40-YR-OLD VIRGIN MOVIE? OH, PLEASE...

If you've watched any TV at all, or read any newspaper, you've probably heard about the new movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin. My ears and eyes perked up when I first heard about it, because I strongly believe in being a virgin before marriage. That should be the premise of all Christian love stories. Get the ring, then the thing, is my mantra to singles. The Bible is explicit.

"Flee sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?...Therefore, honor God with your body." 1 Corinthians 6:18-20

Just like the mommy who keeps her three-year-old out of the street, the Bible tells us to keep sex within marriage. This boundary is for our own good. God isn't some big, long-beared man sitting on a throne somewhere in the big, wide universe trying to withhold something good from us. No. He's reaching down, holding out that something good, and saying, Here. I created this, and it's for your pleasure, and the best way to use it is how I designed it. It's kind of like that Mattel or Playskool workbench toy with different holes and different screws that fit into them, and seeing a child trying to put the square one in the round one, and it just doesn't work. God's saying, Sex and singleness don't go together.

Maybe my next blog will be titled, "Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder." That is so true. I can still remember the first time my dh and I came together as man and wife. I can still remember the aura that surrounded us. I can still picture the scene, me so shy getting out of the shower and slipping on the white nylon negligee Nana had bought me, and walking into the Holiday Inn motel room, my back to Milton who was sitting on the bed as I put things in my big blue Samsonite, killing time, not knowing what to do. I'd already seen him when he came out of the bathroom in the navy blue nylon pjs Nana'd bought him, and I thought my heart would jump out of my chest. Then....ah, I'll save that for another time. Maybe one day you'll read about it in my as-yet-unpublished novel echoing our own love story. So romantic, so pure, so spiritual...

Back to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. First of all, let me state that I don't go to movies. Okay, maybe one every three or four years, and I vow I'll never go again. Like Pearl Harbor. My minister brother said I'd enjoy it, so Milton and I went. When the shooting up scene came (bombing of Pearl Harbor), I started crying, and they kept shooting, and I kept crying, and then I noticed the moviemakers were repeating the same shooting over and over to make it longer for effect, and it sure had an effect on me. I put my popcorn aside and ran out. I couldn't take anymore violence. Oh, and I can't remember when the lovemaking scene happened--before or after the shootout, but I nearly blanched at that. They weren't married, which infuriated me that they had to do "it," (or am I getting mixed up about this movie and The Notebook, which I also saw; my second movie in years and years) and I thought, Hollywood, you don't know what real romance is. You have no concept of "Taking the hard right over the easy wrong." And then, the skin that was shown repelled me. Of course Lifetime movies are now showing so much skin that they're now on my taboo list. But that's another blog.

Back to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Reviewers are proclaiming it funny. One reviewer said, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin is the most pure fun I've had at a movie in years. Bless it's rude, sweet heart. It's easy to make a sensitive drama about a deadly illness. It's a cinch to make a big epic with elephants and sieges and flaming catapults. But to be this funny? That's brutally hard."

Why, sir, is it hard? Perhaps you're desensitized. Perhaps you've seen so much...smut?...or, okay, softer...garbage...that your funny bone's broken?

I was intrigued with the title. After all, the hero and heroine in my novel are virgins, as pure as the driven snow, as pristine as a white, sandy Florida beach, just like my dh and I were on our wedding night. Now, the 40-year-old thing...well, I don't know. I mean, it would be hard to wait that long to do it. Hollywood should've titled it The 25-Year-Old Virgin. That would've been more realistic. Shoot, my dh who's a minister and before that, a minister's son who never veered from The Straight and Narrow was nearly foaming at the mouth to do it. He made it until he was 21, when he married me. We believed that Jesus is coming soon and will come like a thief in the night (read the Left Behind books), and that was pounded into our heads all our lives, and we stil believe it and are looking for the return of the Lord. But Milton always prayed, "Lord, come soon, but pullllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeze let me get married first. Please?" GRIN

So when I spotted a review of this current Hollywood movie with the headline, "AT THE MOVIES: Evangelical group sees nothing funny about 'virgin,'" my eyes were glued to the page (forget FBP {floating body parts re: the craft of fiction} for a moment). What would evangelicals have to say about The 40-Year-Old Virgin?