You Are Under Arrest for Using the Word “Condom”
Posted by newageamazon on Monday, April 12th, 2010
Photograph ©2007 Andrew Goodrich / CC BY-NC
It’s that myth conservatives like to throw into people’s faces anytime the sex education debate starts up again. “If you teach children about birth control, you are teaching them to have promiscuous sex.”
If you examine this myth even on the surface it’s pretty ridiculous. But there’s this pearl-clutching fear among people opposing comprehensive sex education that if you tell teenagers, “Hey, if you’re going to do it? Wear a condom,” it will lead to our daughters (and let’s not kid ourselves, it especially targets young women) going “Oh, hey, no consequences sex? ORGY IN THE CAFETERIA!”
But even deeper than that is the fact that teaching abstinence only education, rife with misinformation and outdated or flat out made up facts, doesn’t stop teenagers from having sex. It makes them more likely to engage in unprotected sex and especially unprotected oral and anal sex, as that way they’re still “pure.”
And now, teaching children how to protect themselves could lead to criminal charges in the state of Wisconsin. In February, the state passed a law requiring schools that teach sex ed to include information about contraception and sexual transmitted diseases and infections. The law allowed for a school to not teach sex ed or to allow parents to pull their children out of the class if they felt it was inappropriate.
But District Attorney Scott Southworth of Juneau County has threatened criminal charges against teachers who include discussions of contraception in their lessons.
“Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender,” he wrote. “It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks.”
Of course, this metaphor is terrible, but abstinence educators aren’t great with them in the first place. Take the “candy” metaphor, where an instructor will unwrap a lollipop and let their students each have a lick. Then they will hold it up against an “untouched” lollipop and asks them which one they’d rather have. Of course, the reply is generally the just unwrapped one.
Which is their metaphor for sexual activity. If you have sex with other people before you are married, you will be a “dirty” lollipop and nobody will want you.
But none of this helps. At all. Teenagers are still having sex. All we’re succeeding in doing is warping their ideas of what sex is and should be by teaching them their sexual desires are wrong and should be ignored at all costs, but then sending them out into a world where the media sexualizes everything, with a specific focus on young people.
Now, the media isn’t exactly exempt from scrutiny, it re-enforces a lot of the same harmful traditional gender roles and stereotypes that abstinence education does. And it aids in teaching young people that sexuality is a black and white issue: you are either the innocent virgin sitting at home on Friday nights taking cold showers and getting called a “prude” or you are the wild girl out until 2 in the morning all the time, drinking and getting high and having loose sex and getting called a “whore.”
This dichotomy teaches young women that their entire worth and personality depends on whether or not they are sexually active. It also helps to set young women against each other in the “prude”/”whore” wars, basically damning them no matter what they choose to do.
Of course, conservative groups will immediately attack the media for it’s portrayal of sex and sexuality as teaching young men and ESPECIALLY young women about sex.
Here’s the funny thing: it’s not the media’s job to teach. It’s the educators. The ones that abstinence education undercuts and insists they teach things their way. In the Wisconsin law, there is room for parents who don’t want their children taught sex ed by the school to remove them from the program. There is room for schools to refuse to teach it, but they have to notify parents of this choice. There is room for personal choice and intelligent decision making.
But in the abstinence world view, there is no such thing. It has to be taught their way, for the GOOD of your children (except for how many studies have shown how harmful it is, but that’s just silly science, right?). And personal choice and intelligent decisions? Dangerous thinking, that’s the sort of thing you want to teach your kids about sex. And we all know that they can’t make personal choices and intelligent decisions.
You know what? Maybe they can’t. But if they’re armed with accurate information and not made to feel dirty for their choices, maybe, just maybe, THEY CAN.
For further reading on this topic, I highly suggest you grab a copy of The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti. It touches on this topic and many others and concentrates on how perceived “purity” is hurting an entire generation of young women.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 12:40 PM. It is filed under Blog, Commentary, New Age Amazon and tagged with birth control, education, Safe sex.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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You Are Under Arrest for Using the Word “Condom”
Posted by newageamazon on Monday, April 12th, 2010
Photograph ©2007 Andrew Goodrich / CC BY-NC
It’s that myth conservatives like to throw into people’s faces anytime the sex education debate starts up again. “If you teach children about birth control, you are teaching them to have promiscuous sex.”
If you examine this myth even on the surface it’s pretty ridiculous. But there’s this pearl-clutching fear among people opposing comprehensive sex education that if you tell teenagers, “Hey, if you’re going to do it? Wear a condom,” it will lead to our daughters (and let’s not kid ourselves, it especially targets young women) going “Oh, hey, no consequences sex? ORGY IN THE CAFETERIA!”
But even deeper than that is the fact that teaching abstinence only education, rife with misinformation and outdated or flat out made up facts, doesn’t stop teenagers from having sex. It makes them more likely to engage in unprotected sex and especially unprotected oral and anal sex, as that way they’re still “pure.”
And now, teaching children how to protect themselves could lead to criminal charges in the state of Wisconsin. In February, the state passed a law requiring schools that teach sex ed to include information about contraception and sexual transmitted diseases and infections. The law allowed for a school to not teach sex ed or to allow parents to pull their children out of the class if they felt it was inappropriate.
But District Attorney Scott Southworth of Juneau County has threatened criminal charges against teachers who include discussions of contraception in their lessons.
“Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender,” he wrote. “It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks.”
Of course, this metaphor is terrible, but abstinence educators aren’t great with them in the first place. Take the “candy” metaphor, where an instructor will unwrap a lollipop and let their students each have a lick. Then they will hold it up against an “untouched” lollipop and asks them which one they’d rather have. Of course, the reply is generally the just unwrapped one.
Which is their metaphor for sexual activity. If you have sex with other people before you are married, you will be a “dirty” lollipop and nobody will want you.
But none of this helps. At all. Teenagers are still having sex. All we’re succeeding in doing is warping their ideas of what sex is and should be by teaching them their sexual desires are wrong and should be ignored at all costs, but then sending them out into a world where the media sexualizes everything, with a specific focus on young people.
Now, the media isn’t exactly exempt from scrutiny, it re-enforces a lot of the same harmful traditional gender roles and stereotypes that abstinence education does. And it aids in teaching young people that sexuality is a black and white issue: you are either the innocent virgin sitting at home on Friday nights taking cold showers and getting called a “prude” or you are the wild girl out until 2 in the morning all the time, drinking and getting high and having loose sex and getting called a “whore.”
This dichotomy teaches young women that their entire worth and personality depends on whether or not they are sexually active. It also helps to set young women against each other in the “prude”/”whore” wars, basically damning them no matter what they choose to do.
Of course, conservative groups will immediately attack the media for it’s portrayal of sex and sexuality as teaching young men and ESPECIALLY young women about sex.
Here’s the funny thing: it’s not the media’s job to teach. It’s the educators. The ones that abstinence education undercuts and insists they teach things their way. In the Wisconsin law, there is room for parents who don’t want their children taught sex ed by the school to remove them from the program. There is room for schools to refuse to teach it, but they have to notify parents of this choice. There is room for personal choice and intelligent decision making.
But in the abstinence world view, there is no such thing. It has to be taught their way, for the GOOD of your children (except for how many studies have shown how harmful it is, but that’s just silly science, right?). And personal choice and intelligent decisions? Dangerous thinking, that’s the sort of thing you want to teach your kids about sex. And we all know that they can’t make personal choices and intelligent decisions.
You know what? Maybe they can’t. But if they’re armed with accurate information and not made to feel dirty for their choices, maybe, just maybe, THEY CAN.
For further reading on this topic, I highly suggest you grab a copy of The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti. It touches on this topic and many others and concentrates on how perceived “purity” is hurting an entire generation of young women.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 12:40 PM. It is filed under Blog, Commentary, New Age Amazon and tagged with birth control, education, Safe sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.