Sex, Lies, Abstinence Pledges

Barbara O'Brien, as is so often the case, homes right in on the core of teen sex:

From reading several articles I take it the Dutch have what we would call a “permissive” attitude toward sex, and they also provide the kids with frankly explicit sex and birth control education. Middle-school age children practice putting condoms on broomsticks, for example. It seems all the parents are OK with this. Here, it would start riots.

I do not know if teens in the Netherlands are likely to begin having sex at an earlier or later age than American teens, but when they do have sex they are prepared for it. Our teens wrap themselves up in so much denial some of them probably can’t admit to themselves they have sex even while they are having it.

This hard on the heels of the news that The Netherlands, one of the most "permissive" countries in the world, has the lowest teen pregnancy rate.

Look, people have sex because it's fun. It's warm and fuzzy, it's exciting, it's pleasurable, it's intimate and rewarding. Of course, in this country we've managed to load it down so heavily with guilt and anxiety that it's a wonder anyone does it, but that just points up how nice it is: people do it anyway. Does anyone expect teenagers, who aren't much more than hormones anyway, to refrain? Doesn't it make sense, as O'Brien points out and as the Dutch do, to equip them as completely as possible for the likelihood? (And it is a likelihood, not a remote possibility -- this post starts with the most recent study showing that abstinence pledges don't stop teens from having sex -- they just seem to make it more likely that they'll either create a baby or get a disease.)

You are no doubt aware that I favor full disclosure in matters of sex (in general -- not on a personal level, because that's . . . um., personal). I have to agree with O'Brien and others on the "left" of this issue: it's going to happen, so make sure the kids are ready for it. That includes, by the way, honest discussions about the emotional fallout of sex, because there are going to be emotional consquences. Kids need to be given some handles on how to deal with them. (There's a touching scene in Little Butterfly when Nakahara says to Kojima, discussing his first sexual experience, that he wishes it had been with someone he loved. I think that's true for of everyone.)

I think it's also true that, as many commentators on this study have noted, abstinence pledges are more a means of establishing fathers' ownership of their daughters' virginity (and some of the descriptions I've read of "Chastity Balls" are really, really creepy). I'd take it one step farther: it's a way of establishing that children are property at a time when we should be preparing them to be independent.