Tune In: Abstinence and the Single Life

What: City Visions Radio presents “Abstinence and the Single Life: An Interview with Anna Broadway, author of Sexless in the City”

When: Monday, June 9, 2008; 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. PCT; during the show, call in with your questions and comments to (415) 841-4134 or email them at feedback@cityvisionsradio.com.

Where: City Visions Radio, 91.7 FM, KALW or online at www.cityvisionsradio.com

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Catch the show as City Visions talks with me about what’s it like being chaste but still part of the dating scene in San Francisco, why (aside from religious belief) people choose to remain abstinent, and the chastity and abstinence movement in general.

Join the conversation with your stories, views and questions.

“Abstinence and the Single Life” will air Monday, June 9, 2008, at 7 p.m. PCT on City Visions Radio, KALW 91.7 FM. To learn more about City Visions Radio, subscribe to their podcast or listen live online, visit www.cityvisionsradio.com. During the show, call in your questions and comments to (415) 841-4134 or email feedback@cityvisionsradio.com.

Mid-week reading trifecta

For those either curious or desperately bored on this Wednesday, there were a few new articles on the book this weekend, with especially nice turns by The Oklahoman and the
Tampa Tribune.

And for something a bit more original, check out my new post on the Radiant blog “The Pulse”: a look at Baby Mama, Iron Man, movie sex scenes and what I call “the lost art of implication.”

Happy Wednesday!

Buy Sexless from BN.com and save 15%!

In case you haven’t bought your copy of Sexless in the City yet, you can take 15% off the cover price now through May 19 when you buy it from Barnes and Noble and use code Y8Y8E9R.

Already got it? Here’s an offer for you too. If you like the book enough that you’d like to share it with a friend as a graduation/Memorial Day/kick-off-your-summer-beach-reading gift, write me with both of your names and your address, and I’ll send a signed bookplate for both you and your friend ... until my bookplate copies run out. I wish I could offer to come sign the books in person, but at this point there’s no book tour planned, so I can’t guarantee when I’m likely to next be in your city.

Don’t forget we also have a select number of copies to give out to people who want to join the Sexless street team by helping spread the word about the book and its soundtrack, suggesting your book club read it (if you’re in one) and so on. Tell us how you could creatively let people know about the book, and we’ll send you a copy (while supplies last).

Lastly, if you’re done with the book, but curious about all the songs and books I quote in it, I’ve compiled a handy reference list of all the authors and artists to whom my book owes such a debt.

Thanks for reading!

Interview in the Chronicle

For those of you who didn’t see it, my interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Heidi Benson ran in the Style section today. While on the whole it’s very accurate, a couple minor clarifications are called for.

1. Celibacy vs. chastity. I generally dislike calling myself celibate, since that implies the vow of lifelong abstention from sex taken by Catholic priests (though not by Anglicans, as one friend hastened to inform me). To be celibate technically can refer merely to the state of being unmarried or refraining from sexual relations — both of which are accurate in my case — but I prefer the broader and more specific term chaste, defined as “refraining from sexual intercourse that is regarded as contrary to morality or religion.”
   
2. Literary agents. While I was indeed brushed off by the first one I spoke with, I was signed a couple months later by the marvelous Jane Dystel. Having wondered at first if it was worth trying to get an agent (when there was already some publisher interest in the book), I cannot stress enough how worthwhile it’s been to have Jane as my champion and adviser. As much as it can somewhat lengthen the process of selling a book, getting that expertise and representation is invaluable. You don’t know how much you don’t know until you have an agent.

Choices like mine can often be perceived as repression, disinterest in sex or lack of opportunity, but as I try to explain in the book, it’s none of those things in my case. Choosing to be abstinent until marriage doesn’t take sex off the table, but it certainly reduces the circumstances necessary for sex — finding someone I’d like to grow old with, and he with me — to something largely beyond my control. When you find yourself making a choice like that, it raises questions about both your identity and the character of the God who asks that of you.

As I’ve reckoned with these questions, I’ve realized that if who I am is fundamentally and principally a sexual being, then yes, I do risk living an unfulfilled life if I wind up dying a virgin. But if I who am is more than just a sexual being, my life’s fulfillment doesn’t depend on how many lovers or great sexual experiences I have (and no, I’m not naive enough to think they’ll all be fantastic).

While I do hope to someday marry — and certainly sooner rather later — I like to think the lesson I’m learning through this prolonged abstinence will actually give me a healthier, better sex life down the road. A few years ago, sex would have been the earth, moon and sky and probably several planets for me, and therefore a major letdown at some point. With this new perspective, however, I’m free to enjoy it just as what it is: a uniquely unitive, procreative way of sharing my whole self with someone — a good thing, but not an ultimate one.

New Radiant post: ‘I See, I See, I See, Thus I Believe’

It turns out I can’t simul-post what I write for The Pulse, but if you’re curious how what I learned from the movies about wearing shoes relates to John Cusack, my recent TV segment on parental sex talks and a college class on courtship and marriage, read on. Post theme: how exactly do we learn what sex looks like? Comments always welcome, either here or there.

I hope, by the way, that The Pulse won’t be the only context for the sort of essays I launched this blog with, but I’m certainly in a transition at present. Having a charter to write what I think about “art, film, literature and music” (as has been given me with this chance to write for The Pulse) feels vastly more inspiring, lately, than coming back with some variation on the same old “still sexless” posts I've been doing for ... um ... about four years — especially since all this book craziness leaves little time to even check my eHarmony account, much less squeeze in a date. That said, I do have a couple ideas I hope to find time to write in the next week or so. Which reminds me ...

A writing assignment for readers
Whether you bought your copy of Sexless at a neighborhood store or from an online vendor like BN.com or Amazon, don’t forget that you can support the book by writing a brief review at one of the aforementioned websites [insert big, persuasive, toothy grin here]. Thanks!!

Anna on TV: Tips on having ‘the talk’

Quite a lot going on for me, lately, so unfortunately I haven’t had time to do more than short posts like this. That said, if you missed yesterday's segment on View from the Bay, you can watch the whole thing online.

If you already saw it, or don’t like watching videos online, here are my main tips for moms on talking about sex with your kids (read them before you tease, please!).

1. Don’t let fear keep you from having a conversation. If your discomfort with the subject matter keeps you from answering your kids’ questions, they'll just get answers somewhere else — and you’ve lost that opportunity to help them create realistic expectations about sex and relationships.
2. Schedule a monthly date night with your child, so that you’re not just giving them attention around activities such as soccer practice, or the conflicts that spring up. This not only builds your relationship (and their self-worth in the process), it also provides a safe space for talking through issues they may be struggling with.
   
3. Practice critical thinking when you watch TV shows/movies with your children, by taking the time to talk through what you just watched or heard is “teaching” about sex and relationships. Remember that most of us probably learn what sex “looks” like from the media, which can lead to lots of misconceptions and unrealistic expectations.
   
4. Model the sexual ethos and respect for self you want your kids to have in their own lives as adults. For all the things you could say or discourage, your example is one of the most powerful ways you teach them.
5. When getting into sensitive topics with your kids, don’t assume the worst; ask open-ended questions that draw out what they’re actually thinking (which may not be as bad you think), or why they asked a question.
6. Provide a safe space for your kids to honestly share their thoughts (half-baked as they may be or seem to be). You might be surprised by their answers. Teens can get caught between the experimentation of their friends and the cautiousness of their parents, and find that their views satisfy no one. By giving them room to talk about what they’re thinking and feeling, you provide a safe space for them to think through issues, role play situations, and figure out what their standards are.
   

Sexless in stores today!

I'll be picking the winner of the contest after a good night’s sleep to recover from doing my taxes, so if you haven’t blogged yet, you can take advantage of the extended submission deadline. Entries accepted until I first check email tomorrow morning.

Already entered? Then take a look around the book’s brand-new website, www.sexlessinthecity.net.

In other news, I discovered during a.m. resucitation attempts today that Starbucks has launched another free music promotion (woohoo!). This time they’re giving away a new free song every Tuesday; today’s is one by Counting Crows.

Finally, if you’re a blogger who wants to post your email address online more securely, my friend and fabulous web designer, Joe, tipped me off to this email-encoding resource. (Not that I’ve started using it, mind you, but it’s nice to know about.)

Spread the word about Sexless and enter to win a free copy!

Updated 4.15, 2:21 p.m.

With less than a week till the book is sold in stores, I wanted to give you all a chance to get a free, signed copy. What you have to do is simple:

1. Mention the book in a blog post* (ideally with a link to a store where folks can pre-order: Amazon and Barnes & Noble have it, for starters, with pre-order discounts till Tuesday).
   
2. Email me a link to the post, and you’ll be entered to win one of five free copies!

Winners selected first thing April 16. NOTE: Entrants who also mention and link to the book soundtrack on iTunes will get an extra entry (only one prize per entrant, however). Need some inspiration? Check out how Batesline and Superfast Reader did it. (Never fear if you don’t have a personal story as they do; one reader simply entered this way.)

FINAL NOTE: Make sure I get your email! I’m trying to acknowledge all contest submissions I receive, so if you don’t hear back, you might want to confirm your email got through. I spotted at least one submission only while it was being deleted from my spam folder, alas. I think the sender’s name was Jeffrey, so if that sounds like you, leave a comment or resend your message.

Happy blogging!

*If you don’t have a blog but have a Facebook or MySpace and friends you feel comfortable letting know about the book, copy me on the email you send or provide some other proof of your post or bulletin and I’ll give you one entry for that too.

Anna on North Gate Radio

Updated 3:02 p.m. PCT

A journalist at the Cal graduate program recently spoke with me about waiting over the long haul.

• Browse the whole program, or
• Download just that specific segment.

Major props for their song choices to include in the piece:

• “I Want Ev’ry Bit of It” (Bessie Smith)
• “Tiembala” (Africando)
• “Here Comes Your Man” (The Pixies)

Speaking of music, I promise the mention of a Sexless soundtrack is not mere tease. Details of how to hear it will be posted soon. In the meantime, have you pre-ordered your copy yet, or (if you’re local), RSVPed for the April 18 reading? If you’re chary with cash, you can also request it at your local library.

Finally, don’t forget that those first few readers who volunteer to help with the street team for the book can get a free copy! Email me for more details.

Friday morning morality play

First off: a few announcements. The book is due out in less than three weeks, so if you haven’t yet pre-ordered your copy, it will be in bookstores soon. And if you live in the Oakland area, I too will be in a bookstore, at least the night of April 18. Tell a friend and then come down and join us at A Great Good Place for Books, in the heart of Montclair. (If you would be interested in helping set up a reading or other event in your city, email me about getting involved with my street team. We have a limited number of free copies of the book as a thank-you to those who get involved.)

Secondly, if you’d like a break from my voice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a column today that mentions the blog: “Sex rules are best laughed at.” Check it out if you’re looking for a funny read and a breezy digest of several recent sex studies.

In a study of a different kind, we did an interesting exercise in a training session yesterday that I thought I would share. I know: sounds dorky, right? But actually, I found that it provided an interesting barometer of the character traits we value. If you want to “play along,” find a piece of scratch paper and make a list with the names Ivan, Abigail, Gregory, Sinbad and Slug and prepare to rank the five characters on a scale of 1 to 5, least to most reprehensible.

The story: ‘Alligator River’
Once upon a time there was a woman named Abigail who was in love with a man named Gregory. Gregory lived on the shore of the river. Abigail lived on thee opposite shore of the river. The river that separated the two lovers was teeming with man-eating alligators. Abigail wanted to cross the river to be with Gregory. Unfortunately, the bridge was washed out. So she went to Sinbad, a riverboat captain, to take her across. He said he would be glad to if she would consent to go to bed with him preceding a voyage. She promptly refused and went to a friend named Ivan to explain her plight. Ivan did not want to be involved at all in the situation. Abigail felt her only alternative was to accept Sinbad’s terms. Sinbad fulfilled his promise to Abigail and delivered her into the arms of Gregory.

When she told Gregory of her escapade in order to cross the river, Gregory cast her aside with disdain. Heartsick and dejected, Abigail turned to Slug with her tale of woe. Slug, feeling compassion for Abigail, sought out Greogry and beat him severly.
Abigail was overjoyed at the sight of Gregory getting his due. As the sun sets on the horizon, we hear Abigail laughing at Gregory.

I know, I know: it’s not exactly up to the standard of Hemingway, but still it led to an interesting discussion. The assignment, you see, was for each of us to individually rank the characters from best to worst, after which we were put in groups to develop a group ranking. This was where the differences really emerged, however.

Whereas I thought Ivan’s hands-off approach was probably the healthiest of all of them, the rest of the folks in my group deemed him worst because of his passivity and lack of compassion. And whereas they all thought Gregory was cruel for spurning Abigail, I found little evidence of his love for or interest in her. To me, she seemed like a desperate, aggressive woman, unwilling to let anything thwart her efforts to get the fulfillment of her desire. Gregory certainly should have made it clear to her what his standards were, but it doesn’t exactly sound like he encouraged her to go so lengths for them to be together.

Another point of disagreement was the character of Sinbad. Once each group had reached their collective ranking, all of us compared our results. While my team agreed that Sinbad was rather mercenary, we did give him props for consistency and being very upfront about his ethical standards (perhaps this is why I liked 3:10 to Yuma). The other groups tended to rate him as the worst, however, because of his willingness to abuse power and take advantage of Abigail’s neediness.

Your thoughts?

First reading April 18

Those of you in the Bay area, rejoice: you’ve finally got a chance to heckle or meet me, or ask those questions you somehow never got around to emailing. To RSVP so the bookstore has enough copies, view the evite. If you’d prefer to stay mysteriously noncommittal, details are as follows:

Sexless in the City Reading & Signing
April 18 7 p.m.
A Great Good Place for Books
6127 La Salle Avenue Oakland

And of course, if you can’t make it, pre-order from Amazon for an additional 5 percent discount off the current sale price. I’ll also be launching a soundtrack of sorts, so stay tuned for further details.

Want to get a free copy of the book? Email me for more on joining the Sexless in the City street team or arranging a signing or other event in your area. Ways you can help:

• If you’re local, spread the word about the April 18 reading on your blog, website, FaceBook page, MySpace ... well, you get the idea.
• Post a text or product link to the book on your blog or website. Promote however you please, but if you’re an affiliate with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or another bookstore, you’ll earn a percent of every book sold!
• If you’re feeling especially motivated, you might use the book as the basis of a contest on your blog (encouraging readers to submit stories, photos, videos, puns or whatever suits your fancy). Let me know what you have in mind, and we can send you an additional free book to give away as the prize.

Whatever you have in mind, just send me an email -- the sooner the better, as we only have a limited supply of free books for street team members. Thanks in advance for your help!

Why are we single? The male view

Before I get to the meat of this post, a couple announcements:

1. You can now pre-order Sexless on Amazon, though it won’t be released until Apr. 15, and I’m still working to get a couple things fixed in their description.
2. Attempting to make announcement #1 last night resulted in royally messing up the site template. Though I managed to restore almost all the settings, the links style hasn’t been fixed yet in some places (as you can see). Anyone have suggestions about the tag(s) I might be missing?

Now then: as promised last week (though I must admit the line between a promise and mere tease is hard to discern in this space lately), this week’s blog engages the email of a guy I know, who recently felt compelled to explain why “the godly guys aren’t hot, and the hot guys aren’t godly.” He writes:

It is an unfortunate thing that many of the guys who are the most serious about being in-line with God’s will are the most inhibited; Christian boys are taught from a young age, You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. and Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.

Then, one day, the Christian boy feels physical attraction to a girl, and since nobody has delimited where physical attraction ends and where sinful lust begins, the whole thing is tainted with guilt. He sees no way he can express attraction or flirt with a “sister” with “absolute purity.” He then gouges out the portion of his masculinity that would make him a man out of fear that the whole of him will be thrown into hell for lusting after a girl (or if not the fear of hell, the fear that the words of his mouth and the meditations of his heart are not pleasing to the Lord). And finding that the feelings haven’t gone away, he approaches the girl in an unappetizingly timid fashion, or lurks at a distance, or approaches tangentially as if his obvious attraction isn’t noticed. He’s been convinced that flirting and dating are “sinful” or “manipulative,” and is embarrassed before himself that he even has physical attractions, ’cause all he’s ever been told is that character and godliness are all important in a mate. (Christian authors and preachers often won’t even acknowledge the aspect of physical attraction which initiates virtually all pursuits.)

So what often happens next is that the godly Christian guy goes to the Christian book store for help (I’m telling you, just about all of my friends have done this, and all of them are still single)–because God knows his dad is never going to teach him how to flirt, to read body language, or to practice proper dating etiquette, and what he finds is that all the books in the Christian book store on relationships only talk about the morals (in other words, more accusations of wrongdoing and wrong feelings), and not the mechanics of winning a girl’s heart. And God knows there aren’t any sanctified men’s magazines; while attempting to learn about style, grooming, fitness, and how to approach women from such a magazine, the reader is bombarded with images of bikini clad women, raunchy articles about sexual practices, and fixations on material wealth and worldly lusts. (Blessed is he who does not take the counsel of the ungodly. . .)

The result is that the godly guys aren’t hot, and the hot guys aren’t godly. And the rest are like parking spots; all the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped. IMHO, this is the reason so many Christian women are paired up with non Christians; non-Christian men don’t give a damn about whether their thoughts please the Lord and do whatever it takes to get what they want, while so many of the godly Christian men are often one yard short of cutting off their own balls for fear that they cause them to sin, which is probably totally un-sexy to Christian women. (Am I mistaken?)

And lest I object to certain oversimplifications, in a subsequent email, he clarified:

[Not] that character and godliness are not more important in the long run, but that they are not usually the spark that initiates a pursuit. Christian parents usually don’t ask about whether a new boyfriend/girlfriend is attractive; instead, the inquisition usually goes something like this:

• is he/she a godly Christian?
• is he a good man/is she a virtuous girl?
• is he/she smart? (a.k.a. “baby got brains?”)
  
• is he financially stable/are you sure she’s not a ‘gold digger’?

The consequence of this upon Christian men who are serious about their walk with God is that they tend fixate on becoming godly/virtuous etc. and neglect the physical and social aspect of their cultivation . . . and then they become a bunch of awkward weirdos unequipped to do anything but fail at pursuing Christian women. And even if character will carry the relationship in the long run, if the guy is a total turn off to the girls he’s interested in, the relationship he’s hoping for is not likely even get started to begin with.

I wish God would open up the Heavens and declare from on high to all the the preachers to temper their preaching against lust with the a declaration of the fact that all those passages in the Old Testament that talk about the beauty of the wives of the patriarchs and of various other women in the OT were not written by blind men. (It is written that Sarah, Rebekkah, and Rachel, as well as Ms. Anonymous Shulamite were all über-babes) Someone noticed that they were attractive, and making that observation is not the same as having committed adultery in one’s heart, and that single men need not feel guilty about making such observations; they’ll do so whether they feel guilty or not simply by instinct, but when they do so inhibited by guilt, they sabotage their ability to approach a woman confidently.

So, faithful readers, what’s your take? I am personally a bit skeptical of explanations that mostly fault other people (though at least he’s more creative for his implication of leaders instead of women), but I will admit his emails gave me more sympathy for some Jesus freaks’ predicament.

That, and an even greater measure of gratitude for my newfound contentment in leisure knitting and gardening, and slowly paying down debt. I’ve sure been a while learning not to race ahead of the beat, but now that I’m finally “in the pocket,” it’s mighty nice. Viva la present!