The fear of not knowing whether, in your extremity, your friends will stick by you or abandon you is very real and may cause him to act differemtly than he would normally.

The last thing he would do would be to ask them that question. He would be likely to receive a 'what sort of blokes do you think we are?' style response and that would make his position more precarious, exposing his weakness/insecurities and introducing additonal doubts/reservations into the minds of his companions.

What he does not realise is that once he has proved himself by sticking to his principles a few times, a group of blokes will usually begin to stick up for him too.

I do find it unlikely that the whole group would go looking for prostitutes. It would be a smaller group within it, probably a group with a nucleus of one or two men.

However survivor's point about social isolation is not necessarily true in all cases.

In the event that the character was already an outsider at home, the fear for him would be that of a return to social isolation.

The MC could in theory migrate to another small group of friends but if he had little rapport with his fellows in the first place then acceptance is far from guaranteed.

I've recently read an article, printed in 1880, telling how in 1879, the downtown business district burned to the ground... all seven blocks of it.

I mention all that for this reason: the aforementioned newspaper article lists the businesses that replaced those that burned. Of the long, long list of newly constructed businesses, there were 13 saloons and two liquor stores... in a seven block area. This doesn't count the high-brow hotels that had "billard rooms" for drinking and smoking. A fair number of those saloons had bordellos in them that were active until they were shut down in the 1930's. I remember reading once there were 20 bordellos in the red light district in our town. Keep it all in perspective... this would have been a community of probably less than 10,000 people. It ain't New York.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the services of a prostitute were easy to access. Mountain men, gold miners, soldiers, laborers, seamen, railroad workers... you name it, in an old west boom town, "fallen women" were a dime a dozen.

dunno if that helps in the discussion or not, but them's the facts from the Old West.

If you look at the psychological research, the easiest way to get a strong, attractive man who's a virgin in his twenties is to give him a mother in your story. If he sees his mother as beautiful, loving, and strong, if he respects her as a person, he's much less likely to see the girls around him as sex toys, more likely to treat women as human beings, as equals. The same qualities that keep him from having casual sex will make him a more desirable catch. But then, of course, the only woman he'll want to mary must be beautiful, loving and strong.

By the way, even in romance novels, the mere fact that he's a virgin doesn't mean he can't please her. Let his father, or a father figure, or even his mother, have the "marriage talk" with him, where they tell him to concentrate on her desire, her fears, her pleasure, before he lets himself be carried away. This was a common talk to have with young men at least through the 1950's.

quote:

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Thanks, I didn't know the Catholic Church's position on this. My church teaches that the Catholic Church views sex as a "necessary evil," not a good. If this is not the Catholic Church's position, either the Catholic Church's position has changed, or my church has got it wrong. So the clergy who take vows of celibacy do so for other reasons, not because sex is viewed as evil?

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Cori, dear, do your research! Don't ever just accept what one group says about another's beliefs! You're online here, so I KNOW you can do searches on yahoo or google. As for your "unique brain configuration", I'm not sure as to which configuration you refer, but most of us here aren't your average joe or jane. That's why we write!

I'm an ex-mensa member. Being eligible for mensa puts me outside 99% of the population; having decided that mensa folks were boring as hell puts me god knows where! Add my ADD and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my world-view being shattered at the age of three by a mother who explained how light and sound travel at different speeds, fracturing my world into bits carried by different senses, leaving me wondering in what other ways the world wasn't as it seemed . . . Add, too, my photographic memory, and the songs that always play in my head (audiographic memory), and tell me I'm more normal than you are, hon.

The Catholic clergy take vows of celebacy because of Paul's letters to the churches (New Testament) where he tells them that a man would be hard-pressed to be a decent husband and a good pastor, too, given the times they lived in.

Education: very good up until age 16 or so, then interrupted by some trouble he got into. Unless he skipped a grade earlier, he didn't have a high school diploma, or earned it after the war.

As for worrying whether he'd look weird in comparison to other men, average or not: it's a manifestation of my own obsession. Will I look weird in front of other historical novelists, particularly male ones obsessed with casual sex? (Think John Jakes.)

Kidding, kidding. Though one does get the feeling that Mensa is culturally dominated by its 98th percentile members...at least that's how I always felt about them. Boy, how's that for effete snobbery?

I don't think CSCS needs to agonise over this. Make a decision and you can justify it a million ways. OSC reckons you can do anything so long as you're willing to pay the price, ie either the price of developing an appropriate back-story or the price of letting the plausibility slip and risk losing some readers.

Clearly you want to produce a book, but what outcome do you wish to achieve? Flattering peer review? To tell a story? The widest possible readership? Knowing the answer to those sort of questions and what outcomes are your priorities will help define what price you should be willing to pay and, in comparison, whether you are paying too much or too little.

Low-end objective: be better than John Jakes!

High-end objective: take my place among the literary greats in producing works towering and immortal.

Super-short explanation: I was judging by "What might modern readers think of an author who writes such things in fiction?" NOT by "What might characters living in that time and place think of such a character?" I can see certain readers, particularly male, picking up my book and thinking, "Who is this naive small-town unsophisticate who is so stupid as not to KNOW that 95% of people have sex before marriage AS A MATTER OF COURSE? What kind of nonsense is she trying to pull here?" I also worry not what other people, real or fictional, might think about my character, but what he might worry they are thinking about him--since I must understand *his* thoughts.

My main character's role models are Grandfather and Uncle, with Father and two Brothers as bad examples.

In case I didn't explain enough about my characters, the reason the question of this specific subject is important, in their particular case, is we're talking about adventurous people (hunter/explorer/soldier types) who didn't stay put in civilized settlements or necessarily just take other people's word for anything. I wonder if it is unrealistic to portray such people behaving in a [S]sensible[/S] conservative manner regarding sex. I can even write to some extent about a character who is reckless--I just have trouble writing about one who is stupid or takes unnecessary risks with himself and others--in other words, one I don't respect. Also, I understand men are MUCH less discriminating than women, but this doesn't necessarily apply to all men. Even if I write about a character with either high standards (respects women) or just shallow (won't do it with anyone not as good-looking as he is, and he's in the top 1%, so--) wonder if readers will respect or believe him if he's not like something I wonder whether I can write about at all. It's a real problem.

What's got me all rattled is the vast chasm between "Casanova" and "total virgin." It seems to cover a LOT of territory! Also, not talking about a guy who would ravish a virgin or really hit on any woman who wasn't asking for it--well, I guess that would take care of a lot of potential situations right there-- --we don't even have to "assume" opportunities were way less in the 1860s, that's a GIVEN--what I'm asking is a little more complicated. Would the character question his OWN manhood for not going out and looking for it, knowing others do--and I assume this would apply more to a naturally sociable person than a total loner? And, if he did question his manhood, what would he do? Give in to what he knows has serious dangers and was taught was wrong? Prove his aggression in other ways, like getting in a lot of fights and beating up guys? Or, not say anything till someone said something to him first, then skewer them with sarcasm? My MC is what you might call defensive without being insecure, if that combination makes sense at all. By the way, this is an EXTREMELY honest person who would NOT lie or brag about anything he hadn't actually done, or encourage another person through any sort of deceit to do anything he wouldn't himself--I do know THIS much for FACT. Thanks for your consideration.

edited because I really can spell....

Thank you for thinking of it and to everyone else thanks for the lively support of the subject.

So sure, have your male MC be a virgin if you wish. It shouldn't even be an issue.

Also _Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences_, by Laura M. Carpenter (2005) covers this very issue.