“According to a fascinating and bewildering investigation in the Guardian by Abigail Haworth Japanese young people are losing interest not just in marriage but in romantic relationships. “Some have even given up on sex. The national press is calling it sekkusu shinai shokogun, or celibacy syndrome.” This is, of course, having a terrible impact on the nation’s birth rate.
Reading this, naturally, the first thing I think of is the song Turning Japanese by the Vapors, which has the lines:
No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women
No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark
Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone Ranger
LISTEN to Turning Japanese HERE
“Songwriter David Fenton explains: ‘Turning Japanese is all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn’t expect to.'” He denies that it contains either the sexual or racial connotations to which it has been attributed. “It could have been (turning) Portuguese, Lebanese, anything that fitted with that phrase. It has nothing to do with the Japanese,” the guitar lick and the video image notwithstanding.
That story about the young Japanese came out around the same time as I noticed articles on Facebook from some Christian pastors suggesting that sex is not meant for enjoyment, but that one ought to read a book or see a movie if one wants to have fun.
It’s ironic that young Japanese have inadvertently adopted the credo of ministers half a world away. (Perhaps they should read this – WARNING: explicit – article about the joys of premarital sex.)
Of course, part of the argument against premarital sex, beyond the religious, has to do with an unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Even now, About half of the of the 6.7 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unplanned… and “women with incomes at or below the federal poverty line are five times more likely than those at the highest income levels to become pregnant by accident.”
The trouble with the virginity pledge is that while it may be an “effective means of delaying sexual intercourse initiation among those inclined to pledge…; pledging does not appear to affect sexual safety among pledgers who fail to remain abstinent.” Indeed, ‘abstaining’ teens still get STDs.
When it comes to sex, ignorance is NOT bliss.