The association of virginity with purity comes at least in part from the fact that it meant the individual almost certainly didn't have any STDs. Similar wording shows up in other expressions not connected to sexual activity: "A clean man" is a man who doesn't have leprosy. We can talk about how the idea of virginity was used or misused in different societies, but it's not arbitrary and does have practical origins.

But other than that, yeah. Chuck this guy. If you're feeling generous, check back in when he's outgrown some of his naivete. Being sexually experienced is normal for twenty-first-century women, and he shouldn't presume to forgive her for it.

And one other thing LW, your boyfriend (big emphasis on the BOY part of that word, btw) is a liar. He masturbates. He may shame himself into silence about it, but he strokes the trouser-trout, I guarantee it. Every. Guy. Masturbates.

You don't need to date a liar.

" a bit younger but mature" any time I hear that I want to scream BULLSHIT!!!!!

MOS: he's not mature for his age, you just like him better. There's nothing wrong with that, but shaming a friend for their choices around sex is not mature. There's plenty of other folks out there, give one that hasn't been an asshole to you a chance.

Urgh. Back to the recycled letters. NEED MOAR SAVAGE.

Anyone check out the GOP debate? Any favorite moments?

@3 - Trouser-trout? If I was well-versed in emoticons, I'd make a squichy face at you...

LISTEN TO DAN, MOS! He's right on the button! Having grown up Baptist, I am well familiar with all the "wait for marriage, don't defile yourself, DON'T DO ANYTHING pleasurable like watch porn or fuck outside the blessed confines of marriage or you will be damned" lines of reasoning. When I was younger than you, I bought into it, but once my brain started functioning I realized how repressive and fucked-up the whole thing was. You are young, but even so, I think that you have already figured out that this is self-loathing, sanctimonious bullshit! "God" created you. "God" created your urges, not the devil! "God" wants you to be happy. Run away! As fast as you can!

Oh, and sperifera is right. EVERY guy spanks the monkey. Learn it. Repeat it. Embrace it.

Uhm, did anyone catch that she's 18 and he's "a bit younger" than her? Would that be 16? 13? Especially when you consider that girls mature significantly faster than boys maybe she shouldn't be approaching this as if they're equals regardless of how mature he seems.

"younger, though mature for his age." is an oxymoron--or a unicorn! This guy is a train wreck in the making. In a few years he will be drinking and having sex and realizing what a fool he was....or he will kill himself because he can't deal with being normal instead of being a Christ-like fictional character, poor thing.

The gall of a teenager to describe themselves as pansexual - aren't we the precocious one.

These two probably deserve each other.

The hyper-repressed one will likely grow out of, or turn in to a monster, the other will probably continue to be absolutely an insufferable know-it-all for another 60, 70 years given today's medical technology.

Youth is wasted on the young.

@12: What a crappy comparison. At least her identity doesn't inflict misery on others. His, so very many people do NOT grow out of. She's a bit dippy for thinking this is a good idea but she doesn't "deserve" his abuse.

Wow. Time to play a drum solo on those drums that makes kind of a "Dump" sound when you bang on 'em. Dump dump dumpdump DUMP.

Sangu @8, trouser- snake.. You like that one any better?

I hope they got married and have a kid already!

@DRF LMFTFY - "meant that almost certainly the WOMAN didn't have any STD's..." Purity has rarely been an attribute required of or celebrated in men.

I always wanted an update for this letter to see if she DTMFA. Especially since it seems he's got her halfway believing that she is 'dirty and sinful' for liking porn, masturbation, and not being a virgin.

this letter is boring and obvious.

1. she is writing SL... and the "boyfriend" sounds like his maturity level could get nowhere near SL on a good day
2. she is "pansexual" (she likes flutes?.....jk)
3. he is 16 or 17
4. he won't sex her up
5. he thinks being sexual is the devil's work

so.... im waiting for the part of the letter that tells us exactly WHY she is chasing this particular guy? something has simply never added up with this old letter. Mismatch is an understatement. "Dan, i am a meat-eating lioness who lives in veldt. Recently, i started dating a vegan herd animal who speaks no lion at all. He wants me to quit the veldt and eat leaves and never mate. What should i do?" Dan - eat the motherfucker. Seriously, where is the question in this letter? or does she just want reassurance that she isn't in fact damaged and she should find a BF who has potential...

Religion is like paint chips. The more you swallow the more you are poisoned. The healthiest choice is to stop chewing on the woodwork.

I'm with you, @19 msa, this cries out for an update!
And, Chairman@20, she's 18, just barely starting to figure out that life is really a barrel of pickled fish but that doesn't mean you have to eat it. I thought I was pretty smart at 18. Turns out I still had a bit to learn. Still do.
@21kwod Nice fortune cookie!

Dear Dan,
I'm an 18 year old Miley Cyrus fan who needs advice about fisting my boyfriend after prom.
Signed,
Creepy Fat Guy in Basement

LW, religion is what greedy and psychopathic controlling people use to rape, plunder, and pillage with impunity. Jesus, if he existed, had no problem with premarital sex, his own mother had sex while single! This boy is extremely fucked up in the head, and whomever brainwashed him - parents, grandparents, whatever are cruel, scary people.

You've seen Carrie, yes?

RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN, You can't help him. He'll need years of counseling before he's someone you can date. Associating sex with impurity and Satan means he's on his way to being a tortured, sadistic, abusive dude, maybe even a serial killer, unless he can get away from whomever controlled and twisted him, and receive serious counseling and deprogramming. RUN.

@3

As my friend's biology teacher said at the start of Sex Ed at school in England, "There's wankers, and there's liars."

I knew a guy who didn't masturbate once. Just once, though.

"... but is willing to date me anyway."

One of the most pathetic attitudes a POS could exhibit. LW, you don't need his kind of controlling, religioustic (I think I just combined religious and masochistic) sanctimony, even if you're probably giving him a pass because he's your first "love". As long as he's on his high horse, you definitely have no future together, let alone the present.

"I am an 18-year-old pansexual..."
OK, that's plenty right there. Moving on.

@26: You made reading the comments worth it.

Secretagent @18: Interesting point, at least these purity campaigners are applying their ridiculous standards to boys and girls equally...

And @12: Teenagers have the internet these days.

@10 Yeah, I was figuring about sixteen.

@18 No, men who've never had sex are also likely to have no STDs. As for purity being valued in men, yes it is significantly less often than in women, but again for a non-arbitrary reason. Virginity also meant that the woman wasn't already pregnant. A lot of ancient cultures (and a few modern ones) believed that an embryo could like dormant in a woman's body for years, that a widow, for example, could give birth to her husband's child years after he died. As for sexual purity being valued in men, consider both Buddhist and Christian monks (not to be confused with Christian priests; they just needed celibacy).

All that came to mind was sarcasm: "no red flags there...." "holy sexual incompatibility batman!"

You are young. I get it. He is young. I get it. So its time for you both to do what young people do - learn from your screw ups... yeah!

You are going to DTMFA, and learn "I am not unclean. I deserve to be with someone who values me and does not hold my past against me, but revels in it, because that's infinitely cooler and leaves me feeling better."

He is going to learn, "I don't treat people I care about like shi!t because then they leave."

And my small personal story. I was very inexperienced with my first hub, who was a perv. I followed him down into varsity sex. We ended up divorcing and he told me as I left that no "decent" man would want me with my sexual history....

Because... you know... I was now the spawn of satan.

Hint, that was one in a long line of signs the guy was a douche and I was a fool for marrying him.

Hint, I married a dude who, while he didn't want to do the varsity level sex I had, thought, score! She's probably got a red hot motor and can suck start a harley. Lots of sex! Weeee!

And yes, there has been a lot of weeeee!

-Bi-Gal too. <3

PS, tell your friends to STFU. They aren't in the relationship, you are. They aren't very experienced either, and probably think you all look cute in "selfies." Oddly, I'd never encourage anyone to stay in a relationship they wanted to leave..... If they want to leave, I am probably missing something....

I don't get why people are being critical of her identifying as pansexual. She's said she likes girls and boys. Pansexual may be seen as a silly label with a potential for puns (I'm dutch oven-sexual!) but it means they are also interested in people outside the gender binary implied by "bisexual", and I don't see why that's something that should be scoffed at.

@29: They always get SO MAD when you call them out on being liars, too.

@1 - I agree with @18: purity and adultery taboos rarely apply to men, historically. And I think the biggest STD most people were worried about was pregnancy. If you fuck around before marriage, you won't come to the marriage bed carrying someone else's kid. A lot of western laws around sex and marriage are around inheritance and legacy -- and making sure it's your kid who inherits. Before modern genetic testing, it was a lot easier to prove who the mother was (witnesses to the delivery, etc.) than who the father was. Some cultures solved that by having matrilineal descent. Patriarchal cultures solved it by proscribing women's sexuality in ways that rarely equally applied to men.

I do agree that with the exception of dudes who are more asexual or have a very low sex drive, the vast majority of guys who claim they don't masturbate are lying (especially guys who aren't having sex with a partner on a frequent basis). But I did know one guy who I believe was telling the truth when he said he didn't. He wasn't religious and had no moral hangups about it, but he said he had the most mind-blowingly spectacular wet dreams when he was pent up and he looked forward to seeing what fantasies his subconscious mind would present to him. I imagine he's a bit of an exception.

I think he sounds just about as nasty as the 23-year-old-woman I really disliked from not long ago, possibly worse, but for one thing he's presumably underage and for another it's not entirely clear from the letter all of which words are hers, which are his and which are her interpretation of his.

I suspect his apparent "maturity" is really just the air of assurance of a lifelong supposedly true believer whose faith has so far gone untested. I think we might well have directed more of the inquiry into what she was doing joining the wrong sort of youth group in the first place.

This letter recalls to mind the Cold Case episode 5.01 or 5.02 (I think they titled it "That Woman" because it opened with a HS class reference to Ms Lewinsky) in which a HS girl with a s*y reputation is humiliated when a makeout session turns out to be a prank and takes up with the school purity club, only to find out that everyone in the club is a huge mess.

@32 the criticism isn't about her "pansexual-ness", it's inserting it, absolutely needlessly, into this letter. I've met plenty of these people, they aren't rare, although in present society they are frequently lauded as even-more-special than most, so their smug asshole factor goes up like 10,000x. And trust me, *that* (@14) is definitely inflicting some misery on me.

Furthermore, jesus, here's a guy who is saying he's not ready to have sex. THAT AIN'T ENOUGH? If this girl isn't down with what her boyfriend wants sexually, she either needs to live with it or move on. It's VERY NORMAL for a guykid at that age to want to save themselves until marriage - even I did, and I wasn't raised any type of religion at all - I just had romantic fantasies of foreverlove and all that syrupy shit.

Our society is fucking crazy. we're cool with saying a magazine makes girls anorexic but talk about this boy's religious convictions like it's a choice, despite the fact that most kids are forced to attend church every week for a majority of the life.

@37: "possibly worse"

I'd say his disdain and hate for her sexuality should certainly be considered "worse" than the woman's fear and confusion.

Ms Rand - If he's the same when he's 23, sure, but 16/17 is more of a mitigating factor. They have similar inclinations to require that their partners fit in a very narrow box; she has the mitigating factor that hers is theoretical.

She lost me at "willing to date me". Hon, as young as you are, as early in your relationship as this is, if he isn't "eager to date me", "panting to date me", "desperate to date me", dump him. There's a lot more fun out there than this guy.

@40: Nod, I'd just see the boy as someone who could much more easily grow up be the what you feared the still-young-herself Dom could become. While her experience is all theoretical, his may still fester and amplify.

@1 No, the origin of valuing virginity in western cultures has nothing to do w/ contracting stds. It's about ownership, and the transition from matrilineal inheritance to patrilineal. In the latter, the tribe/city/household/etc was ruled over by the brother and sister, and the sister's children would inherit from their mother. The father/sperm donor might be brought into the family, but not always.

When western cultures moved towards patrilineal inheritance, the father had to ensure that whoever inherited his wealth/rulership was his actual child and not Jose's from two valleys over who just happened by one day. Thus he had to make sure that his bride was not only virginal, but that the relationship (for the female at least) was strictly monogamous.

This is the source and start of our double-standard approach to relationships and sexuality: The middle east & levant, around 4000 BCE.

Time to toss away that moldy decrepit bit of cultural detritus that's been clinging to our brains like barnacles onto a rusted out wreck on the beach, hey?

@43 Then how come even cultures that have different rules about who inherits property still value virginity? And Western cultures didn't "move toward" patrilinear inheritance in the middle ages; it goes back to the Greeks and Romans and earlier.

Ah, the Middle East and Levant... ...with their obsessions with being ritually clean and ritually unclean. Anyone who had open sores or leaking fluids was considered unclean because that usually meant they were contagious.

@33 I was not reacting to this silly boy's belief in purity but to the letter-writer's and to Mr. Savage's dismissing the idea without engaging it. He is perfectly at liberty to believe that sex doesn't make someone impure, but the letter-writer clearly thinks it does. "Oh just stop feeling that way!" isn't helpful. "Your beliefs are stupid; replace them with mine" isn't helpful. And yes, having sex most certainly can make someone impure, and not only in the religious or spiritual sense; STDs are also part of the reason we think of sex as unclean, and probably at least part of the origin of the spiritual meaning.

@35 Strict rules about male sexuality were rarer than strict rules about female sexuality, but they were not at all absent.

@44: "to the letter-writer's and to Mr. Savage's dismissing the idea without engaging it. He is perfectly at liberty to believe that sex doesn't make someone impure, but the letter-writer clearly thinks it does. "Oh just stop feeling that way!" isn't helpful. "Your beliefs are stupid; replace them with mine" isn't helpful."

Sure it is. His beliefs are stupid and she should not date someone with stupid beliefs. You can't tackle religious zealots head-on, just sidestep and let them surround themselves with misery on their lonesome.