If you’re a God-fearing parent looking to school your teen on the joys of waiting until marriage to have sex, then AbstinenceOnly.com is probably not the website for you.
The brainchild of former Penthouse scribe Patrick Randall, the humorous site parodies the religious right’s obsession with faith-based sexual abstinence education programs, introducing such terms as “faith-fucking” and “cluster-trusting” to the cultural zeitgeist and offering such delicious nuggets as “Masturbating your faith partner through her underwear is a far more delicate and pleasurable experience; Nothing says ‘I love you and I respect you’ more than diddling a young woman through her panties” and “The Bible plainly states: ‘Man shall not lie with man as he does with woman,’ so as far as the Lord’s concerned, it’s Beaver Season all year ‘round for you gals.”
Meanwhile, readers can also delight in the “advice” found in the satirical “Ask the Bishop” and “Ask Dr. Frist” columns.
Randall says that the idea for the site came to him after he heard how much money the Bush administration spends and plans to spend on abstinence-only education. “Let’s face it—abstinence is the closet thing to nothing that someone could teach,” he says. “Besides, they’ll probably just teach the usual scare propaganda and religious dogma cloaked under the rubric of saving kids from pregnancy and STDs. So I just took the whole thing literally and thought how I’d teach sexual abstinence under those guidelines.” Surprisingly, AbstinenceOnly.com was available as a domain, so Randall purchased it and launched the site on April 22.
“In its way, AbstinenceOnly.com is a way of bypassing the grip of money over the media through cleverness,” Randall purports. Though he says he is surprised that not everyone is in on the joke (“I felt it’s so over the top that nobody could mistake it for anything but parody,” he laughs), Randall admits that it’s cool when some take him at his word. “I got an email from someone called Jesusgrrrl asking if the site was for real,” he says. “That made me smile.”
Randall claims the site has already had over 30,000 visits, though he is gunning for as much notoriety as possible. “I want to become the most popular abstinence site on the net,” he claims. “I want to be the first site that comes up whenever keywords like ‘abstinence’ or ‘abstinence education’ are typed into search engines. It would be so cool if all the [religious right’s] money and political clout could be subverted by a $500 website.”
For more information, visit www.abstinenceonly.com.
