Abstinence fails, use a condom

According to a recent study, 25% of teenage girls in the United States have a Sexually Transmitted Infection. (requires login) Such a high rate of infection is public health crisis, and one that is very preventable. It's also a sign that our government is failing our youth, especially young women, by insisting on abstinence-only sexual health curricula. Teenagers have sex. They have hormones, and they experiment, because, well, they're teenagers and they're horny and why not? Ignorance, combined with the adolescent feeling of invulnerability and the need to fit in, results in extremely risky behaviors. Even if girls know that they need to practice contraception, they don't necessarily practice safer-sex, and even those who insist on condoms for penetrative intercourse can catch diseases through other types of sex play. In fact, only half the girls in the study admitted to having had "sex", which, thanks to Bill Clinton et al, is often defined only as penetrative vaginal intercourse. There are lots of ways two naked people can have fun together, and many of those ways carry the risk of disease. Obviously, these girls didn't get HPV or chlamydia simply from holding hands, which indicates that they're engaging in other types of sex acts.

When teens know the risks of "sex" but define "sex" so narrowly, they decide to mitigate those risks by engaging in other kinds of sex play. And girls, especially, get the raw end of the deal when it comes to abstinence-only sex ed, because many girls feel intense pressure to give into their boyfriends' sexual demands in order to maintain a certain social standing.¹ Even in the 21st century in the USA, girls and women still do not have the same amount of sexual autonomy that males do. By giving girls accurate information about the risks associated with all kinds of sex, we empower them to make decisions based on facts, not what they learned at summer camp and on cable. They have better reasons to say no and to wait until the decision is theirs, rather than their partner's. And boys too, need to know just what risks they are taking by engaging in these activities.

But no one wants to imagine their precious little girl performing fellatio, so instead we bury our heads in the sand and tell teens to keep it in their pants. Which is good advice, certainly. I'm not advocating that we encourage free love in the corridors of our nation's schools. But we know for a fact that it isn't being followed by everyone. We tell kids not to smoke or drink or do drugs or speed, and yet they continue to do so, owing partly to adolescent rebellion and partly to that aforementioned feeling of invincibility. The difference between these activities and sex is that sex is a biological drive, necessary to the survival of our species, and there are ways to mitigate the risk when you give into that drive. We need to teach our young people what those ways are, because the chances that they're not going to engage in sex someday are very small. Teaching teenagers about sex and how to be safe doesn't turn them into fornicators. Being teenagers does (even the dullest teen can generally figure out that Tab A goes into Slot B, esp. in our sex-saturated media culture). Even if they make it out of high school without having any kind of sex, they grow into adults, and with each passing year, the likelihood that they remain virgins goes down (92% of women have had sex by age 24 ). If we don't make reality-based sexual education available to our teenagers, when is it that we expect that anyone will learn about the risks of sex? College? Loveline? Isn't part of the point of public education to prepare our youth for their place in society? And some of these girls are destined to join the unacceptably large numbers of people without health insurance (15.7% as of the last census). Who will continue to spread disease, because they won't have primary-care physicians to suggest testing or provide treatment and education. When left untreated, many curable STIs can result in infertility (and other long-term side effects, including heart disease and brain damage) or be passed on to infants during pregnancy and labor, greatly increasing the public health crisis.

Bottom line is this: the vast majority of people will have sex at some point in their lives. By hiding the realities of sex from our teenagers, we do everyone a disservice. Ignorance may be bliss, but it's a lousy bedmate. Why are we so afraid of teaching people how their bodies work?

1. I remember a very interesting discussion in my Sociology of Sex and Gender class about why such a narrow definition of sex is embraced by our society. Teenagers are under pressure from the media and their peers (and their hormones) to have sex. Teenage girls are under pressure from society to remain chaste until marriage (or at least college). By engaging in sex that isn't intercourse, they get to remain "virgins" while still satisfying their boyfriends' and society's demands that they be sexual. But our public schools can't discuss these activities or the risks they carry, and so your average teenager doesn't know what her risks are or how to prevent them.