Lately -- finally -- the media has been giving some attention
and great credence to what we at Scarleteen have been saying all along: that young adults direly need inclusive
and continual dialogue about sex. And we do mean sex, all of it,
not just penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse.
In “new” study after study, article after article supports the
statements we who work at the grassroots level of sexuality education
have been making for years: abstinence-based sex education and
umbrella denial of the "don't do It before marriage" variety simply
don't work. This is the kind of sex education, mind you, that
has been prevailing in American schools for much of the last 10
years, and particularly since 1996, when conservative forces in
the Federal government succeeded in tying abstinence-based, wait-until-you’re-
married sex education with accessibility to Federal funding.
It was a bad decision on the part of the Federal government; a
stupid decision, and a decision that is harming more people than
it could ever hope to help. Why? Because abstinence-based sex
education rarely encourages a thorough education about what sex
actually is, or about all of the risks and responsibilities inherent
in all kinds of sex. Abstinence-based sex education relies, most
of the time, on scare tactics, finger-wagging, and “no no no,
you aren’t allowed to do that yet” messages in the hopes that
people simply won’t do the things that are problematic. More times
than not, the adult educators sending those messages don’t even
know themselves the full extent of what is or could be problematic,
even when it comes to something as relatively medically simple
as sexually transmitted infections. As a result, abstinence-based
sex education leaves a wake of enormous, yawning, potentially
disastrous ignorance. A great many people -- young and old --
understand messages of abstinence to mean just that: abstinence
from The Act, from "It," from penis-in-vagina intercourse. Period.
That’s it. That’s all folks.
Certainly, abstaining from penis-in-vagina intercourse, that Holy
Grail of heterosexual activity, will prevent most pregnancies.
It’s pretty good at that. But abstaining only from penis-in-vagina
intercourse, and thinking that other forms of sexual activity
are perfectly fine - and this is what many, many teens and young
adults seem to be thinking, not only based on our experience but
on that of numerous researchers, clinicians, and health care workers
- doesn’t prevent a whole lot else. And what it doesn’t prevent
is damned serious: the widespread transmission of a variety of
sexually transmitted diseases and infections, many of which can
ruin a life or even end it prematurely. This puts not only our
children’s health at stake, but public health at large, including
our own.
The sad thing is that a great many adults and even sex educators
support the myth that sex equals penis-in-vagina intercourse.
Either they may not know any better themselves, they’ve never
taken the time to think about it, or they are simply content to
allow personal and sectarian ideals of "morality" outweigh real
and ethically sound concern about and care for the quality of
life and health of the young. Many adults in the abstinence camp
are more concerned about the quality of life and health of unborn
children than they are of the children living today, an irony
not lost on those of us who realize that the children whose sexual
health is being so blithely relegated to a “just say no, sweetie”
are the children who will be the parents of the next generation.
Those children may be conceived and born within the bounds of
holy matrimony, but how does that benefit them if they’re born
with congenital infections - HIV, one of the new antibiotic-resistant
strains of gonorrhea, hepatitis B or C, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes
- that their parents contracted while having unsafe but “abstinent”
non-intercourse sex? For that matter, how does it benefit a young
adult to wait until marriage for intercourse if they contract
HIV in the meantime?
Three-quarters of newly reported STI cases are in those under
25 years of age. Sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea,
chlamydia, and human papilloma virus are being spread at shocking
rates, again, mainly among the young, and not simply in the inner
urban areas from which many White Americans politely excuse themselves,
but also in the seemingly protected and pristine realm of quiet,
privileged suburbia. To be plain, at this rate, worrying about
early pregnancy may be a moot concern: several sexually transmitted
infections and diseases can render a woman completely and permanently
infertile. Other illnesses, such as human papilloma virus, dramatically
raise the risk of cervical and uterine cancer. Eventually, we
as a society will have to deal with these and other long-term
complications of extremely common STIs, and the enormity of the
public health expense that looms down that road is staggering,
utterly outweighing what it would cost right now to more effectively
prevent those STIs in the first place.
Too many of us forget what it was like to be young. We forget
that our knowledge was limited, we forget that what we wanted
to believe often had more prevalence than what the realities were,
and most importantly, we forget that being told what to do or
not to do never mattered much unless we were told why we should or shouldn’t do it and those reasons were convincing,
supported, and thoroughly explained. Funny, that’s not different
from how most of us still are as adults. Yet we expect our children
to accept “don’t have sex until you’re married” homilies without
us even thoroughly explaining just exactly what we mean by “sex.”
Is it any wonder the message gets discarded?
As a society, we are allowing some very dangerous attitudes and
misinformation to prevail, not in the service of protecting our
children, but in the service of protecting our own ideologies
and covering up our own sexual ignorance and shame. If we make
clear that sex is not just intercourse -- that it can be a myriad
of different things -- then we allow for the simple fact that
sex which is not strictly heterosexual (that is, involving a penis
and a vagina) is also sex. If we take the time and the care to
explain to our youth how to take care of their sexual health and
what dangers truly exist, then we allow for the simple fact that
they can and will make their own choices and that we have only
moderate control over those choices. If we assign them serious
personal responsibility, such as the responsibility to exert control
over their own sexual desires and actions, then we must recognize
that this gives them the liberty to make those choices ultimately
in the way they see fit. And this, above and beyond all else,
is what many adults simply do not want to swallow.
Is the answer to attempt to deny teens and young adults those
choices and responsibilities? Wake up and smell the double skim
latte, folks - those liberties are not ours to give, we can only
acknowledge that they are already there. Teens and young adults
already know that their sexualities exist, that they are ultimately
the only ones eligible to decide whether or not to act on them.
They also know, whether they do it with or without adult permission
or approval, that they will. And they have every right to: they
are human, and sexuality is a part of being human.
In our experience as sex educators, it is only very rarely that
teenaged rebellion makes a teenager or young adult make unsound
or unhealthy sexual decisions when they know what their alternatives
are. What keeps them from making those decisions in as responsible
and healthful a way possible is that they simply don’t have the
information, they don’t know what alternatives exist. Our general
societal and governmentally reinforced refusal to equip them with
the information, the tools and the support to make good decisions
is as good a guarantee as you can get that most teenagers are
simply not going to know any better than to make ignorant decisions.
That refusal, and not the unavoidable human reality of sex, is
something of which America at large should be profoundly ashamed.
America is not protecting its children with these actions: America
is killing them slowly and painfully and without remorse. Sexually
transmitted disease is still often seen, after all, as the due
punishment for sin. The message sent is not “protect the little
children.” It is, instead, “protect the good little children,” and good people are those who obey and follow
directions. Yet, most of them -- those “paying the price” with
STIs and accidental pregnancies -- have done just that, followed
the unclear and full-of-holes instruction of their abstinence-based
sex education to the letter.
We've watched kids walk into Scarleteen (a privately owned, not-for-profit,
volunteer-run sexuality clearinghouse for teens and young adults
that receives no federal, state, or local funding) as self-identified
"virgins" who are having anal sex regularly. We've seen young
teens with several partners who have unprotected oral sex regularly.
We've seen countless pregnancy and STD scares and incidents among
teens who were taught that only penis-in-vagina intercourse carries
any of these risks. Many of the young adults who participate in
our moderated online dialogues at Scarleteen firmly believe, when
they first arrive, that they’re just fine having unprotected oral,
anal or vaginal sex, even if they’ve never had a PAP smear or
been screened for STDs/STIs, and most of the time their partners
haven’t been evaluated for sexually transmitted disease, either.
That’s the norm for us because it’s the norm all over the country.
It makes us very happy when we see those same young adults several
months later -- having received the information as to why what
they are doing is unsafe and unhealthy and WHAT they can do about
it -- walk out truly proud to have taken control over their sexual
lives by learning how to practice all kinds of sex safely, learning
to take care of their health, and learning that partnered sex
is truly better when they're prepared to responsibly manage all
aspects of it.
Not only are young adults like these physically healthier as a
result, they are personally empowered by understanding that sex
doesn't just "happen," that sex is something which they can control
and manage, whose potentials and consequences they can learn about,
something they can choose to do or not do, or to do only in certain
ways to diminish risks. This kind of understanding is not merely
a benefit to the individual teens and young adults who acquire
it: it trickles down and benefits others. Many young adults at
Scarleteen have reported being able to correct their own health
teachers when those teachers were misinforming their students.
We think it’s a fine thing when young people are educated enough
about sexuality that they can say things like “well, actually,
you do need to practice safer sex when you do oral sex, because
many sexually transmitted diseases can be passed on that way,”
or “not everybody has, or has any desire to ever have, penis-in-
vagina intercourse. What about them?” We also think it is a fine
thing when a young adult is given the credit they deserve for
being responsible, especially in a culture which is happy to give
them the responsibility when they make a poor choice, but when
they make sound choices, is more inclined to commend a parent,
an educator or a culture than they are to commend the teenager
who actually made the decision.
Honestly, it makes us proud to know that we’re helping to educate
teens and young adults about sexuality so that they can question
the incompleteness of the sexual education they’re given in the
schools, and so that they can make their own decisions in the
face of the “just say no” rhetoric that attempts to remove not
only choice but serious evaluative thought about sexuality from
teenagers’ lives. We don’t advocate sexual activity for teenagers
at Scarleteen. In fact, we tell teens on a daily basis that simply
NOT having or doing a particular kind of sexual activity is an
available option, and that when they are feeling pressured, hurt,
or confused, the best decision to make is no decision at all:
the decision to just not go there right now, and simply not have
to deal with it until they’ve learned more and had more of a chance
to figure out what they really want. It’s not a matter of morals,
it’s a matter of self-protective common sense.
Scarleteen doesn’t advocate sex. We advocate knowing about sex,
in all its many forms. We advocate being honest about what sex
is, what sex can and can’t do for you, what sex does and doesn’t
mean, what risks come along with various kinds of sexual activity.
We advocate making choices based on information and how that information
applies to a given individual, not simply following whatever wave
of societal ideology on sexuality is most accepted at the time,
be that abstinence or promiscuity, safer sex or sexual practices
which throw caution to the wind. Most of all, we advocate strongly
for an ethical sexuality in which desire and hormones are mediated
by intellect, information, and compassionate behavior toward ourselves
and others. And that, we are sorry to say, seems to be the kind
of sexuality and sex education from which the vast majority of
Americans seem to be truly abstinent. If that’s what abstinence
is, then it certainly is not -- as roadside billboards blare --
“the only safe sex.” It isn’t safe at all.
Copyright 2000, Hanne Blank and Heather Corinna. Reprinted by
permission. |
