No hymen, no diamond

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Those of us who inhabit this corner of the internet know that we toil in relative obscurity. Which is just fine as who needs the awful eye to impose its gaze upon us. But lately I have been seeing ideas and opinions that we have done over to death beginning to emerge in the mainstream. There is a saying in commodities that when something surfaces in a mainstream media outlet that any inherent value is already gone. Only the rubes and suckers will jump on the bandwagon at that stage, which is entirely the point.

So when one of our talking points emerges it means that the associated behaviors in the general population are more widespread than would be generally assumed. So from The Spectator we have the following article – The sexual counterrevolution is coming.

Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee …

… Narayan and his close male friends are all around the same age. They’re all elite guys working in tech and finance — and all either dating to marry, or already married. In what amounts to an informal 21st-century marriage brokerage, they and the wives of already-married members of their friend group collude to track down potential partners. But they’re picky — and Narayan is blunt about the criteria. It’s not just about being educated, ambitious or pretty. ‘Guys who say they don’t care about their wife’s sexual history are straight-up lying,’ he tells me. All the men in his group, he says, would strongly prefer their future wives to be virgins on marriage. Some categorically rule out women who aren’t: ‘No hymen, no diamond’.

Eschewing the sexual marketplace, dressing modestly and demanding virginity. What will Gen Z think of next? But there are a couple of key takeaways here. For a start, these young people inhabit the world of the elite. They have decided to reject their parents’ hedonism because they are able to afford that luxury. However, a society as immoral as ours cannot countenance such disgraceful behavior on the part of its young.

The current they’re swimming against is strong. Charlotte reports that, when she got engaged in her senior year at Harvard, her peers looked at her ‘like I was crazy’ for expressing a preference for children over a high-flying career. Narayan tells me that his views on the importance of marriage and the qualities he seeks in a potential spouse have left him facing accusations of woman-hating.

‘Voicing any of this stuff openly is just social suicide,’ he says. So much so, in fact, that ‘Narayan’ is a pseudonym: there’s simply no way he can afford to be quoted about this under his real name without risking social censure or even repercussions at work.

Consider that for a moment. A 30-year-old American man holds the (until recently entirely conventional) opinion that men and women should refrain from promiscuity and that marriage, monogamy and family life are general social goods. And he will say so only under a pseudonym, for fear of destroying his career.

None of this is surprising. A world ruled by degenerates has no patience or tolerance for escape attempts. The writer correctly identifies some of the causes of the breakdown of the family code. Contraception, pornography and feminism take center stage in her article. But no mention is made of the erosion of the spiritual life which once underpinned everything. These youngsters have the right idea, but without a single mention of Christianity how much hope can there be for these marriages if they merely replicate the secular world around them? The answer is not very much at all.

Still, it is good news. Marriage is now so out of reach for Millennials and Gen Z that it has become a status symbol. Which brings me to the other takeaway from that first paragraph that I quoted. The fact that those of their circle that are already married collude to track down suitable partners for those who are still searching. They are looking out for each other. They are community minded. They are not focused merely on themselves but on helping their peers to reach the same desired goals.

In a world that has done everything possible to push the lie of individualism as the greatest goal, this is very good news. I can only hope and pray that this involves a real church as well. No hymen, no diamond indeed.

Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.