It’s a few minutes before showtime and the air in the church hall has that slightly tingling sense of anticipation that often occurs in crowds of sweaty teenagers.
The girls are tugging at their T-shirts and smoothing their hair, the boys laughing too loudly. They are here to spend the next few hours talking about sex. Then, they are going to declare in front of total strangers that they will swear off all forms of sex until they are married.
”I just want to wait until I meet the right person,” says 16-year-old Lindsey Bocheck. ”The world is so messed up as it is. Society wants you to be a whore basically.”
Welcome to the world of teenage abstinence, a choice championed by, until recently (following her confessions about the true nature of her relationship with Justin Timberlake), Britney Spears, and embraced by about 2,5-million young people in the United States in the past decade.
In an age obsessed with sex, they inhabit an interior universe where intercourse turns relationships stale and leads to break-ups, condoms don’t work and those weak enough to have tried the pleasures of the flesh are inevitably sorry.
”You don’t realise what you are doing until everything has changed,” says 16-year-old John Wagster as he explains his decision to embrace chastity. ”You are having oral sex, and you don’t realise it’s wrong. It’s like eating Pringles. Once you start, you can’t stop.”
Only you can — or you should. At least that is the message heavily promoted by the Bush administration, which has allocated $117-milllion for abstinence-only education for teenagers this year, and hopes to raise it to $135-million.
The growing desire to remain a virgin, and the Bush government’s eagerness to back programmes that would lead Americans to a biblical lifestyle, has alarmed US organisations such as Planned Parenthood, and those who support sex education in schools.
About 35% of all school districts have replaced sex education with classes that focus solely on why not to have sex. During the past few years Planned Parenthood itself has been forced to mention abstinence as a strategy for avoiding pregnancy and disease.
For organisations such as the Silver Ring Thing it is the only way. Its premise is simple. In a confusing world of choice it offers only absolutes: stay pure or else have sex, lose your boyfriend and your self-respect, and arrive at the altar at some unspecified future date as damaged goods. Those are the emotional costs.
The health risks conjured up are even scarier, as activists make extremely liberal use of data on the rise in sexually transmitted infections. The moral perils are scarier still, with dark warnings that the ”epidemic” of oral sex has got ”out of control”.
None of what the Silver Ring Thing preaches is new — even its tirades against condoms are familiar fodder in Bible-thumping sermons of the American South. What is different is the fact that these exercises are now being funded and supported by the US government.
At the Silver Ring Thing events testimonials are mixed with loud music, skits, videos and flashing lights. Fellow teens recount the pressures to have sex and rue the day it ruined their relationships. ”Couples stop having fun when they have sex,” says one follower of the programme, now married. ”I was able to give my wife the best gift you could give — your virginity.”
Nobody on stage actually talks about sexuality, beyond stock references to raging hormones. Nobody is very specific about what they mean by sex — though it’s clear that they think oral sex is bad. There is no mention of masturbation. Heterosexuality is automatically assumed.
After sitting through two hours of this, the teens stand to take the pledge publicly. They then slip on a silver ring, on sale in the foyer for $12.
The symbolism is no accident, says Denny Pattyn, who developed Silver Ring Thing.
During the show, a woman appears to tell the new pledgees that if they are going to fall further down the road and have sex, they should flush the ring down the toilet, rather than dishonour their comrades.
”This is a constant reminder. They are making a vow tonight to wait until they are married to have sex,” Pattyn says before the show.
He is a little more explicit on stage where he warns the crowd that the modern world is quite literally a cesspool, swirling with sexually transmitted diseases.
”On your wedding day you give the ring to your husband or wife and say, ‘I waited for you, let’s get it on’,’’ he tells the audience.
In the foyer Shelly Povazan is trying to extract a smile from her daughter, Kayla. Povazan, a neo-natal nurse who says she has seen far too many teenage mothers on her ward, does not really expect her daughter to remain a virgin until she is married. But she is afraid for her.
”I just want her to be older [when she loses her virginity]. I’m thinking, Kayla is 12. Soon she could be making that kind of decision. I would just like her to wait,” she says. ”When we were growing up, it was just ‘don’t get pregnant’. Now it is much bigger.”
Kayla isn’t quite ready to deal with sex. ”It would be nice if you had told me before I came here. Then I wouldn’t have come,” she hisses at her mother. But she soon relents. ”The rings are cool,” she says. — Â