The just-launched site SexReally is paid for by the non-partisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and presumably intended as a slightly older companion site to the Campaign's excellent StayTeen.

It's a fine idea to set up a site for 20-somethings that deals with topics in sexuality free from the stale moralizing of adolescent sex ed, a site that could serve as a forum for discussion of, say, the rising numbers of women in their twenties who use withdrawal as a contraceptive, why that might be, and what the risks and benefits are, or the difficulties posed by the fact that 20-something women are the least likely age cohort to have health insurance, or the fact that while teen pregnancy has decreased in recent years, the rate of unplanned pregnancies among women aged 20-29 is actually growing. What beggars belief is that anyone, let alone a non-profit group of sexuality educators, would think that Laura Sessions Stepp — a woman whose nuanced theory of human sexuality begins and ends with "Don't put out unless you're in a relationship, ladies!" — could do any such topics justice.

The first podcast for SexReally is titled "Starting a Relationship With Sex: Running the Bases Backwards," which should be a clue to lead blogger and podcast producer Sessions Stepp's position on the issue at hand — as if anyone should need the hint since the former Washington Post reporter's various condemnatory anecdotes about young women and sex were collected between hard covers in 2007's Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both. (In her book, Sessions Stepp advises against relationship-free sex, and encourages kitchen fun for singletons instead. "Bake cookies, brownies, muffins. Ask your girlfriends for assistance. Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods." Girls, if you only can make enough cookies, you too can snag a man!)

Among her many other eminent qualifications for talking to young women in a balanced way about sex, Sessions Stepp is a true believer of the oxytocin junk science, a chief proponent of the late-90s teen oral sex moral panic — her reporting was flatly contradicted by actual statistics about young people's rates of oral sex — and it took her until 2006 to figure out what a "wingman" was. She also originated the term "gray rape."

So it's really no surprise that in her inaugural podcast, Sessions Stepp, in a stilted, motherly voice, marvels at the fact that grown adults no longer find the "bases" metaphor meaningful or informative. Her own all-caps transcript of the segment reads:

WE'VE ALL HEARD THE BASEBALL METAPHORS FOR SEX, LIKE "MADE IT TO SECOND," OR "HIT A HOME RUN." YEARS AGO, AS A GIRL RAN THE BASES, SHE ANTICIPATED A CERTAIN PROGRESSION IN THE RELATIONSHIP. (AT LEAST, SOME GIRLS DID.) GUYS MIGHT TRY TO SKIP A BASE OR TWO AND IT WAS UP TO HER TO FOIL THEIR OFTEN-CLUMSY ATTEMPTS.

WELL, THAT SCENARIO IS NOT SO COMMON ANYMORE… THESE DAYS, SEX FREQUENTLY HAPPENS BEFORE ANYTHING RESEMBLING A RELATIONSHIP. IS THIS A GOOD THING? A BAD THING?

I'll give you one guess!

Sessions Stepp talks to "Amanda", a woman from Los Angeles who, on her second date with a dude, and without — "No, no, no, no. Definitely, not!" — boyfriending him or taking any sensible precautions against oxytocin at all, had sex. The little minx invited him over for a movie and then within the hour they were doing the dirty! The fact that Amanda and her partner saw no harm in this reckless act — in fact, they subsequently did decide to date, and are, shockingly, still together — clearly marks them as either dangerously delusional or extraordinarily lucky, because as everyone Laura Sessions Stepp knows, every single hook-up makes the Baby Jesus cry irrevocably corrodes your own capacity for future love and happiness. As she explains:

SOME YOUNG WOMEN, LIKE AMANDA, ARE LUCKY. THEIR HOOKUP BUDDIES BECOME THEIR HONEYS. BUT IT DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK OUT THAT WAY...ONE PROBLEM WITH TAKING OFF FROM HOME BASE IS THIS: IF YOU START TO FEEL ATTACHED, YOU MAY NOT KNOW YOUR PARTNER WELL ENOUGH TO TELL HIM THAT. YOU'RE AFRAID YOU'LL SCARE HIM AWAY IF YOU BRING UP THAT DREADED WORD "FEELINGS". SO YOU SAY NOTHING…. WHICH CAN MAKE YOU FEEL…JUST BAD — ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR PARTNER AND EVEN THE SEX.

Of course, even the college sophomore Sessions Stepp finds who had a disappointing hook-up experience — she grew to resent the guy following her realization that she felt more strongly about him than he did about her — still prefaced her criticisms with the phrase, "As much as I don't regret having sex with him..."

Statements like Sessions Stepp's play host to a whole set of nested assumptions, most of which are dated and restrictive. (Some of which are just dated. Who under the age of 40 calls their [in]significant other their "honey"?) In the system of sexuality that Sessions Stepp seems to favor — the slow, steady, codified "running of the bases" within a relationship — women are always the sexual gatekeepers. This stance neatly sidesteps any notion of men's responsibility for, well, anything. In Sessions Stepp's view, women trade sex begrudgingly in return for access to the socially-protected role of "girlfriend" and the supposed privileges that come with it. Women who enjoy having sex with casual partners, who don't feel the need to explore their serious, long-term prospects with every guy they date, or to only date guys with whom they feel they might have serious, long-term prospects, women who initiate sex and claim to like it, are just fooling themselves. Worse — they're actually hurting themselves. Because nobody can make an easy transition from having a lot of casual sex at one point in her life in one set of circumstances, to enjoying a more serious relationship at a different point in her life and under a different set of circumstances. It's just not possible! It's because of oxytocin, or something.

Strangest of all is the belief that underlies this and all the rest of Laura Sessions Stepp's work. She argues against casual sex — at least for women — so assiduously on the grounds that it hurts us. That it diminishes our self-esteem and numbs us to real love. But since when is a relationship any prophylactic against heartbreak? No hook-up, no cumulative accounting of a lifetime of hook-ups, will ever hurt as much as a break-up with a partner you love more than anything in this world. Young women know this about relationships. That's probably one reason why we sometimes prefer not to engage in them.

More stories about birth control costs, abortion access, finding a doctor willing to fit you with an IUD even if you haven't had kids, and finagling decent care in our under-insured society would be a lot more welcome — and more useful — than just more of the moralistic same from the likes of Laura Sessions Stepp.

SexReally [SexReally]
StayTeen [StayTeen]
National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy [NCPT]
The Challenge in Helping Young Adults Better Manage Their Reproductive Lives [Guttmacher Institute]
Does Withdrawal Deserve Another Look? [Guttmacher Institute]
A Disconnect On Hooking Up [NY Times]
Moral Panic Comes 'Unhooked' [Campus Progress]
PERCEPTION THAT TEENS FREQUENTLY SUBSTITUTE ORAL SEX FOR INTERCOURSE A MYTH [Guttmacher Institute]
A Bud For The Ladies [WaPo]

Earlier: Cosmo Wonders: Is It Rape If You Had Too Many Jaeger Shots To Remember?

"I just have a huge amount of frustration with guys," he told the Times. "They need to know that so much hurt can come from the lack of respect for women."

Dear Moe,

Here are some explanations of the conversation that I actually had with Randall, and the understanding that he surely had, but didn't present in writing. The main problem with the article is that it presents only the fact of sexual arousal and temptation, and says nothing about the degree. I carefully explained to Randall that almost all men in our culture live at a hyper-stimulated level of sexual arousal, fed by pornography, their own fantasy, advertising, women's fashion choices, etc. Almost everyone knows that men are "horny," but what they don't realize is that it's not a natural state. When you stop pouring gasoline on the fire, as it were, it goes down to a manageable level. Living a chaste lifestyle means not drooling over every attractive woman you see, fantasizing whenever something crosses your mind, and watching pornography. The sexual input is minimal, and so it is easy to live with it from day to day, so that you're not pulled around by your nose. It's an incredibly liberating and hopeful message for men, because they feel like they have no possibility of controlling their sexuality, when in reality it's entirely possible.

About the way that he manipulated the quotations from me: describing my lust as an "untamed beast" was a comment on the nature of lust itself, not the strength of my own. It's untamed precisely because it is lust, and if given free rein it considers nothing but its own gratification. It seeks to use another person to gain personal pleasure, which is why you have to take away constant fuel for it if you want to love and respect women for who they are, and not just how they turn you on. Also, the ways in which things like a touch, a glance, or a random thought can bring arousal is simply an observation about manners in which it can happen. The actual occurence of such stimulation goes down at the same rate as the willful input of lustful stimulation, and while such things (like a thought) may occur regularly, they rarely bring any arousal at all if you learn to let go of them and ignore them—like a fly buzzing around. Basically, it's not a huge deal! I'm frustrated that Randall didn't make any of this clear, because I said all of this to him, and more. It would have been easy for him to pain a picture of me as someone who had fought a battle and emerged free, happy, and comfortable with his sexuality, but instead he makes me seem like a repressed weirdo. All this does is perpetuate the myth that men have no choice except to be horny, and if you act like I do then you'll go crazy and salivate at every little thing that crosses your path. Our culture so badly needs role models of the opposite lifestyle.

Oh, and on another note—Janie was laughing when she was asked about being attracted to me! Lol, we both found it a funny question, but he totally changed it in the article. And we weren't supposed to smile in the photos either—somebody commented on that, lol. They said that Janie and I should smile more and lighten up!

Everything above is what I wrote, so if you could write up something to append to your blog, I would be very grateful.

Peace,

Leo

The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. "The biological drive can be overcome," she said. "It's not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex."

"And you don't go down the street thinking you'd like to have sex with him, him, him and him?" I asked.

"No!" she said, abruptly. "Is that what men do?"

It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something "breathtakingly powerful" that "lights all of your body on fire." He spoke of his lust as "this untamed beast."

Fredell was incredulous: "Leo said that?"

He told me that he struggles constantly against "physical lustful temptation" — that he can be aroused just by a woman's touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by "thoughts that just come out of the blue — basically pornography in my head." They come to him when he's merely walking around campus, or even when he's alone in the library — "like a fly buzzing around."

To the matter of masturbation, he said, "This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that's so deeply ingrained, it's hard to stop."

Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, "Oh, God, no!"

Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said — that the real meaning of masculinity is "being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman." "To have that kind of self-control is really what it means to be a man," Keliher had told me. When he finds himself aroused these days, he endures it and waits for it to pass. In this way, he said he has "matured out of that more infantile need for a woman into a recognition of self-sufficiency." But some women, Keliher granted, continue to give him trouble.
One of these is a freshman — "a very gentle, caring soul," he said, who "works with little kids and stuff." Keliher can't help thinking about her glossy hair and beautiful skin.

Another appears to be Janie Fredell. Keliher smiled and said he was "a little bit" attracted to her — "in very superficial ways," he added. "It's something we laugh about — if we dated."

But Fredell did not laugh. "No!" she erupted, and with increasing volume, "No! No! No! I can't emphasize enough that there is nothing between me and Leo! It's just that we're not compatible in that regard."

Or actually, that is a lie, taking yourself too seriously is up there with "presumptuousness" when it comes to achieving things I guess, so what do I know; I'm still with Lena, for whatever it's worth.

Students Of Virginity [NY Times]