Over the Thanksgiving holiday, news broke
that quarterback Tim Tebow and former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo, who had been
dating since October, have gone their separate ways. Ordinarily, this would
register as only a minor blip on the celebrity gossip Richter scale, except for
one unusual detail that set the internet afire: apparently Culpo left Tebow
because she was fed up with his unwavering vow to save himself sexually for
marriage.
Tebow, as everyone who follows sports and/or
pop culture knows, is one of the most outspoken, committed Christians in either
arena. In fact, the 28-year-old is arguably more well-known for his steadfast faith
than his accomplishments on the football field, at least since winning the
Heisman Trophy as a college sophomore.
Olivia Culpo, apart from her pageant success,
is known more recently as the former girlfriend of Nick Jonas of the Jonas
Brothers, all of whom were outspoken, committed Christians themselves at the
height of their fame. The boy band’s sexual restraint not only ran against the
grain of pop star promiscuity, but they and their “purity rings” even made
abstinence temporarily cool and inspired a trend.
But Nick Jonas was apparently unable to hold
out against Culpo’s charms (in fairness, not many young men could). About
losing his virginity, he told Wendy Williams, “As I grew up, I sort of figured out what
was important to me and my own belief system.” Abstinence apparently didn’t
make the cut.
But Tim Tebow continues to hold out, despite
it reportedly costing him a relationship with someone whom many people would
consider a hot catch.
Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Because
despite news of the breakup inspiring a raft of crude jokes at Tebow’s expense
– “For once, it's not Tebow who's having trouble scoring - it's his
girlfriend,” the New York Daily News quipped
in an article titled “Tim Tebow still can’t find the end
zone as girlfriend Olivia Culpo breaks it off over lack of sex” – it is Culpo, not Tebow, who likely missed
out on a great catch.
“He was really into her,” a source told the New
York Daily News, but “she
just can't deal with the sex thing. He's pretty adamant about it, I guess.” Indeed,
and that makes him a rarity in today’s sex-saturated pop culture – such a
rarity that it polarizes people into one of two teams: those who deride Tebow as
a loser for not taking full advantage of the opportunity to, um, find the end
zone with Miss Universe, and those who are impressed with his almost superhuman
adherence to religious principle.
At Jezebel, for example, where Tebow is a
favorite target of the angry bloggers because he’s a white Christian male and
because his mother famously refused her doctor’s advice to abort him, they
titled their article, with their usual boring profanity, “Miss Universe Allegedly Dumped Tim Tebow
Because He Refused to Fuck.” It painted Culpo as a “woman who knows what she wants” and “doesn’t
have to wait for anything.”
No doubt she is. But if indeed Tebow’s
abstinence is indeed the reason for their breakup (E! Online claims to have been told by “an insider” that the split had nothing to do with it),
it makes her look like a woman who didn’t recognize what a young man of
exceptional character and personal strength Tebow is, and what a partner she
could have had.
Peer and cultural expectations – not to
mention hormones – place incredible pressure on young people to lose their
virginity. A good-looking guy in the public eye and in the hyper-masculine
world of pro sports, like Tebow, is under special scrutiny and presented with
extraordinary temptation to cheat on his religious commitment. "Once you start
seeing these girls around the NBA,” basketball star Magic Johnson once
reportedly told a rookie, “you won't be thinking any of that Christian and God
stuff.” As ESPN’s Jemele Hill put it back in 2009, Tebow “must spend a good bit of his day stiff-arming
willing women as if they were SEC linebackers.” By contrast, former NBA titan Wilt
Chamberlain boasted of sleeping with 20,000 women, and Magic Johnson reportedly
had sex with 300-500 partners a year and threw orgies at his house. Johnson
ended up contracting AIDS.
If Tim Tebow can stay strong and committed to
his Christian principles in the face of this onslaught of temptation and the
public derision that he often receives, then he’s a man who can be trusted to
be faithful to his partner. That’s no small thing in today’s world,
particularly for a handsome young man in the sexually charged world of
celebrity. Not only that, but it points to his strength of character and his
trustworthiness to act according to principle in every other aspect of his
life.
And isn’t that worth waiting for?
From Acculturated, 12/4/15
