Sunday, August 26, 2018

Sex and Television: A Virgin’s Perspective

I plan to stay a virgin for as long as possible. Only on my wedding night do a plan to change that. So you might wonder how my virginity might affect my understanding of certain TV shows. There are a lot of sex based things that you see on TV a lot. And I’m limited to network television. I don’t see the shows that have actual uncensored nudity in it. There are some things that I might not understand and possibly never will unless I actually wind up having sex at some point.

What is my perspective? For one, I do not understand the whole concept of flings. This should be known as different in my mind to one night stands or casual sex. It is when a person intentionally has sex with someone that they don’t really like that much, if at all, in order to get back in the game or something like that. Why would you choose to have sex with someone that you don’t like? These are often one time things and we might not see these people again. But this might be one of the problems that you see on TV that are far too common in real life.

Another issue I see is when people are having sex with people that they haven’t known that long. This could even lead to a prospect that I like to call love at first sex. Who wouldn’t want their relationship to begin with we met, we had sex, and that was just the first day of us knowing each other? This happened in the first episode of the show Salvation. In a flashback episode of The Big Bang Theory, Leonard was about to have sex with someone he didn’t know less than twenty-four hours ago. In an episode of Family Guy, Bonnie talks about how it was only several hours after meeting the man who would become her husband that she gave him her virginity. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

So many other issues are brought up. Some people, often women, regret having sex the next day. Then why have it in the first place? Too many divorced couples wind up hooking up again later and they often always regret it, or the women do. But why aren’t the men seen as having a sexual conscience? There have been a lot of shows about men who are constantly hooking up with women and they don’t care most times about any negative consequences and often don’t wind up with them except for when they do catch feelings for someone, but not always a hook up at first.

Often, a huge problem is the amount of cheating that is going on. And often, they want us to root for those who are being unfaithful to people. And another thing I wonder about is why they can’t just put the people who are supposed to be that way together in the first place. What’s with all the will they or won’t they crap? Does that actually happen in reality? I haven’t known of any relationship like that in real life. Do any of you?

What I do wonder is why abortion isn’t brought up as an option more than it is. I’m glad that people do not just mess up with pregnancy and then decide to kill the baby. Maybe it is still taboo enough that they figure they don’t want to rock the boat that much. Or maybe, they can have character that are so amoral, but never that amoral. Of course, people can debate if it is actually amoral or not. I can think of only two shows so far that have used abortion with main characters.

Now while I’ve written a lot thus far about sex and television, I haven’t done much about what being a virgin has to do with my lack of understanding about things that happen. There is a recurring joke that I see on TV. It has a man on the phone or on some type of connection while a woman nearby is doing something sexy. The man gets distracted which leads to this exchange:

Man: Damn it!

Woman: Already?

I don’t get this. What does it mean? Why does the live studio audience find this funny? Does it have to do with erections? That’s my only guess, but it is hard to know that much. I still am not fully sure what masturbation is. Does one have to be naked to do it? Why are tissues involved at times? Why would a married man need to do it or do it with pictures of someone who isn’t his wife? Does a man have to ejaculate in order for it to count?

Perhaps my virginity is one of the reasons why I don’t understand why sex is so common in TV. All of the people who have it seem to enjoy it all of the time so it must be good. Why else would people often get into trouble for it?

There are so many other issues that I probably wouldn’t understand if I did have sex someday. Why would people use handcuffs? Why agree to that? Why do spanking or other forms of beating? Do some people really get a warped sense of pleasure out of it? And why would anyone want to watch someone use the bathroom? That’s just messed up regardless of which gender it is you are or which gender it is you would look at.

What are other oddities I’ve noticed? For one, I’ve often noticed that people claim to have sex half a time. How is this possible? What does that even mean? And there are all these sexual positions that people often talk about, but you wouldn’t think that there could be more than ten and that’s even more than I think is possible. (Of course, that’s only if you do traditional, vaginal sex.) One show that I saw made it seem like the orgasm was the end of sex. You have to end there?

Of course, there are various issues with there is self censorship or other issues I see like that. I do not know why they can’t be more straightforward so they don’t confuse the audience. Like in an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where the sculpture looked like a vagina. They must not realize that not all of us have seen one. And if they never say the word, then how are we supposed to know for sure? It took a lot of watching that episode for me to understand it.

An 8 Simple Rules episode brought up an issue that you’d think would be very important to address for teenage boys: unwanted erections. Only they had never said the word so it would have been confusing to some people. I had no idea what that was for quite some time and I didn’t have a father to ask as he died when I was five. There are a lot of guy things I might never know. Who would I ask?

I still don’t know if sex scenes are just called that or actually have sex happening in them sometimes. I do not know how often an actor or actress is naked when their character is. And something odd that I notice from time to time is that there is some sort of tell that virgins have. What? Apparently, you are having or about to have sex and the other person (not a virgin), somehow knows that you are one. Is there some sort of secret way of knowing?

What’s with TV shows often not just spelling things out? Do they expect us all to understand? Maybe there are reasons why things aren’t clear in some way. Maybe there are lawyers or others who object to certain things being said or not said and we just have to fill in the gaps ourselves (no pun intended). So there might always be confusion.


I think that is all I can think of for this post. This is the last of the Sunday updates. Sorry to be getting rid of them so soon after starting them. The Monday updates will or should continue for the near future and there will be random other days posted as well. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.

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