Girls Gone Wild, Boys Gone Mild...Continued from page 1

This is rather self-evident. In societies where sexual opportunity is restricted to marriage and where absolute monogamy is the socially reinforced standard, chastity becomes desirable for its own sake. Women accept, as a point of honor, the restraints imposed by society. In so doing, sexual opportunity is limited to marriage and promiscuity is condemned. For men, whose sexual desire remains relatively the same regardless of the surrounding culture, Unwin makes the point that the limitation of sexual opportunity to marriage provides a powerful incentive to marry and “settle down.”

Rutgers University confirmed this same conclusion following one of the most comprehensive studies on the state of marriage: The State of Our Unions, The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2002. According to researchers, the top reason given by men for their unwillingness to commit to marriage is “They can get sex without marriage more easily than in times past.”  You can begin to see how sexual promiscuity directly undermines the social commitment to marriage as an essential institution.

Granted, there has often been a double standard relative to men and women. Women have frequently suffered condemnation and even death for their sexual transgressions, as in the case of Muslim societies, while men often received unspoken admiration or, at most, indifference. Wendy Shalit advocates “returning to a single high standard for women and for men, instead of letting men off the hook or pressuring young women to imitate the most adolescent males in order to be ‘empowered.’” This is the same standard given in Scripture—there is no double sexual standard for men and women.

This is not to say that men do not play any role in the preservation and promotion of a virtuous sexual ethic—they certainly do. While men, generally speaking, do not control “opportunity,” they can and do influence the public attitude in support of or opposition to chastity. Men also must therefore do their part to promote and protect virtue.

Unfortunately, in a culture that seems to produce more and more men who are either wimps or barbarians—the support for female virtue is either flaccid or ridiculed. Couple this with the sexualized messages of the culture, the fallacy of feminist ideology that promotes “sex as power,” and single women find little or no support for modesty and sexual purity.  

If we want to recover a sane and moral sexual ethic, which is essential to the health and longevity of society, we must, once again, teach our young women to honor modesty and chastity and teach our young men to defend and preserve the honor of our young women.

© 2007 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture, a ministry of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to the reformation and renewal of society through the reformation and renewal of the Church. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources, and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.