Petition to get John Green to join the Legion of Jo(h)n, made up of John Darnielle, Jonathan Coulton, John Hodgman, and John Roderick.
cosigned
The thing that circumscribes life for almost all of us is not war, but disease. […] We’re going to have to find our heroism and our well lived lives in small ways… in taking care of each other and in taking care of ourselves.
“
| — | John Green (just now, live from Indian Springs but channelled through the magical Internet!t) |
Watching John Green reading a book on the stage he must’ve looked up at a thousand times, in the school that inspired one of my favourite books ever
Really really happy about this
John Green is my hero.
I wonder if I can use “John Green is my hero. -Wil Wheaton” as a blurb on the back of The Fault in Our Stars. I LIKE YOU BACK, WIL WHEATON.
(Side story: I met Wil Wheaton was at the LA Times Festival of Books in 2010. When I told my friend Cecil Castellucci that Wil Wheaton, one of the coolest and funniest people on the Internet, was in the same room as me, she insisted upon introducing us. I was nervous and awkward, as I always am when meeting people I admire, and after 45 seconds skulked back toward the cheese table. Hopefully, Mr. Wheaton does not recall this.)
re: blurb: please, please do.
p.s. now I’m craving cheese… curse you, anecdotal cheese table!
p.p.s. I like this graphic. Lots.
Yeah I definitely just went and ate a slab of boursin after reading this.
brb saving this to tell my future children
Anonymous: Do you believe in saving sex for Marriage?
John Green: I can’t answer that question unless I answer the question of what constitutes marriage. And none of the definitions I have for marriage really hold up to scrutiny:
1. A marriage is a legal contract. But for the vast majority of human history, marriages were not legal contracts, so are we to say that all those people—from the Prophet Muhammad to Mary and Joseph—weren’t really married?
2. A marriage is a life-long monogamous romantic relationship. Well, this is patently untrue. 40% of marriages end in divorce; is it immoral for those people to have had sex during their marriages simply because their marriages later ended? If I’m single, meet a girl in Las Vegas, marry her, have sex with her, and divorce her the next day—is that somehow less ethically problematic than two unmarried people in a committed relationship having sex?
The question is further complicated by the fact that many people in the United States are legally prohibited from ever marrying. So if you argue that one must always wait for marriage, you end up arguing that gay people in New York can have sex after they get married, but that gay people in Alabama will never be able to have sex, at least until and unless gay marriage becomes legal in Alabama.
Which brings me to the biggest issue of all: To answer your question, I must not only define marriage (which turns out to be really hard to define); I must also define sex. What is sex? Is it actions that can result in procreation? Is it any kind of sexual intimacy? If so, is kissing sex? Is hugging sex if it happens to result in arousal?
We’ve created this aura around virginity as if one’s virginity is a real and tangible thing—but of course it isn’t. Sex and virginity are socially constructed concepts. Are you a virgin if you engage in oral sex? Are you a virgin if you’ve kissed a girl? Are you a virgin if it was just the tip? Are you a virgin if your hymen breaks from tampon-insertion?
In my opinion, our obsessive focus on virginity and sexual purity doesn’t serve anyone. Losing one’s virginity is not an event; it’s a process. Similarly, weddings are events, and signing your marriage license is an event, but marriages are not events. They are processes.
So no, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to have sex before marriage, because I don’t know what sex means, and I don’t know what marriage means. I think people should feel empowered to make their own decisions about their own bodies in thoughtful and open conversations with their romantic partners.
And use condoms. The End.
