There’s something refreshingly honest in two takes by conservative commentators on the behavior of young and youngish people at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Erick Erickson laments the lines of young men queued up to buy condoms, and the trend he sees in men coming to the conference with the goal of having casual sex:

They risk dragging the whole affair down to some bawdy, rowdy distraction. They risk embarrassing themselves and the conservative movement. They risk the perception premised on their own actions that conservative men of a certain age think that good manners and decorum around women of the same age is unneeded or unwanted. This is not to say CPAC cannot and should not be fun. This is not to say that CPAC cannot and should not be a party. But it is to say that I hope the college groups bussing in students next year, the out of college set there to network, and CPAC itself encourage behavior we all too often don’t talk about anymore in our society — the behavior of gentlemen. Eat, drink, smoke, be merry, but be chivalrous too. There really is, regardless of your age, no need to play the cad at CPAC to score points with conservative ladies.

And Melissa Clouthier takes her sisters in the movement to task for how they dressed and presented themselves:

Women will be future leaders, too, and I was dismayed to see how many of them either looked frumpish or like two-bit whores. First, are these young people being taught anything by their parents? I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts (you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners?). They were sitting with their mothers. What is going on here?…I cannot even tell you how many girls have told me that all they want is to get married and have babies. They do not seem to make the connection that a young man is not interested in getting married and making babies with a girl who is so easy as to have a one-night stand over a CPAC weekend (or any other weekend.)

If there’s one thing I agree with conservatives about, it’s this: conservatism’s survival as a modern family-values movement depends less on passing policies that restrict the sexual and reproductive rights of Americans and more on building an alternative cultural framework and narrative, and convincing people to actually base their lives on its tenets. This is an effort that tends to work well in closed communities. It’s much easier to, for example, choose not to have sex until you’re married if you’re surrounded by people who are making that same choice, and who are providing reinforcement that such a decision is not only moral, but will provide you with the most benefit. The idea that waiting to have sex will make sex better because you’ll have reserves of the hormone oxytocin are part of arguing that making a conservative lifestyle choice will actually yield better results.

Events like CPAC are disconcerting because they suggest that the movement is doing poorly at selling conservative ideals of sexual ethics on a broad scale. Whether the conference has consciously tried to cultivate a party vibe or not, it’s clearly no longer an environment that reinforces values like chastity, conservative self-presentation through family, and dating as a pursuit of marriage. And of course that’s disconcerting to commentators like Erickson and Clouthier. It’s utterly unsustainable for conservatives to govern one way and live another if they truly want a society based on their stated and legislated values. But calling women sluts and exhorting men to be gentleman seems unlikely to bring the two back into alignment.

Reading Chloe Angyal’s lessons from a summer’s-worth of romantic comedies, I was particularly struck by this:

This is surely one of the most bizarre lessons Hollywood rom coms teaches us about sex: You can only be open about your sexual desires with someone if you’re not dating them. In Friends With Benefits, Jamie and Dylan are delighted by the fact that they can speak freely about their wants and needs—like where they do and don’t like to be touched—because, it’s implied, they could never be that open with a significant other. Jamie is relieved that she doesn’t have to limit sex to a location with good lighting, the way she would with someone she was dating. In other words, Hollywood still wants us to think that honesty about sex is impossible in romantic relationships. When you’re having sex with a friend, you don’t have to fake orgasms, withhold constructive criticism of sexual technique for fear of offending your lover, or camouflage your repulsive body with flattering lighting. When you’re having sex with a romantic partner, however, those things are par for the course.

However much we may say the evangelical myth that if you wait to have sex until you get married the sex’ll be better is precisely that, a myth, we really do buy into a modified version of it in our pop culture when we assume that sex will automatically be awesome if you have it with someone you’re in love with because of…spontaneous synchronicity, or something like that. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Andy may be quick to the finish line when he finally consummates his marriage, but when they have sex a second time, it’s implied to be a tantric, transcendent experience. You don’t need practice to make perfect, just true love.

The movie’s sexual politics aren’t perfect, but the scene in Chasing Amy where Alyssa*, Banky, and Holden talk about what it’s like to sleep with someone who won’t give you feedback and directions may be the most honest romantic comedy scene ever filmed:

Maybe the idea of other movies is that the quest for love is so overwhelming and titanically difficult that it only seems fair that sex should come easy. But that’s not true, and even if characters sleep together before they’re married, the romantic comedy promise that falling into bed is as easy as falling out of it is just another myth, and one that’s rooted in some considerably conservative assumptions.

*Probably the first significant movie with a character with my name. Came out when I was 13. I had some cognitive dissonance.