Retro-Sexual
The Thrill of the Chaste
by Dawn Eden
W Publishing Group
(224 pages, $13.99, paperback)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
The Thrill of the Chaste is a chick book. The author is clearly addressing female readers woman-to-woman. So why am I putting my masculinity on the line by admitting that I read it? Because I, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, have five daughters.
And, like Tevye, I know that things can go very badly for young women today, even those who come from doting parents, a loving home, and the best shelter a pious-ghetto upbringing can offer. I believe that The Thrill of the Chaste can rescue young women from real danger, and so I want the world to know about it.
A New Confessions
I’m not exaggerating when I compare Dawn Eden’s book to St. Augustine’s Confessions. The Thrill is, as the Confessions was, introspective, hip, a gorgeous piece of writing, and so brutally honest and self-revealing that it’s sometimes painful to read: “In a vicious cycle, single women feel lonely because they are not loved,” she writes, “so they have casual sex with men who do not love them. That was my life.”
She speaks of the gradual move from premarital sex to promiscuity, of “learning to detach, to feel as though I could separate the physical actions of sex from its emotional consequences.” She came to see lust as “a way station on the road to love.” “I had blunted my emotions for the sake of physical pleasure.”
She draws an analogy with eating disorders, calling her own promiscuity a sort of “spiritual bulimia.” “Trying to escape loneliness, we accept a sexual act devoid of spiritual nourishment. Such nourishment can come only from the union of two permanently committed souls . . . [F]or a woman, the disconnected feeling that premarital sex brings can be emotionally disastrous.” Indeed, she says, “the same armor that enabled me to tolerate casual sex made me less attractive to the kind of man I most desired.”
For her as for so many others, traditional morality was turned on its head: “Good and evil themselves are redefined. No longer is it bad to allow oneself to use and be used sexually. The only sin is failing to ‘protect’ yourself by using a condom.”
The author recalls that her relationships, devoid of love, often turned on “games”—the desire to control the other or to produce jealousy. In all cases, sex became a useful tool: “The main way I thought I could control a relationship was by either introducing a sexual component or allowing my boyfriend to do so.”
In either case, “I would end up alone and unhappy—but I didn’t know how else to handle a relationship. I felt trapped in a lifestyle that gave me none of the things that the media and popular wisdom promised it would.”
Mike Aquilina is vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com) and a general editor of The Catholic Vision of Love catechetical series.
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more on sex from the online archives
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