prostitution and covenant

Here's an article about a guy who auctions his virginity as documentarians film a movie about it. A girl was auctioning hers, too, but that's less surprising, as is the difference in starting bids. Yeeeesh! So much to say here. I guess one reason for the disparity is purely mechanical: a man could have a satisfying time with a completely inexperienced woman, but a woman almost certainly won't have a satisfying time with a completely inexperienced man.

Deeper, though, is the main issue in my opinion, and that is common sexual economics. Sex is, for many many people, something that women provide for men at some price: it's up to the woman, then, to decide what she's "worth," and it's either a hamburger and movie, or willingness to hold hands in public, or willingness to commit to being a boyfriend, or a fortune of several million dollars, or $70 an hour, or marriage and no less. All up and down the scale, though, this is a prostitutional model of sex — and it's one that I encountered in youth programs at my church! Naturally, at church, the prostitutes were encouraged to be as expensive as possible, not giving away their virginity when they could sell it for an ultimate price: a man's possessions and life in marriage. (This was invariably pitched to girls: guys were never seen as prostitutes, because, naturally, guys are the customer.)

Completely out of the blue, then, comes our model of marriage: the covenantal model — so different from the prostitutional model in every way. People just don't understand it. The other day Catherine and I were having dinner with a friend, and talking about marriage and cheating, and he just couldn't understand how hugging and kissing and having a candlelight dinner could be as worthy of fury/divorce/murder/complete dissolution of marriage as actually sleeping with someone. Catherine and I both feel that emotional cheating is just as much a betrayal as sexual cheating, and arguably more. But when your view of sex is the prostitutional model, and you're talking with someone who's on the covenantal model, it's like one person's playing chess and the other's playing checkers: same board, same talk of "pieces" and "moves," but there just can't be a game till the game itself is discussed openly.

The covenantal model is foreign even to most Christians, I've reluctantly and sadly concluded. But it calls, more and more insistently and gently to people all around us who are weary and heavy-laden.

Maybe the most disturbing thing in the article is what goes completely unsaid: [1] that sex might be worth something other than money; and [2] that in the brutal gladiatorial entertainments of reality TV, it's always and only the gladiators who are destroyed — if you don't count the incremental coarsening of conscience in every audience member.