Better Dodges Needed

The fundamental problem I had with the classic “girlfriend in Canada” excuse is that it’s much less effective when you actually, ah, went to college in Canada. I am reminded of a friend who had a mythical girlfriend in Port Hope, or “Port of No Hope” as it was thereafter known on my dorm floor…

…Tracy Clark-Flory has more. Matt is right, of course, that the emphasis on (still almost certainly inaccurate) medians is to make reinforcing the virgin/whore complex easier. My favorite example remains Leon Kass’s assertion that “[m]any, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one’s partner than for one’s mother.” See, although logically men having premarital sex with women would logicially seem to have to be having sex with women, women who have sex before marriage aren’t really women at all, so why question the numbers? And call me crazy, but the existence of these norms (albeit usually in subtle form than when expressed by Bush’s favorite bioethicist) may just make self-reporting in surveys unreliable.

…see also zuzu.