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To save yourself for marriage means to refrain from vaginal intercourse until your wedding night. While in theory I can get behind the magical idea of saving that particular sex act for the one special person you want to spend your life with, and everyone should have agency and personal choice in the matter, and there may not be anything inherently wrong with ‘saving oneself’, I find that this particular take on sex to be hugely problematic.
First of all, the idea of saving oneself is really fundamentally destructive. It passes control and ownership to your partner, instead of having control and ownership and agency within your own body. If you are saving yourself, this means you are saving that thing in order to hand it over to your partner. That may sound romantic to some, but the overarching theme of property in marriage, particularly historically, creates huge ramifications for married couples. Not to mention the fact that while some men do choose to save themselves, there has always been much more pressure put on women to hold onto their virginity, which is sexist and misogynistic.
Another serious problem is this idea that vaginal intercourse is the holy grail of sex. This particular sexual experience is only one of the many intimate sexual experiences that two people can share together. It is incredibly heterosexist that this experience is dubbed in a specific sacred way. I can recognize that part of that is the fact that penis-in-vagina sex is what results in procreation, but the reality is that the majority of the sex humans have is based on pleasure. This means that when we glorify vaginal intercourse and put it on this pedestal and consider it to be the definition of ‘sex’, we discount all the other ways that we derive sexual and intimate pleasure from each other. We also discount sex between same-sex couples, sex with those who have physical disabilities and may just simply not be able to have that particular kind of sex, but experience massive amounts of sexual pleasure and connection through other sexual expressions, and sex between men and women who don’t wish to focus on vaginal intercourse. There is just way too much discounting of a diverse sexual experience.
Another issue is the fact that marriage is usually intended as a lifetime companionship and partnership and if you are not sexually active with that person (and I don’t mean vaginal intercourse, I mean however you define sexually active…like, can you get each other off, can you be sexually intimate with each other and pleasure each other, are you sexually compatible, do you like the same things, are your kinks compatible with each other), there is a big risk that you may end up in a sexless and sexually void marriage, which is not what most of us are signing up for.
1. I’d save myself for marriage, but then I’d never get a date.
2. My boyfriend wants to save himself for marriage, but I suck his cock 4-5 times a week. How do I get it through his head that oral sex IS sex?
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