In all seriousness, though, I have to wonder about Christine O'Donnell, not from a moral standpoint, but from a mental health standpoint. This is not about "She's crazy, ha ha", but rather about What the hell happened to her in college to make her be like this?"
O'Donnell likes to paint herself as a chaste woman, but as Alex Pareene pointed out last week, O'Donnell admitted that in her days at Fairleigh Dickinson, she did things she regrets -- "drinking too much and having sex with guys with whom there wasn't a strong emotional connection." You know what? So did I. So did a lot of women. I'll bet that like me, she also had sexual experiences that today we would call acquaintance rape.
I've written before about whether it's healthy to wrap oneself in the label of "survivor of rape" for the rest of your life because some guy held you down on a bed in college and told you if you didn't fuck him, he'd rip your clothes off and throw them out the window. Yes, that happened to me, I've written about it before, and while today one might say that this kind of behavior on the part of males ought to be legally actionable, I'm not sure how my life would have been enhanced by getting on a witness stand and having to tell a defense attorney trying to paint me as a whore that yes, I went to the guy's room willingly.
Yes, there's the world as we'd like it to be, but there's the world as it is, and I think I'm much better off having decided after that incident "You know, I think maybe I'm not going to go to bedrooms in frat houses anymore", putting it behind me, and going on to have a good life and a successful marriage of 24 years duration last Tuesday than I would have by wearing a bad experience like an open wound for the rest of my life -- or by deciding that no one else should ever have sex. It's like the women who regret their abortions and work hard to have abortion made illegal so that no one else has the choice they did.
My spidey-sense just tells me that Christine O'Donnell had at least one of those bad experiences in college, and that what we're seeing in her chastity advocacy is a result. So I have a message for Miss O'Donnell:
Chrissie, it's OK to be traumatized by a bad experience. Really, it is. And everyone responds differently. And if what you have to do in order to live your life after such an experience is to live "as a chaste woman", then be my guest. However, you have to realize that not everyone responds the way you do. People have sex. They do. And the God you believe in wouldn't have made it pleasurable if He didn't want you do do it. I'm sorry you have regrets in your life, and I'm more sorry that you can't seem to get beyond those. Perhaps a good therapist could help you get past them and let you make a decision about chastity through clear eyes, rather than through the prism of whatever happened to you all those years ago at FDU. But the one thing to keep in mind is that this is YOUR issue and YOUR problem, and you have to work it out for yourself. Imposing your response to trauma on the general public is not befitting a public official.
I wish you well. And seriously. Talking to someone might help.
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