Ruth Russell, who has never had sex, watch her friends suffer from the aftermath of casual sex. Picture: Stuart McEvoy
The first question is easy to answer. Dawn and Eden are her first and second names (she was born in 1968 when her parents were immersed in a Californian hippy culture); her real last name is Goldstein but she dropped it years ago "because I got tired of people who saying, 'Oh, you're Jewish'."
Eden was born Jewish; now she's Catholic and proudly chaste, which explains why people so often want to know when she last had sex, and why she gave it up. The answer is "complicated".
"I became a Christian in October 1999 but I did not immediately walk the talk. For a while, it was sin, repent, sin, repent.
"After a while, say after October 2003, I felt in my heart that I should begin living the way God wanted me to live."
Eden's book, The Thrill of the Chaste explores her journey from a sexually active rock music journalist in New York City in the 1990s, to her new life as a Catholic. During World Youth Day events beginning tomorrow in Sydney she will speak about her chastity and her conversion.
Eden was a virgin until she was 20, when she lost her boyfriend to a friend who was willing to have sex with him. The experience convinced her that "I had to gain (sexual) experience if I want to hold a man".
"I wound up losing my virginity to a man I found attractive, but did not love, just to get my card punched," she writes.
Over time, she learned, as most women do, "that if I played my cards right, I could get almost any man I wanted into bed" and so she bedded quite a few. She describes the cyclical nature of her sexual life thus: "Meet interesting guy; have sex; dump or get dumped; repeat."
"Either way, I would end up alone and unhappy," she writes. "I felt trapped in a lifestyle that gave me none of the things that (I thought) it would."
What she wanted was everlasting love and, most importantly, marriage.
"I thought a man was more likely to fall in love with me after having sex than prior to it. I thought that having sex was part of the process of falling in love," she says. But "men with depth quickly figured out that I took sex far too lightly".
Jaded and depressed, she had a Christian born-again experience at the age of 31, joined the Catholic church, and adopted chastity as a lifestyle. She now believes the cost of casual sex, especially for women, is too high.
"Single women feel lonely, because they are not loved," she says. "To feel less lonely, they have casual sex with men who do not love them."
Eden says sadness and anxiety over failed relationships makes women "lower their expectations. The idea you get from media is, you too can enjoy all the excitement of casual sex and feel no pain, provided you just don't care that you are being used".
When Eden quit sex, she did so in the hope that chastity would assist in her search for "a union that is real" and for marriage. But here's the rub. Eden is now 39, going on 40. Her conversion is nine years old; and Mr Right has not turned up. She is childless, having given her child-bearing years to chastity.
Hugh Henry, of the Catholic youth group Juventutem (it is a word from the rejuvenated Latin mass, and means youth), who invited Eden to speak to young Catholics at St Augustine's in Sydney's Balmain tomorrow, says Eden's status as a single woman "is interesting, isn't it, because it does show that we cannot plan our lives; our lives are planned for us".
"In a way, she's got to accept that, and she does. She says, OK, I might not get what I desired, but I do know if I stayed on the path I was on, I always ended up at a dead end."
Henry says World Youth Day was designed by Pope John Paul II to "show off young Catholics, being positive, joyful" and a celebration of chastity "is an important part of that". "Dawn taps into something that is going on in our culture," he says. "She points the way forward for young people who might be confused. Her message is counter-cultural, there is no doubt about that."
Eden acknowledges her failure to (so far) find a mate and, for a time, she wondered whether God planned for her a religious life.
"I have asked God about that, and I think the answer is no," she says. "I would also say, I wrote the book three years ago. My view then was, this is how I will meet a good man.
"My views have started to open up. It's true, I'm close to 40, I'm not married, so that may not happen, but I can say to myself, 'What was my happiness level back when I was living the (sexually active) life, and what is my happiness now?'
"And as much as I have that longing for a physical union, as much as I must admit that I do get lonely for that kind of union, I can say honestly that I am happier now. I continue to be happier, more fulfilled, and I can only assume that it's going to get better."
Eden says she never longed to be a mother. "I'm a child of divorce. I had a distant father. I had a mother who was giving herself away sexually before she remarried, so I grew up fearful of what kind of mother I would be. That fear made me not want to have kids.
"It's only since I began to live out chastity that I can see I would be a good mother. Now I'm coming to the end of my fertile years and although I have been chaste, I have not met a man. But how was I trying to meet a man before? I was making myself sexually available."
One problem with Eden's argument is that most people have boyfriends or girlfriends, and some, or even many, sexual partners before marriage. It is rare to find a person whose heart has not been torn asunder, or who would not admit to playing reckless with another's heart.
But many people do not now, and never will, regard their early relationships as sinful. Many people remain friends with their former lovers. The writer Marcel Proust says the people to whom we give our hearts and bodies, 10 years hence, will become our dearest friends. They knew us when we were younger, more reckless and less wise; and since there is no longer anything we want from them, we can enjoy them fully.
Eden has softened her approach towards practitioners of pre-marital sex as the years have advanced. "When I first started talking about this, I was more judgmental, as converts often are," she says. "But I will still say there have been studies, that while it is certainly far from impossible to have a lasting marriage if one has had sexual partners, it's harder, because you're taking more baggage, and you have more ghosts in the attic.
"It seems to me that if you do have that past, you must relinquish it. You must turn your face from it. An example I like to use is cigarettes. Nobody would call a parent a hypocrite if they smoked, and then quit, and told kids not to smoke."
Eden says she is part of "a new rebellion" against a sex-soaked culture, and Sister Mary Karen, who will host another of Eden's talks, on abortion, at the Love and Life site at the University of Notre Dame on Wednesday, says: "She speaks as a young woman, and from experience, and that's important.
"She wasn't finding fulfilment in her life, in her career, her relationships with men. She felt an emptiness that many young women will recognise." Eden defines her message as truly counter-cultural. "Every generation needs to have their own cause," she says.
"With this generation, it's a battle against the world that has been created, a culture of objectification," and cheap satisfaction. She says sitcoms, and the new Sex and The City movie "make children act like jaded whores, and it makes adults act like spoiled children".
"Young people grow up, being told by the media, by advertising, by their own friends and family, that they are worth loving according to what they do (and how they look) and not what they are," she says.
"The message of John Paul II, the message that Benedict has continued is that the dignity of every human person is important, and that includes not using their bodies for our own satisfaction."
from: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24013339-28737,00.html
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