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The mentality of abstinence demands a certain elementary moral metaphysics. Teach this: the more you indulge in anything, good or bad, but especially bad--in drugs, casual sex, violence, idiot music, stupidity, driving 90 m.p.h., bad manners, rage--the more you lose. The more you abstain, the more you gain. This is not cheap rhyming paradox but a good truth that in the past generation or two has been swept away by raw sewage. For an adolescent, abstinence means security and, therefore, the freedom that comes with self-possession. Abstinence becomes a medium of clarity, the window through which it is easier to recognize, among many things, one's work and one's mate.
America has become a society that makes too much of its living by marketing its own Impure Thoughts: a corrupt dynamic. Secular realists reply to the idea of abstinence with some snorting variant on what Hemingway's Jake Barnes told Brett Ashley at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (Jake's problem was not sexual indulgence, of course, but the reverse--grim chastity enforced by a war wound.) Get real.
But I remember that the Jesuits at Gonzaga High School maintained a chokingly blue-hazed "senior lounge" wherein we privileged men in our fourth year could light up cigarettes between classes. By graduation I was up to a pack of unfiltered Camels a day. The culture and its sustaining icons (Humphrey Bogart, for example) loved smoking. Today smoking cigarettes is disreputable, to me and practically everyone else. Change the myth, and the values follow.