Purity? What about it?

I am becoming more and more frustrated by each new article I read on the following quote from Tony Abbott concerning pre-marital sex which he 'let slip' during an interview with the Australian Women's Weekly: ''I think I would say to my daughters if they were to ask me this question . . . it is the greatest gift that you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don't give it to someone lightly, that's what I would say.''

It has provoked such indignant responses and has once and for all convinced me that sex has almost zero meaning in our secular and liberal society:

But in its own way, the Opposition Leader's description of virginity as ''the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving'' was nauseating. The comment both fetishes a woman's virginity and reduces her value to the presence of a hymen, to the unpenetrated state of her vagina. Why is that the greatest gift a woman can give someone? What about her mind? Her actions? Dare I say it, her soul? If I were one of Abbott's daughters I would be furious to have my value reduced to the state of my hymen.

Worse is the suggestion that our "greatest gift" is still just a sexual one. Not our intelligence, professional contributions, support, capacity to love, laugh, or just suffer through an entire Boxing Day Test match, but the giving of sex.

These women are fuming because they believe Abbott to be sexist and old-fashioned. I'm fuming because they would obviously think me a naive and ridiculous prude. Oh and religious nut. I'm just amazed at the way in which they write about sex. According to this last woman, purity is to be valued AFTER intelligence, professional contributions, support, capacity to love (this one really, really annoys me because obviously this writer has absolutely no clue as to the real meaning of love), laugh or willingness to suffer through cricket. And what exactly does the first writer presume to be the soul? How could purity, emotional and physical, not totally encompass that notion? If you've had several partners and shared yourself with them so intimately before you finally find "the one" what are you going to have left to give? What soul have you? What, I ask you?!

Oh, Carolyn McCulley, how right you are when you say that being a biblical woman in this world is a radical act.