The Virginity Project

This Wheel's on Fire....

Last week’s book cover prompted this little recollection from a new correspondent.

‘I instantly recognized the cover photograph of Alan Harris’s, 'Questions about Sex'. I bought a copy, possibly one of the first editions, and read it way back in those heady days. Actually, back in those ‘Woodstock’ times, I always wore a navy blue suit, collar and tie, except when I was working as a farm casual laborer, and thought premarital sex was very wrong and shocking! However, I did play the guitar. This volume is almost certainly still in my dusty bookshelves, somewhere.’

Cripes, I'm getting mail from Bob Dylan!

Suits? Woodstock? Guitars?
All makes sense to me....

Moving swiftly on….Oh to be freelancing. I say that because if I were freelancing I would have access to a scanner and if I had access to a scanner, I could show you the inside pages of said book, which I noticed as I flipped idly through its pages this morning. Scrawled on the inside cover in biro are the following words, ‘To be passed on’. What a good idea, the information contained within such a tome was hardly the everyday in 1968.

Passed on it clearly was. Written in electric red felt tip are the words, ‘Congratulations from Chris and Chris’. After Chris and Chris had had a good old read, they passed it onto ‘Eric, Ginny and Steve’. But not before they coloured in the rather impressive looking erection on page six with their bright red felt tip pen. Funny.

On another note, it’s been a while since I heard from my regular religious correspondent. He’s gone to ground. Perhaps this might perk him up. As I wondered through the blogosphere this morning, I came across the superbly named bustedhalo.com and Sister Mary Eve, a nun who recently received, divinely I like to think, a copy of Eve Ensler’s, ‘Vagina Monologues’. A top read and I am hoping this might stir him into action so to speak. Sorry in advance for my cheekiness.

While you’re there, give this a bash too. Joseph Marchelewski gives us ‘Ten random thoughts’ on the impending loss of his 27-year-old virginity.

Happy Saturday!

My my, Hey hey....

Today is a full moon. And it’s not just any old full moon, my friends. Oh no. Today is an Aries full moon, and, as you might have gathered, I am an Aries. To celebrate my four-legged, two-horned day of self, I am adding a widget to my Blog that I have been resisting for some time. What has the moon got to do with virginity? My point exactly. Or at least that’s what I thought.

A quick Google takes us from the most tenuous of links – did you know that Air’s first album was called MOON Safari and their second, The VIRGIN Suicides? Right through to the downright significant. Artemis is the goddess of the moon……..and virginity. The moon represents cycles, fertility, endings – and beginnings. We even have a ‘chaste moon’. That happens in March so no need to watch your step just yet. No, September is the harvest moon, so in the words of the great Neil Young...

…there’s a full moon risin'
Lets go dancin’ in the light
We know where the music’s playin’
Lets go out and feel the night…

Good lord, I love the Internet.

Skiing off piste

My mind, thankfully, is not always thinking about virginity and its loss. Frequently my mind is full of other stuff. Today I have thought about sex, chocolate, shoes, what I am going to wear this winter (yes!!), when channel 4 are going to show more episodes of ‘Six Feet Under’, is the cat is going through a bad patch because I’m not at home so much, will I always live in England or up-sticks to another country, can I blog from there, where does the wet patch in my car come from (do you know?), have I forgotten a nephews birthday? (yes, yesterday), will I ever get to interview a man who lost his virginity to a prostitute and has George Bush produced more terrorists than prevented, (a resounding, yes sir!).

Sometimes I get the urge to write about the minutiae, the seemingly inconsequential details of life. That I slept in till nine this morning, (I am always awake by seven), that I drank tea and watched two episodes of Hart to Hart. I then went to the farmers market and bought extortionately priced bread, which I spent the rest of the day eating as opposed to doing what I was meant to be doing, which is writing. That I lay in the buff out back between showers, loving the feeling of hot stone on my skin. That I am house sitting in Twickenham and I just watched ‘The Secret’, lent to me by Barry*, one of my interviewees, a married man who, for one reason and another, has never had penetrative sex. That despite the fact it’s hard to see past the marketing phenomena that is ‘The Secret’, that there’s some challenging stuff in this film. I wondered how people might react if they showed it in prisons and if it would inspire people to change their lives?

Now I am considering a bath, ‘Dodgeball’ at 9pm or a post about nothing in particular. The post won out. As the old saying goes, there’s a first time for everything.

*All names changed to protect identity

I think its Thursday..

Day four in the world of advertising and not only have I survived, but Faris Yakob, he of nifty brand communications blog, ‘Talent imitates, Genius steals’, has nominated me for a ‘Thinking Blogger’ award. Thank you Faris. I am overjoyed at the thought of inspiring…….thought.

In return, I get to nominate five blogs that make me think. About what, I am not sure, but these are the places that my mouse and finger, take me too on a pretty regular basis:

Jump inside the headspace of a politically minded, cat owning, gay wordsmith from New York. Whats not to like? Joe.My.God, I salute you.

Wife in the north brings life to the mundane and meaning to minutiae. School runs, baby sick and builders. All things I would not normally be interested in. All made bewitching beneath the wife’s observant eye.

Tiny Cat Pants. It’s the name, it gets me goin’. Live and direct from Nashville Tennessee, Aunt B introduces us to an assortment of nut-jobs, peeing neighbours and her collection of, um, colourful, relatives.

I don’t much care for law but I like this blog. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that its author was once known to me as ‘Table 3 Mike’. Or maybe its just because when he goes off on one, its worth hanging around for.

There is beauty in simplicity. Post secret is the space between the motionless morning faces of your fellow commuters and the foaming maelstrom of thoughts, feelings and emotions that we don’t dare articulate.

There it is.

I could think of five more, but I would be giving away a little bit too much about the ‘work’ I have been doing for the past four days.

'Billy, don't be a hero..'

OK, I geddit now.

A couple of weeks ago, Hud threw the above retort at Billy, a recent contributor to these pages. How rude, I thought.

I had absolutely no idea what he meant.

Now I do.

It’s a song. From the seventies. I remember bits of the seventies, The Carpenters, Alice Cooper, The Who. But not this bit.

I don’t think Billy will remember either because he would have been minus eight years old.

Here is Billy, not being a hero.

Teenager with a one track mind..

Girl with a One Track Mind cut straight to the chase with Monday’s post.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

$1b is an astonishing amount of money to spend on a abstinence programme that tells teenagers to do the direct opposite of what every hormone in their body is impelling them to do on daily basis.

As Niki, one of The Girl’s commenters says, ‘one of the easiest ways to get a teenager interested in doing something is to tell them not to do it’.

We have a long way to go, both America and the UK, before we get anywhere near the level of sophistication the Dutch apply to the teaching of sex education. They have one of the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world.

Enough said.

Still, I cannot deny a morbid fascination with George Bush and his abstinence programmes.

I wonder how he lost his virginity?

Gosh, it really doesn’t bear thinking about does it…….but…I would still love to know.

In fact the thought of going to America and interviewing Americans in general gets me going. Where does the reality lie between the progressive ideas that pour from the pages of books like Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Borat’s unfortunate frat boys and the popularity of The Silver Ring Thing and other chastity promoting movements?

What is the grassroots truth? Where are America’s youth really at?

And how might those stories compare with those of their parents? People for whom the tipping point between the 1950’s paranoia and purity combo and 1960’s ‘liberation’ is still a relatively fresh memory?

America is a fecund patchwork of cultures, ideas, opportunities and sophistication peppered with an elite few who still persist in wearing the emperors clothing. I would relish the opportunity to cut to the chase, to take that written snapshot of a country that inspires global loving and loathing in equal measures.

All from the perspective of it’s virginity.

A blog is for life, not just for Christmas…

Or….a shaggy blog story. I know, it’s the name of a new book. I haven’t read it yet but it’s a nice idea. Bloggers contribute their best posts, a book is published and all the proceeds go to charity. Nice.

Makes me think of a shaggy blog story of my own. Not that this will necessarily be my best post ever but it certainly featured large in the day of someone who spends an increasing amount of time indoors, hunched over a hot Mac.

It was last week and I was strolling down Fernhead road on my way to meet my friend Hud. It was sunny and it was windy and as I passed the Lebanese my eyes fell upon a collection of rubbish bags stranded next to a lamp-post and…..a rather tired looking chocolate coloured Labrador. He was wedged between a parked car and the pavement, his front body resting on the paving stones, the rest of him parked quite casually in the gutter. As I continued on my way I paused and looked back. He sat impassively, as if this were his average sort of day. Just sitting in the gutter, panting slightly into the wind.

My stomach rumbled. Time was getting on but I seemed unable to continue my journey until I had ascertained exactly what this creature was playing at. I asked in three shops if he belonged to anyone. No, he didn’t. No one seemed especially interested either.

The tipping point came as I bent down and took the little bone shaped tag hanging from his collar between my fingers. ‘Bovril’. On the other side was a number and as I reached for my phone, a family comprising three small children, a teenager and a Staffordshire bull terrier gathered around me, whispering and shuffling. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ ‘I don’t know’, I answered, ‘I’m going to ring the number and find out’. No one home. I left a rambling message detailing Bovril’s exact location and demeanour.

The action began to gather pace, as, out of no-where a large shiny car shrieked to a halt, its owner leaning across the passenger seat and shouting to me through the open window, ‘Awright mate, do you want me to drive you and your dog to the vet’?

‘He’s not my dog’ I said, ‘I’m not sure if there is something wrong with him’.

He left the motor running and hopped out, all sleeveless T-shirt, trainers and three quarter length denim. Young, geezer-ish and suddenly the most pro-active member of our growing group.

‘What’s up with his leg?’ he asked. We looked down at Bovril’s back leg. It did seem to be wedged way too far up and under his body.

Geezer bloke stood in front of him, backing away and clapping. ‘Come on mate, up you get, come on’, he clapped at the dog as Bovril began to make a gargantuan effort to move his hulking furry brown frame upwards and onto the sidewalk. The small crowd encouraged him but his efforts failed and momentum tipped him back again to his pavement cum road sitting position.

‘Come on mate, lets be having you’, Geezer bloke clapped again at him, and once again, he lurched upward and forwards, his back-legs trembling like something that hasn’t walked for a very long time and this time he made it, just as the final character in our set piece arrived.

Pretty, posh and slightly shrill, she demanded to know, ‘What is happening with this dog?’ We all went to talk at once. Bovril, meanwhile, having regained the use of his four rather wobbly limbs, made a dash for it. Posh girl streaked after him. The children meanwhile, had extracted a length of string from one of the shopkeepers and Bovril’s short bid for freedom was curtailed on the corner of Shirland Road as they looped the string around his collar.

Before you could say, I was just going out for lunch and all I got was this scraggy old chocolate Labrador dog, posh girl and geezer bloke have hopped into GB’s still running motor to take Bovril down to the Mayhew dog home, leaving me with instructions to call the owner again and tell her what her dog has been up to. Playing cupid by the looks of things.

Not before Bovril left a rather large parting gift outside the Lebanese.

The teenage family melt back into daily life on Fernhead Road and I continued along my way, wondering if the last four minutes had been a figment of my imagination. They hadn’t, as it happens. I got a phone call later that day from the owner and found out the following Bovril related facts:

-She was delighted to have him home, having not realised he had escaped until getting back from the airport where she had dropped her daughter.

-He is very Arthiritic, hence the wobbly legs. Thank goodness, no broken bones.

-It is his birthday tommorow. He is fifteen years old.

Ahhhh. Happy Birthday Bovril.

You can’t keep a good dog down.

Which brings me neatly (not) to the virginity related part of this post.

Check this out. Ever wondered if it is possible to regain virginity, in much the same way as that rather scary virginity related news story that I posted the other week? But without the pain? Then try this little baby – and get re-virginized. You better believe it.