Arleen Spenceley

[callout]This post is an excerpt from chapter 1 — “Chastity: A Better Sexual Ethic” — of my forthcoming book, Chastity Is For Lovers: Single, Happy, and (Still) a Virgin, (Ave Maria Press, 2014).[/callout]

I parked my Plymouth Neon in a dirt lot and skirted the rocks strewn atop it by taking a shortcut across a patch of grass.

My flip-flops finally smacked pavement when I reached the street between the parking lot and the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, a complex that covers the quiet, northwest corner of the University of South Florida’s Tampa campus.

I traipsed across a covered courtyard, where a handful of fellow grad students in the Department of Rehabilitation and Mental Health Counseling congregated at picnic tables. I walked into the building. Inside, the cold air eradicated all evidence of the late-afternoon heat from the mid-May sun outside. I took off my sunglasses and turned a couple of corners toward classroom 1636 for the first session of my human sexuality class.

I sat at the back of the room, plugged in my laptop,and pretended not to be nervous. The professor, Dr. Dae Sheridan—a young, spirited sex therapist—interrupted my anxiety by inviting the class to shout the names we know for sexual activity and for the body parts we associate with sex. Continue reading “An Excerpt from Chapter 1 of ‘Chastity is For Lovers’”

[callout]This post is an excerpt from the introduction to my forthcoming book, Chastity Is For Lovers: Single, Happy, and (Still) a Virgin, (Ave Maria Press, 2014).[/callout]

I rested my head on the tall back of a black vinyl, executive-style chair and stared at a computer screen. The chair’s wheels rolled audibly across the mat beneath it as I—a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times—reached toward the desk in front of me to type.

The e-mail, addressed to an editor named Jim, expressed my sudden reluctance to do what I already promised I would: write about sex. A week earlier, I had pitched the idea to Jim with confidence: a sex essay for the front page of the “Perspective” section of the Times, inspired in part by the demise of a bad relationship.

The day I pitched it, how many readers we had—more than four hundred thousand on Sundays—hadn’t dawned on me. When it finally did, all that had been bold in me got anxious. I—a budding columnist, a practicing Catholic, and a virgin by choice—had a passion for putting what I believed in print. But that morning, the thought of revealing my virginity to the secular public sounded like a bad idea. I so warily considered the potential repercussions—unwanted attention, unsafe situations, and uncomfortable colleagues—that I forgot why I pitched the idea in the first place. Continue reading “An Excerpt From the Introduction to ‘Chastity Is For Lovers’”