sexuality

by jenks

Agrosexual

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During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like your shirt,” she said. “I was wondering, can I have it?” The running joke about New Moon, of course, is the extent of the shirtlessness perpetrated by Lautner’s character and his werewolf brethren. (It’s gone so far, in fact, that Lautner, who beefed up special for the role, has vowed to never appear shirtless in a movie ever again.) As Lautner struggled in response to keep from losing his shirt and his dignity, Kimmel, possibly the oldest person in the entire studio at that moment, interjected, “You know, I think people would look down on men for demanding the shirt off a woman.” Yet that this interaction seemed totally acceptable and par for the course to the otherwise teenage audience struck me as an indication of a potentially far lager trend a few days later, when I saw “The Christian Side Hug” video.

If you’re wondering what on earth is that?? The “Christian Side Hug” is a rap performed by a group of white kids at a Christian youth gathering, about a way of hugging while standing side by side with someone as opposed to facing one another and putting your arm around their shoulders or waist, because, “front hugs be too sinful.” Despite ultimately turning out to have been intended as insider “satire” (though not before passing very convincingly as both 1. A typically “ass-backwards” — to employ a Palin-ism — move from the abstinence movement of promoting celibacy while sexualizing even mundane forms of human contact, as well as, 2. A reason to weep quietly for the final, ignominious death — like a sad toothless crack-addict in an abandoned alley — of hip hop), I happened to see the Christian Side Hug video on the same day as the fallout from Adam Lambert’s American Music Awards performance, and to me there was a certain similarity between the two.

In case you happened to have missed it, or hearing about it, Lambert put on a rather racy, sexually scandalizing live performance at the awards show.

http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/b6/68/3368c59c46f69ba79aa50a2519c9.jpeg

Perhaps confusing the AMA’s with the MTV Movie Awards, which have no problem rewarding male makeouts, or, more likely, shrewdly pushing the envelope hard on the night before his debut album release, in his first televised performance since the finale of American Idol, Lambert “shocked” the audience at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre and the millions watching live on ABC by closing the show with a risqué rendition of “For Your Entertainment,” the first single of his album of the same name. Highlights from the controversial performance included simulated oral sex from a male backup dancer, a make-out session with his male keyboardist, and a giant mirrored prop set up on the stage so the audience could see the looks on their own shocked faces.

According to Rolling Stone, the producers of the show weren’t informed about the guy-on-guy kiss in advance, and after the show, Lambert told the magazine the musician he kissed is a straight man. In the aftermath, ABC canceled Lambert’s Good Morning America appearance slated for the next day, which of course only helped generate even more attention and fanfare for the artist, who has clearly become an expert at navigating the myriad controversies he’s racked up. To me, what connects Lambert’s performance and the Christian Side Hug and the Kimmel incident, as well as endless other examples from our current pop culture, extends beyond any particular sexual orientation and includes even abstinence itself. It’s an underlying aggressiveness to sexuality in general: agro-sexuality.

To be clear, I’m not talking about aggression enacted through sex, but rather about a militancy in the display of one’s approach to sexuality. The past decade’s proliferation of online profiles, digital cameras, and all manner of social technologies has demanded we approach basically every other aspect of our modern identities as a performative display. It only makes sense that sexuality wouldn’t be exempt.

When I was a teenager in the late 90’s the general approach to sexuality could easily have been described as “come as you are.” Kurt Cobain had died the year before I started high school, Britney Spears’ first album wouldn’t come out until I was halfway through, and in between there was a lot of Green Day, Jewel, Fugees, and REM. Rap was still busy beefing between the coasts to have gotten fully pornified yet. Heroin Chic, an aesthetic glamorizing a drug that destroys sex drive, was all the rage. Even Madonna was, by this time, more interested in acting and electronica than vogueing or kink. And AIDS was huge. People were still dying of AIDS then. As opposed to now, when people are living with it. Kids were obviously still having sex, but since there was some semblance of sex education going on under the Clinton administration they were getting pregnant a lot less than in the “abstinence-only” Bush era. Basically, aside from the effort pushing the word “safe” in front of it, sex in the 90’s was not something to get particularly militant about.

Of course, there was the gay rights movement, but by the time Ellen Degeneres was making the cover of Time for admitting, yep, she’s gay, it had already long been transmogrified from Activism to Pride. And perhaps it’s this shift from social justice to self-expression that is the root of Agrosexuality in general. After all, what are purity rings if not emblems of Abstinence Pride? And in some basic way, even the demand for the shirt off Lautner’s back was as much a performance of sexuality as was Lambert’s on the AMA’s.

In a 2006 New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.”

Even the nouveau-celibacy of the abstinence movement is an option on this spectrum, its appeal (if not necessarily its effectiveness) one kind of response to all these overwhelming new choices. As alternative sexuality has become more mainstream, and sexuality moves from self definition to self expression, what has emerged is a new agrosexual attitude that really wasn’t there 10 years ago. There’s an expectancy of an in-your-face show of sexuality — whatever yours may be — as part OF sexuality itself. It’s by no means anything new, but it used to be employed by those who’d followed alternative sexual paths, flying their freak flags as a social statement, or for deliberate shock value, now, however, as the sexual mainstream is fragmenting along with the cultural one being agrosexual is par for everyone’s course.

In her LA Times article on Lady Gaga — likely as close to the embodiment of agrosexuality as a generation could hope for — Ann Powers writes:

Having gotten her start in the bohemian enclaves of downtown New York City, Gaga is deeply indebted to Warhol’s “Superstar”-oriented Factory scene and its aftermath, which produced drag performers like Candy Darling, artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and streetwise rock stars including Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

“The idea is, you are your image, you are who you see yourself to be,” she said. “It’s iconography.”

Warhol supported and exploited a coterie of outsiders who likely would never have emerged from their corners without his help. Gaga takes control but also shows herself losing it; she blurs the lines between self-realization and self-objectification, courting the dangers of full exposure for a generation of kids born with camcorders in their hands.

Though she talks nonstop about liberation, Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.

She says she wants her fans to feel safe in expressing their imperfections. “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

Trendwatching.com calls this “Maturialism,” one of its “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010:”

Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavors and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of….We’ve dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism),

In fact, the image at the top of this post is an ad for UK ice cream brand The Ice Creamists, mentioned in the Trendwatching post as an example of Maturialism in action:

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Trendwatching suggests that if they want to keep up with culture, brands need to mirror the current societal norms that are “about anything but being meek.” In other words, this isn’t just for teenagers and pop stars; brands need to get in on the agrosexual action, too.

    



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by jenks

that’s how you get it on

A few months ago I’d written a post called How Not To Use Condoms, about the misstep of  Trojan’s “Evolve” campaign.

Here, then, is Durex’s take on how to advertise condoms, courtesy of Fitzgerald & Co:

And I’d actually been planning a more substantial entry to be the first post of 2009, but when I came across this last night, I couldn’t not write about it. I think the ad is brilliant in SO many ways, and the difference between Trojan’s “Evolve” and Durex’s “Get It On” approaches to marketing condoms could not be more glaring.

It’s more than just that the tag-line “Get it on” is a damn clever double entendre (in one smooth maneuver intimating that getting *it* on, and getting a condom on, actually mean the same thing!) whereas “Evolve,” as I’d written before, aligns condoms with a phenomenon that half of Americans are in opposition to (aka: Evolution)…. It’s that this is SERIOUSLY funny!

I didn’t even realize it until I saw the Get it On ad, but Evolve is really quite humorless, isn’t it? Granted it’s hard to be funny when you’re dealing with STD’s–and, to be fair, the Evolve radio spots do manage a bit of wit in dealing with the subject. With Durex, though, funny is the key.

Both brands are trying to un-taboo their product. One of the specific goals of the Evolve campaing is, in fact, to get all of us to be more open about the topic of sexual health. But while Trojan stakes out Public Service Announcement territory, Durex is going about it in a way that I guess can be described as tongue-in-cheek porn. Of course, the dire gravity of the sexual health crisis truly cannot be underestimated, and perhaps this is why the feat of being able to position sexual responsibility–which is what condoms stand for, basically–in the context of playfulness and silliness and…..naughty condom-balloon animals, is that much more significant.

Humor makes the subject infinitely less taboo than invoking Evolution, and not only that, but it makes it more resonant too. After all, despite however it is you feel about the process of natural selection, if you get what the naughty balloon animals are up to, then the ad is speaking to you.

(P.S. Whoever did the sound design for this spot should seriously get some kind of award.)

    



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by jenks

how not to use condoms

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.

The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.

In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (“How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”

“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:

While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”

“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”

Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.

“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:

I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.

Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”

A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”

Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?

Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”

In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)

As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”

As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.

And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)

“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?

Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!

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(CRAP!)

In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)

Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.

Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?

The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.

    



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by jenks

celibacy is so hot right now

It’s pretty interesting that at this year’s MTV Video Music awards the biggest controversy came from Brit comedian, host Russell Brand messing with the Disney-sponsored teen pop boy-band the Jonas Brothers for wearing Purity Rings.

Purity rings, or chastity rings/promise rings originated in the U.S. in the 1990s among Christian affiliated sexual abstinence groups. The rings are sold to adolescents, or to parents so that the rings may be given to their adolescent children as gifts.

It is intended that wearing a purity ring is accompanied by a religious vow to practice celibacy until marriage. The ring is usually worn on the left ring finger with the implication that the wearer will remain abstinent until it is replaced with a wedding ring. Although the ring is worn on the hand, where others can see, its main purpose is to serve as a constant reminder to the wearer of their commitment between themselves and God to remain pure until marriage. There is no particular style for purity rings; however, many worn by Christians have a cross in their design. Some rings contain a diamond chip or other gemstone and/or “True Love Waits”, “One Life, One Love”, or another similar saying embossed somewhere on the ring.

“It’s a little bit ungrateful,” joked Brand, “Because they could literally have sex with any woman that they want, and they’re just not gonna do it. They’re like Superman deciding not to fly, and just going everyhwere on a bus.” The joke became a running theme throughout the night, and at one point Brand even pretended he’d stolen a Jonas Brother’s virginity, holding up a ring in his hand. This, I should mention, got people more riled up than Brand calling George Bush a “retarded cowboy” after pleading, as a citizen of the world, for the US to elect Barack Obama. Eventually, however, he was compelled to apologize. “I’ve gotta say sorry because I said those things about promise rings; that was bad of me. I didn’t mean to take it lightly. I love Jonas Brothers, I think it’s (purity) really good. I don’t want to piss off teenage fans… Promise rings, I’m well up for it, well done everyone…It’s just, a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody.”

Coming from Europe, Brand clearly underestimated the dire seriousness with which Americans take their sex. Sure, comedians are supposed to poke fun at people, that’s what they do, but Brand’s delivery had seemed to imply, “Well, surely everyone else must agree this whole purity ring business is silly, right? After all, this is MTV. We’re all groovy Rock ‘n Rollers here, are we not?”

Before Brand issued his apology, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, herself flossing some finger jewelry, deviated from the telepromptered script at the live telecast declaring, “I just want to say, it’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody–guy or girl–wants to be a slut.” And for an 18 year-old, Sparks nevertheless managed to articulate the American perception of teenage sexuality with an astuteness that I would say is beyond her years: Either you’re a virgin or a slut. There is nothing in between.

Under the influence of the Bush administration’s Abstinence-Only approach to sex education, it’s not particularly surprising that there would be such a drastically reduced understanding of sexuality. Even the idea inherent in the whole Purity Ring concept implies that sex is a contamination, exposure to which makes you unpure. In this kind of oversimplified paradigm there’s obviously no room for complex ideas like being sexually responsible, or emotionally prepared, for instance. Of course, it’s not like rockstars have ever been society’s role models for moderation either, but in the past they’ve generally tended to err on the side of hedonism. So what’s happened that the newest generation of pop sensations is suddenly bringing non-sexy back?

Britney Spears was probably the turning point. Not that it’s exactly her fault that 16 years ago New Kid on the Block, Marky Mark was all about letting Kate Moss come between him and his Calvins while pimping underwear, and in 2008 teen stars are sporting accessories for vows of chastity, but she marked the crossroads. Back when she and Christina Aguilera were vying for individual identities to distinguish themselves (“Hit me baby, one ore time,” vs. “I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way,” anyone?) and Christina went all Dirrty, Britney’s positioning strategy became about branding the singer as virginal as nebulously possible. (And look which one ended up the nutcase!) Even now, as L.A. Times pop music critic Ann Powers writes, Britney’s “still dealing with questions about exactly when she lost her innocence, even after bearing two children.” Before Britney was singing ballads like, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman,” I think the last time anyone would have really cared this much about the status of a pop star’s virginity was back when you couldn’t show Elvis below the waist on TV. Even if there were still any expectations about the issue, you’d figure it would have gotten cleared up, once and for all, by Madonna. But a couple of things have changed in the two and a half decades since Like a Virgin (“That’s like a virgin. Not actually a virgin,” as Brand pointed out at the VMAs) came out.

Alan Ball–who’s no stranger to commentary on contemporary American sexuality, having written American Beauty, and the just-released Towelhead–explained in a recent NPR interview, “In our culture now everything is saturated with sex. Just watching mainstream TV, or going to the movies, or turning on your computer and looking at the images that are on your welcome page, it’s just sex, sex, sex….I think it’s much more in the faces of children now than it was when I was a kid.”  And it doesn’t stop at mainstream entertainment. A 2007 study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that more than 40% of kids have come across porn online. Two thirds of them weren’t even trying to look for it. By contrast, in a similar study conducted 8 years ago, just 25 percent of all kids interviewed said they’d had unwanted exposure to online pornography.

Meanwhile, in the era of Katy Perry ditties like “I kissed a girl and I liked it. (Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.)” and “Ur so gay and you don’t even like boys,” teenagers are now also faced with an unprecedented array of options for how to define their sexual identities. In a New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

This past September [2005], when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

So if all the options for defining your sexual identity are left open, but taking advantage of any of them makes you–as Sparks schooled us–a slut, and at the same time the pervasive sexualization of mainstream  entertainment, and contemporary culture in general, has made sluttiness a pretty much expected default–dude, how the hell are the latest crop of teen pop stars supposed to rebel?

From Details’ The Total Awesomeness of Being the Jonas Brothers:

On a quiet Friday morning in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden, the Jonas Brothers hold out their hands to show off their purity rings. Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas—the teen-pop trio who stand, at this very moment, on the brink of hugeness—wear the metal bands on their fingers to symbolize, as Joe puts it, “promises to ourselves and to God that we’ll stay pure till marriage.” Joe is 18. His ring is silver and adorned with a cross. “It actually ripped apart a little bit, just on the bottom, here, but I didn’t want to get a new one, because this one means so much to me,” he says. Nick, who is 15, says, “I got mine made at Disney World. It’s pretty awesome.” Kevin, at 20, is the oldest of the three, and while a punk-rock purity ring from Tiffany might represent the ultimate oxymoron, that’s exactly what he’s going for. His silver vow of abstinence is covered with studs. “It’s pretty rock and roll,” Kevin says. “It’s getting banged up a little bit because of the guitar.”

For any parent reading this, suddenly getting wildly excited about getting their teenager bling from god, this would probably be a good time to mention that virginity pledges are basically as much a sham as Brand assumed everyone would figure they are. A recent review of a number of independent American studies concluded that abstinence programs “show little evidence of sustained impact on attitudes and intentions,” and furthermore “show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse” Which is how Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter ended up 7 months pregnant, and how yours might too if the republicans have anything to say about it.

All this stuff we’re leaving kids to figure out on their own can be pretty damn charged and confusing and overwhelming. In an environment where the policy on sex ed exemplifies “don’t ask don’t tell,” where 40% of kids are being “educated” about sex through porn–whether they’re looking to be or not, and where the process of defining your sexuality is like a whole new kind of multiple choice exam, it’s actually not all that surprising that some kids might find the concept of a virginity pledge appealing. (At least in theory, if not 100% in practice). In the absence of information or substantive guideance to help them better understand what they’re dealing with, a purity ring offers teenagers a way to simply sublimate the insecurity and pressure that it’s completely normal–basically mandatory–to feel about sex at that age, with a token of self-righteousnessconfidence for simply avoiding it.

Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister, and founder of Silver Ring Thing, which runs more than 70 programs a year for teens, spreading a message of abstinence until marriage, and offering a ring to those who complete the course, appeared on the Today show following the VMAs, and according to MTV News:

Pattyn said he’s been getting quite a few requests from media organizations in the United States and England to discuss the issue. But more important, he ran into John McCain’s daughter Meghan backstage at the show, and the two had a talk that he hopes will soon connect him to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “We had a long talk about Sarah Palin and her daughter’s pregnancy and them maybe getting more involved when they come to Pennsylvania where I live,” Pattyn said.

“This is a big, big to-do,” Pattyn said of the flap in his community over the Jonas Brothers/ Brand issue. “It’s fantastic for an organization like ours, and we think this will open up some major things.” Pattyn said he gave Meghan McCain one of his group’s rings to give to Governor Palin for her daughter “to let her know we’re supporting her and praying for her.”

I don’t know which is more suspect, that just two years after the ACLU settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a case challenging federal funding of more than $1 million for Silver Ring Thing (which seeing as it is a subsidiary of an Evangelical Church, giving it govt. funding did kinda constitute a major violation of that whole separation of church and state thing) Pattyn’s back innit again as if that never happened, or what exactly this guy was doing hangin’ backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in the first place?

(Hey, Trojan, have you considered maybe getting involved with the VMA’s for 2009? Might be a good time to think about that.)

Kinsey is probably rolling over in his grave, and so are a bunch of musicians. As Powers writes, “Nobody seems to remember when rockers were supposed to rattle the jewelry of the folks who attend glittery galas. But then, MTV has long trafficked in turning rebelliousness into a commodity. Brand, saying uncontainable things, upset the apple cart. That made him the most old-fashioned presence in a program full of young, aggressively commercial self-packagers, for whom any statement — political or otherwise — is best judged by the number of units sold.”

    



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