whitney Houston lyric, being generally emo, and acting, you know, just... like a virgin, in general. Like sex has that pre-sexual-experience mystique.

I’ll admit that I was one of the most virgny virgins when I was one. I did play a lot of video games, I did dissect diagrams and videos, and I did give off an almost pathetic hopeless-romantic vibe. It was so obvious that once in a writing class in school, I’d done a piece that was part of a larger story where a sheltered teenage kid falls in love with sort of a “bad girl” at first sight, and one of the pieces of feedback I got was “don’t take this the wrong way, but you have got to get laid.”

To still be so inexperienced even with experience just seems odd, like someone is constantly stuck in so many coming-of-age movies from the 1980s. My friend admits that it’s frustrating, incredibly frustrating, even. Dennis Miller, not that I like the motherfucker, once commented on all the virgins promised to those Islamic terrorists when they die. He said, “after a few, wouldn’t you want a pro?”

It’s not just guys, for sure, although we’re all conditioned to expect certain manly sexual attributes from guys, but girls get it, too. My ex told me about the sex ed she got in junior high. Her teacher did some metaphor job with the female body and said girls have a limited number of petals on their flower, and if you give those petals away before you find the right guy, you won’t have any left.

The sex ed I got, by the way, was an abstinence-only program called Project Self-Respect. The guy who taught it made me think of the phrase “castrated reformed sex offender.” He had a perverted smile but wouldn’t look at or go near any of the girls. The culture I was surrounded in was a major launching point for perpetual virgin syndrome. “This is your penis, don’t feel bad at all about the nature of your penis.” What were we supposed to do? Say, “woooow, I have a penis, and it deserves respect”?

Some fuzzy science about STDs was used. Okay, actually, some flat-out fucking lies about STDs were used. Like how AIDS could be transmitted almost telepathically. And lots of “hey, it could happen” scenarios that physical science demands I not consider seriously. We were supposed to fear sex, I gathered. Which, if population control were the intention, I might forgive in the slightest way, but, trying to turn a bunch of teenagers into perpetual virgins for the sake of, what, making sex a religious experience?, kind of irks me.

And it irks my friend, who has a repressed sexual appetite due to her PVS boyfriend. His sex ed, amazingly, was incredibly liberal and "sex is natural and homosexual couples have sex, also, and this is how sex happens." I don't know, maybe I’d be more entertained by the sex ed offered in Mean Girls, where the P.E. coach says, “if you have sex... you will get AIDS... and you will die.” Even with that education, guys might stare at girls like horny, repressed, confused scientists. Who write adolescent poetry. And long to squeeze boobs.

alarm clock

I need to buy a new alarm clock

and I've been meaning to do this for weeks.

I wake myself up with the alarm on my cell phone,

and even if I put it in the other room before I go to sleep,

I just carry it back to bed with me after I've turned it off

and sleep two hours later than I wanted to.

Today's my day off and I didn't set an alarm.

I slept until 2:30. It was raining and dark outside

when I finally got up, though, and I know that's why.

I can't ever wake up when it rains.

preface

I guess I should preface anything else I ever say by attempting to explain the major concrete philosophy I have about people, about life, about all that shit.

We are our brains.

This isn’t an earth-shattering concept, nor is it part of a great epiphany that makes me feel superior to anyone else who has ever thought of anything. I’m not trying to be deep, and I usually hate deep, philosophical, open-ended question discussions. So when I say that we are our brains, I mean it as something I accept to be, until great evidence contradicts, a simple fact.

Simple, maybe, because it’s four monosyllabic words and sounds fairly obvious, but I hope I’m not hiding behind just how complex human brains really are. An incredible amount of activity happens that shriveled cantaloupe. It houses an estimated 100 billion neurons, and yet four-fifths of it is water. It’s responsible for every rocket science problem solved and every toe stubbed. And many of its ins, outs, purposes still go unknown.

Basically, there is an incredibly long formula for who we are, part of which is filled in from conception, another part filled in gradually by every moment of existence thereafter. All of which is open to interpretation by, yep, the brain.

Thanks to a study done by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, I may have a little something extra to explain and elaborate my point. The study followed 1,100 males in middle school and high school, aged 12-18. What researchers were looking for was an indicator, possibly genetic, of violent or “delinquent” behavior. Over a six-year span, subjects filled out surveys, highlights in life and behavior were noted, and, in the end, the study concluded that evidence supported the existence of a genetic link to aggressive behavior.

Essentially, our inclination to a certain behavior is wired into DNA.

Still, the study noted that genes apparently need to be activated by an outside factor. Someone with the potential to be a tyrannical asshole still needs the correct catalyst. Every human being carries an impossibly long “if ___, then ___” list, and the brain is only thing capable of consulting that list. Constantly.

Then there are those scores of studies implying, if not empirically proving, that spirituality is linked to activity in a specific spot in the brain. Either you’ve got spirituality potential in your head or you don’t. So far, I’m certain I don’t. A million gods could be looking down at me while I pick my nose, but my brain has so far lacked the equipment to make me think so.

But brains don’t just dictate the highlights of someone’s ethos. Hell, there’s even evidence to suggest that there’s a part of the brain just for remembering celebrities’ faces. Think about that next time you see an ad on a web site asking you to determine which actress’ lips are shown in a photo. But I don’t recommend you click on an answer.

I can’t leave out the rest of the body, but the body feeds the brain information. The brain decides which information is relevant. Chemical balance affects brain interpretation (hence my fascination with drugs). A whole chunk of the brain doesn’t even think; it just does and controls.

So who we are, what we do, is written in and decided by a soggy mass in our head.

I had almost a dozen teachers in my life pass out the infamous “Attitude” bit by Charles Swindoll on the first day of class. You’ve probably read it at some point. Maybe even half a dozen times. The second half of it is what has pissed me off from the first time it landed on a school desk in front of me.

"The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.
And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes."

My assumption whenever I received this mantra was usually something along the lines of, this teacher is going to knowingly do something I dislike and blame me if I get upset about it. I knew then that not everybody has control over their emotions, and that, most commonly, people have very limited control of how they feel. It’s entirely possible that a portion of every class that was handed a stack of Swindoll’s philosophy would have a positive reaction to the paper, but I never once thought it was worth all the trees sacrificed for the cause of a harmonious classroom.

And, hey, isn’t a reaction an act, as well? And why are we supposed to change how we act even though other people will act a “certain” way? And how does Swindoll expect me to change if he just admitted that we can’t change how people will act?

The essay would also always make me think of starving, homeless people in third-world countries featured prominently in National Geographic. I thought about how in charge they’re supposed to be of their attitudes. It just seemed, to me, that so many people have too many negative factors and catalysts for their brains to be especially positive.

Hope, I think, lies not in positively changing everything, but rather in changing something. Demanding that everything changes and blaming everyone else when it doesn’t always seemed overly aggressive and unsympathetic, to me. And so, I never felt inspired to keep Swindoll’s pesky charge around whenever someone issued me a copy.

I don’t think reducing the ethos almost seven billion people to a piece of tissue is really so depressing. I still don’t know what will happen on any given day, or who I will meet, or how someone will reveal themselves, or even what I will ultimately be capable of.

And, in the end, all I’ve got is my brain, this companion confined to my skull.