American Pie: Progress, Strength & Renewal
I watched American Pie in the winter of 1999, on PPV, in a three-star hotel in Fresno. A bunch of church kids, there for one of those conferences church kids went to so they could have sex and do choir, none of us had any illusions about what we were about to see. Actually that’s not true. The immense hook of American Pie, a boy having sex with a baked good, didn’t have any business being in the trailer. If they’d kept it out, The Sixth Sense and its perfectly buried lede could have fucked right off.
The main difference between Christianity and Islam is that while the male youth of both are promised sex with multiple virgins, the former doesn’t require your death. In the Pentecostal sect I grew up in, with its Sharia-like restrictions on dress and demeanor, all the girls were under supernumerary pressures not to look like sluts, thereby leading the boys into temptation. But everyone was fucking anyway
This did not mean my peer group took sex lightly. There’s one story, probably apocryphal, about a dude my age who spoke in tongues while he jerked off. So yeah none of us took it THAT seriously. But most of the couples I knew always assumed virginity wasn’t all that hard to preserve until the right unguarded moment when they realized, okay this is happening and no amount of doctrine or osmosis could have prevented it.
When me and all the kids I knew, every one of us having grown up under the pew so2speak, had sex for the first time it was the first-ever realist decision we made. We weren’t learning about our bodies, we were learning about our minds. And even though most of the others ended up repenting, marrying whoever it was and falling back into the same conga line to glory they’d resented their parents for birthing them into, at least they turned their back for a second.
You’re always told, if you grow up fundamentalist, that virginity is a gift not a prize. Which is of course a fabulous ruse to keep women down and perpetuate the male hierarchy’s morbid obsession with chastity—that’s all freshman-level. What’s ironic is that I don’t remember any of the 17-22 crowd I was in, the males anyway, not believing it—by which I mean it never occurred to us that a girl’s virginity was something worth pursuing or leching out about. For that much of our lives at least, we weren’t skeevy pervs programmed to find virgins intrinsically hot. It was all about getting rid of it ourselves, finding our place in the great unburdening.
Based on the teachings and how often the rebellious ones bet the other way, we should have been absolutely stalking girls, especially the non-rebellious ones. But that’s not how I remember it.
What makes American Pie, the original unsullied by its unfortunate successors, so fascinating is how nonpredatory the sex in it actually is. It’s styled as a competition which is kind of icky but the screwball natures of Jim and Oz and Finch and Kevin (not Stifler, who’s so funny precisely because he’s the odd man out) pretty much curtail any douchey aspersions.
For all five of these bros, virginity is something to be shed, but fast. It’s like a malignancy, and taking advantage of some girl is hardly the aim. And the girls (3 girls, 1 woman) in question, being in each case much smarter than the boy, are pretty hard to take advantage of.
Incidentally Natasha Lyonne’s Jessica, in some ways a deity whirling just above everyone’s heads, is maybe my favorite character, young female division, of the intervening decade+.
The people in that Fresno hotel room ranged in age from 15 to 31 or so, including chaperones, who were obviously the worst chaperones ever. There was a spectacularly average blonde from Sacramento who me and my friends rotated being obsessed with for some reason—I slackily only hooked up with her right before 9/11, which is why I remember it. Not long after that she, for serious, moved to Alaska and married a bush pilot. There were three (3) closet cases, only one of whom is now all the way out, and maybe a fourth for bridge, now that I think about it. (Okay maybe this is why so many of the dudes were easygoing. I just killed my own piece and now I’m eating it.) All of us professed to love Jesus with all our blood and yet we were locked in this half-motion race to sexual administration, each of us at a different stage. First one home won.
