Ladies & Gentlemen: Stop Giving Your “Gift” Away

By Ilex Bien-Aime

I was reading Men’s Health Magazine not too long ago when I ran across an article titled 30 Secrets Women Keep. In the article women say that they would not tell there partner how many men they had slept with. The article goes on to say that even if she does give you a number of men she slept with, odds are she’s probably lying to you. If that’s  not bad enough they say, “Her lie is partly intentional (she doesn’t want to appear a floozy), but mostly it’s sexual amnesia. When a woman wants to pretend an encounter never occurred, she simply scraps the man from her official score sheet.”

Many women try to stay away from this conversation because we live in a society that does have double standards. Let’s be honest about this for a second, if a woman has slept with x amount of men, even other women look at her in a negative light. For men however, it is almost accepted that he has “sown his royal oates.” When watching a scene in the movie Better Than Sex the female character admitted to having had 27 sexual partners while the male character admitted that he had slept with somewhere between 40-50 women. Am I the only person that sees something wrong with this picture?

I am not writing about the double standards amongst our sexual practices. That is beyond old and quite frankly a stupid argument. What I’m writing about today is the gift that we have given away. Most of us who have gotten married, did not get married as virgins and though some of us have a conservative number of sexual partners, others will probably put Wilt Chamberlain to shame. This my friend should not be. If you have had sex with one more person other than your spouse, you have already given away your gift.

Many of us were raised in the church and taught that we should not have sex before marriage. We were taught that this was the design of  God. Sex is meant to be enjoyed and is a beautiful thing. It is meant to be the gift that you give to your spouse and only your spouse. Now a days sex is just a thing. It no longer holds any real significance to us because everyone is doing it. These days even elementary school kids are having sex. How sad is that?!

People think that their sexual past is just that, their sexual past. They believe that you should not worry about their past because that past does not involve you, but I disagree. In the movie For Colored Girls one of the main characters is seen in the doctor’s office crying with her husband because they cannot have kids. She admits to him for the first time that she had contracted a disease from another man some time ago and this is the reason that she can’t conceive. Her past had now become their past.

This isn’t just on women. Men are just as guilty. Because of our foolish ways we have spread disease throughout the land. On top of that, we run around getting women pregnant and in many cases random women. Before you know it, we have two and three baby mommas. Your past is not just about you—especially not when some of those crazy baby mommas come knocking on your door. Your future wife may not be all that accepting when she sees how much child support has to be paid on a monthly basis. She wants to be the first and only mother of your child.

These things are the outward consequences of past sexual relations. What about the inward things? In a survey from Men’s Health Magazine 51 percent of women said that is was natural to fantasize about other men while having sex. Though some men could care  less about what a woman is thinking during sex, I caution you that this is not a good thing. Make no mistake that men are guilty of this also but something that seems so innocent can become a big problem. Now you are starting to compare your partner to your old sexual partners. Trust me nothing good can come of this. Before you know it, your past is now staring your present and future directly in the face.  You’ll start to find yourself getting upset because your spouse does not do the things that someone else used to do. We are supposed to come into a marriage with the same amount of sexual experiences–zero. We are supposed to create our own sexual history and not have it blurred by other people.

We spend so much time worrying about fulfilling our sexual urges that we do not think about the future consequences of them. If you asked a man to give up his Rolex watch, he would want to know what he stood to gain from the exchange. If you asked a women to give up her new Christian Louboutin shoes, she would not give them up without a fight. Yet we give our bodies to just about anybody that smiles at us right. How many of us have people that we can’t remember in our sexual archives? How many of us have people that we hate in those archives? Sex is supposed to be the closest that you can ever be with someone. You are physically inside of another human being and to so many of us it means nothing. The once great gift that only one should have had the privilege of opening, is no longer valued the same way God designed it to be. So to you non-married readers out there I ask you, how long will you continue giving your gift away?

My name is Ilex Bien-Aime and I live in Washington, DC with my lovely wife. I write as a man who has seen women mistreat themselves and who have allowed themselves to be mistreated. I write as a man who wants to give my future daughters a guideline on how to deal with men. Lastly I write what I write because my female friends are always asking my opinion about these situations.