I’ll buy one, but only if the back says “CURRENT LIAR.”

The hardest section of my book to write, by far, was the one about masturbation at Liberty.  It was challenging for a few reasons:

– Because my grandparents/parents/middle-school teachers will be reading it and judging me accordingly.
– Because I may have to get a real job someday, and masturbation stories rank up there with felonies and DontDateHimGirl.com profiles on the list of things you don’t want showing up in your Google results.
– Because masturbation at Liberty is an incredibly, uh, touchy subject.  And while 99% of American college students masturbate with no compunction whatsoever, self-love is high on the sin hierarchy at Bible Boot Camp — somewhere between cheating on an exam and smoking a joint.  In my book, I write about the time I paid a visit to “Every Man’s Battle,” Liberty’s on-campus support group for chronic masturbators.  It consisted of a dozen guys sitting around a conference room table confessing their “victories and falls” to a pastor, and it was odd and heartbreaking all at once.

Now, thanks to a Christian group called the Passion For Christ Movement (PFCM), graduates of “Every Man’s Battle” can proclaim their freedom from onanism with EX-Masturbator t-shirts.

PFCM’s website has a whole line of confessional t-shirts, including EX-Fornicator, EX-Homosexual,  EX-Diva, EX-Atheist, EX-Hypocrite, and EX-Slave – the last of which is what my friend Robert would call “loaded” — along with a video explaining the rationale behind the campaign, most of which is taken from the same Bible passages and bits of folk wisdom I heard in “Every Man’s Battle.”  (See the group members’ anti-masturbation manifestos here and here.)

I’m sure the shirts will sell like hotcakes, but I don’t know a single Liberty student who would wear one of these in public (except maybe EX-Diva, which is a little more like something you’d find at PacSun).  And unless I’m underestimating Christian America’s social awareness, it’s pretty obvious to me that evangelical teens aren’t going to be PFCM’s primary market.

So who will?  Gawker thinks these shirts will be an ironic hit among hipsters.  Me, I’m betting on horny frat boys.  Watch your back, Vaginatarians.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 11:50 pm .