Chasity is now seen as part of a new sexual rebellion. Is this the start of a backlash against promiscuity, or just another fad? Nadine O'Regan reports.
One day Rivers Cuomo, the bespectacled, so-nerdy-he's-cool lead singer of multi-platinum selling American rock band Weezer, had an epiphany that inspired him to change his life.
The more he indulged his sexual desires, Cuomo realised, the more hollow and lonely he felt. The fulfilment that he craved, the kind he found when practising vipassana meditation, was eluding him in his everyday existence. He was, as he put it in an essay he wrote at Harvard University, lost "in the emptiness of my own excess".
So 34-year-old Cuomo made a decision.
He knelt down on the floor of his Los Angeles home, shut his eyes tight, placed his hands together in front of his chest and repeated three times the words, "I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind, whatsoever, for the next two years".
After he had modified his pledge a little - electing to remain chaste either until the end of his vow or until he got married - Cuomo began living out his promise.
That was three years ago.
Fast-forward to May 2006; to a Rolling Stone cover story on Weezer and an interview with the still-chaste Cuomo. Employing the kind of tone that made one think of a squeamish A-student forced to handle frog innards, the reporter portrayed Cuomo as deeply eccentric, the kind of guy who "gets off on deprivation".
Biting the heads off bats à la Ozzy Osbourne was fair enough, the reader was left to conclude, but chastity? Now, that's odd.
The article - albeit unintentionally - ran a highlighter pen over the current norms of society, illuminating a world where raunchiness is normal, porn stars conventional, and, as Ariel Levy has suggested in Female Chauvinist Pigs, women adopt the Playboy bunny logo as a symbol of liberation. But the magazine also spawned something else: a flurry of internet editorials outraged on Cuomo's behalf, which in turn indicated the existence of a society where Cuomo is not a freak but a symbol, a spearhead for a nascent counter-culture.
Leading abstinence movement, the Silver Ring Thing, claims to have more than 22,000 members in the US alone. As their books, blogs and bands are demonstrating, these chastity converts are not the oddball, whey-faced, lips-pursed, straw-in-hair yokels their detractors might like to think them.
They're as likely to dwell in cities, wearing designer threads, as they are to be found clutching rosary beads in the Bible Belt. They don't see themselves as anachronisms but as revolutionaries, kicking against convention.
"Here in the 21st century, trying to be like Doris Day - sexy yet modest, confident yet humble, lighthearted yet deep - is simply unhip," writes Dawn Eden in her forthcoming book, The Thrill of the Chaste. "However, it's so unhip that it's considered downright subversive."
Eden is a chastity convert, a 37-yearold New Yorker with a bubbly laugh and a passionate love of music, who works as an assistant news editor for the New York Daily News. Eden spent her 20s drifting in and out of short-lived relationships, desperately wanting to find her soulmate, but somehow always ending up right back at square one.
"No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't transform a sexual encounter - or a string of encounters - into a real relationship," she writes. "Our culture relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a waystation on the road to love. [But] the most I could hope for, it seemed, was a man who would treat me with 'respect', but who really wouldn't have any concern for me once we'd split the tab for breakfast."
In October 1999, Eden, formerly an agnostic Jew, converted to Christianity.
With her conversion came two realisations - the first was that she now felt much happier and more secure.
The second was that if she were to truly live by the rules of her faith, it would life - a life free of pre-marital sex.The last time Eden had sex was in March 2003.
She's single and doesn't plan to have premarital sex again. She's finding it hard - "it is a struggle. I could fall off the chastity wagon any day" - but she's trying.
In Ireland, there are many who share Eden's struggle and once again they have little in common with the prevailing social stereotype of them.
Jamin O'Donovan (26) is not just the bassist with gloriously quirky, Flaming Lips-style Cork band Fred, he's also a member of the Baha'i faith, a religion founded in 19th-century Persia, which now has about six million members worldwide. Baha'is have many rules - O'Donovan cannot drink, take drugs or indulge in premarital sex, but "the sex one is the hardest", he says.
Currently single, O'Donovan's longest relationship lasted a year and a half.
None of his relationships broke up because of his religious beliefs, he says. But nailing his colours to the mast is far from easy.
"It's difficult to live by the standards that I try to live by in a society where those standards are looked on as almost ridiculous," he says. "If it's a Wednesday and you're having a one-to-one conversation with someone, people would be very open to your ideas and think, 'Wow, that's interesting'. But if it's a Friday night, people would be like, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard'."
O'Donovan adds that although crowds sometimes sneer, people privately tell him they think his choice is "amazing".
What exactly constitutes chastity is the subject of much disagreement, though. For some converts, chastity simply means avoiding premarital sex. For others, it means disavowing everything from premarital sex to passionate kissing.
When Rivers Cuomo dated a beautiful girl in 2003, he wondered what exactly they could do when he finally brought her home with him. "How does that feel, baby?" he asked her, as he frantically fondled her elbow.
Like a student reciting a rhyme, Eden can sing off exactly how her progressions towards different levels of chastity have unfolded.
"Two and a half years ago was the last time any part of my body was naked with a man. Just under a year ago was the last time I got very sexually excited, with clothes on, with a man."
Eden believes that people are becoming more receptive to those who choose chastity, not least because they're discovering that the post-feminist world they inherited is not living up to expectations.
"I think women feel they've been lied to, they've been sold a bill of goods with this Sex and the City lifestyle," she says.
Ask around and people easily identify with the melancholy picture Eden has painted of modern life.
"I know one girl who sleeps around all the time," says Sarah, a 35-year-old office worker. "She can't understand why the guys don't call her the next day."
"There's a definite lack of depth in relationships today," says O'Donovan.
"When I go out with the lads, a lot of them are just viewing women to see if there's a chance for sex. It seems very base. Whereas I find I can talk to whoever and develop normal relationships."
Both O'Donovan and Eden have excellent support networks.
O'Donovan knows about 20 other Baha'is of around his age based in Cork. While his non-religious acquaintances think marriage is for 40-year-olds, many of his Baha'i friends, even those younger than him, are already married. It's hardly surprising given the rules by which they must abide.
Even Rivers Cuomo, who had once viewed marriage as "as undesirably permanent as a tattoo", soon began to revise his opinion.
On June 18th, Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, a woman he'd known since 1997. He has presumably spent the time since rediscovering the joys of other parts of the body besides the elbow.
Since every line of Eden's book is shaped and shadowed by her intense desire to marry, it seems almost cruel to ask her what will happen if she doesn't ever find the right person. But she is surprisingly stoic about the prospect.
"Experience has shownme that I'm not getting more unhappy. I'm getting happier. So, as depressing as it may be to think of another five years, or a lifetime, of not being married, the depression is only in me in the fear. Actually living out a chaste lifestyle indefinitely is not sad. I'm accomplishing so much with my life that I didn't think I'd be able to accomplish."
And then she laughs her bubbly laugh, and it rings out strong and bright.
• The Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden will be published by W Publishing Group
