Purity pledges, abstinence only does not work

[Mayabird]

Seriously. The only times the various contraceptive methods were brought up were to talk about failure rates (complete with a very poor understanding of math and statistics) and all the drawbacks to them. It was never to say something like "condoms only aren't perfect, but you could use a combination of condoms and something else" or "there are all these different options because they don't all work for everyone, such as how some women can't take birth control pills." The message was that contraception doesn't work, period. You can't reply on them because they're fail on you. The line about the 'weave' in condoms sticks out in my head because I remember hearing one of my classmates parroting the line years later when someone asked why they weren't using any protection during sex (said classmate either became pregnant soon after or was already pregnant, but either way the town's population grew within a few months).

Another plank is the demonization of sex and people (well, mostly women) who have sex. The worst moment I can remember was when my class was told that virgins are like newly opened roses and every time you have sex it's like ripping a petal off, and eventually you're just this ugly bud and nobody will want or love you unless you're already married to them and they're stuck with you.

[JLTucker]

Jesus Christ, Mayabird. Where the fuck did you attend school in Georgia? A rural area? I've lived here my entire life and I do not ever recall being told this shit during the sex education courses I took.

[Alyeska]

Whomever ran that system ought to be prosecuted for ruining lives. I never realized that Family Guy was spot on accurate when they satirized abstinence only.

[Mayabird]

Yeah, rural area. Specifically, a certain shithole called Commerce. If you ever get the urge to go shopping at the outlet malls there, I strongly recommend not doing so. In fact, boycott the entire town.

[Samuel]

Whomever ran that system ought to be prosecuted for ruining lives. I never realized that Family Guy was spot on accurate when they satirized abstinence only.

You cannot tell parodies of religion from the real thing. That is how crazy it is.

Another plank is the demonization of sex and people (well, mostly women) who have sex. The worst moment I can remember was when my class was told that virgins are like newly opened roses and every time you have sex it's like ripping a petal off, and eventually you're just this ugly bud and nobody will want or love you unless you're already married to them and they're stuck with you.

...What the Hell is wrong with them?

[Norseman]

... snip crazy stuff...

Another plank is the demonization of sex and people (well, mostly women) who have sex. The worst moment I can remember was when my class was told that virgins are like newly opened roses and every time you have sex it's like ripping a petal off, and eventually you're just this ugly bud and nobody will want or love you unless you're already married to them and they're stuck with you.

Whaaaaa?

Okay for the record that is batshit insane!

I mean hell when we were 12-13 in Norway (rather embarassingly long ago) they had full scale cutouts of the penis entering the vagina, and classes in how we could apply a condom. Heck one of my children's books talked about how babies were made!

When I hear about Abstinence Only I naturally assume that it's the kind of stuff you have in Norway, where you know they talk about how people who do it too early come to regret it a lot later, it's bad for their later self-esteem etc, etc. E.g. the "Don't do it, you'll just regret it later" approach. So I just assumed that Abstinence Only was this, only with no mention of contraceptives. What Mayabird describes however is so whackadoodle that I lack words.

[Kitsune]

I was reading on a medical website about an additional problem.....

A person who either had an Abstinence Only education or Purity Pledge is much less likely than a person with a more comprehensive education to seek medical attention if they find some kind of genital infection. They are afraid of the stigma

[bilateralrope]

That said Sex ed doesn't work, but abstinence is worse: researcher

Since when was sex ed ever just about reducing pregnancies? The fact that nobody in that article bothered to mention a thing about STDs is rather suspicious.

Also, when that article says that sex ed doesn't work, where did they find the population without sex ed to compare its results with ?

[sketerpot]

Another plank is the demonization of sex and people (well, mostly women) who have sex. The worst moment I can remember was when my class was told that virgins are like newly opened roses and every time you have sex it's like ripping a petal off, and eventually you're just this ugly bud and nobody will want or love you unless you're already married to them and they're stuck with you.

That sounds very familiar. My (public) school had a decent sex ed class (if parents were willing to sign a waiver) because one of the coaches had a conscience, but there were some damn screwy mandatory assemblies. One of them had a guy from "Wait training" whose analogy was a piece of tape. The first time it sticks to something, it's nice and sticky. Then when you rip it off and stick it onto anything else, it's much less sticky. If it's stuck on to a few more sexual partners (sorry, "surfaces"), it loses all its stickiness and becomes worthless as tape and gets thrown in the trash. And that's why you should abstain from sex until your wedding night!

Well, that and some other reasons. Check out the kind of "reasoning" that's typical of the abstinence-only crowd:

Fact: Sexual activity at an early age has multiple harmful consequences. The earlier a teenage girl begins sexual activity the more likely she is to suffer from increased rates of infection with sexually transmitted diseases, increased rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and birth, increased rates of single parenthood, decreased marital stability, increased maternal and child poverty, increased abortion, increased depression, and decreased adult happiness.

Fact: people who don't know the difference between correlation and causation are adrift without a paddle in a sea of information that they have no chance of understanding. This seriously needs to be taught in school, like once a semester all through high school. Maybe then one out of ten people will learn it.


In another assembly, the speaker was a local fundamentalist preacher from the most cult-like church in town, warning us about the dangers of being exposed to new ideas in college and urging people to stay strong in the conservative Christian beliefs that everybody was expected to have. Also the graduation ceremony had a school-sponsored prayer. In a public school.

[Johonebesus]

Virtually all small town highschools have invocations or prayers at graduation. That alone isn't an extraordinary example of state/religion violations. The rest, though, is disgusting.

It's examples like these that make me upset when I hear liberals say that conservatism is doomed, rationalism is necessarily going to win out in the end, etc. Many people living in sensible communities just don't realize how active reactionaries are in pushing their agendas. It seems that over the past thirty years the far right has gotten much more powerful. There is no reason to assume that they must fade away.

[DPDarkPrimus]

There was a letter published in the local paper today about the ineffectualness of abstinence pledges, and it made the interesting suggestion that people keep insisting on people taking them even after they are demonstrated to be utterly worthless because it gives them peace of mind and absolution, so that when their darling little girl has sex before marriage it isn't their fault she became a whore.

[Korto]

<Snip>
Another plank is the demonization of sex and people (well, mostly women) who have sex. The worst moment I can remember was when my class was told that virgins are like newly opened roses and every time you have sex it's like ripping a petal off, and eventually you're just this ugly bud and nobody will want or love you unless you're already married to them and they're stuck with you.

I love this. This is brilliant. And let's note the inherent misogyny of it, as it's the woman who gets ugly, and the man who only stays because he's married and therefore has to.
Also implicitly absolves him of much blame should he scamper.
I'm probably not married long enough for my wife to deteriorate yet, but Wong's apparently pretty sexually active. Maybe we should ask if he's noticed any steadily increasing ugliness. I mean, just to give this scientific theorey some objective testing.

[Darth Wong]

Mind you, my wife is not representative of the norm; her svelte figure seems to be immune to the effects of age.

To be realistic, in a lot of cases people do put on a lot of weight as they age, and they end up looking like completely different people. I've seen pictures of old university friends that I had trouble recognizing because the changes were so dramatic, and not in a positive way. But that cuts across gender lines; the idea that it is an exclusively female problem is pure misogyny, of the most traditional kind.

[Mayabird]

Of course, weight gain in middle age has nothing to do with the amount of sexual activity someone is getting (well...if anything more sex would probably be a benefit, being exercise and all). And anyway I don't remember them saying anything about physical effects, just moral, as in, "If you have a lot of sex you turn into an evil SLUT and everybody hates a slut, including the sluts, which is why they are sluts and keep having sex!"

Forget correlation and causation. I wasn't quite sure if they even understood cause and effect fully.

[Kitsune]

I am having a some trouble convincing someone on another board that people are being taught "Abstinence Only" in school. Are there any suggestions how I may be able to convince the person?

[Samuel]

I am having a some trouble convincing someone on another board that people are being taught "Abstinence Only" in school. Are there any suggestions how I may be able to convince the person?

The existance of Mayabird?

[Alyeska]

I am having a some trouble convincing someone on another board that people are being taught "Abstinence Only" in school. Are there any suggestions how I may be able to convince the person?

Link

[Kitsune]

It sounds to be honest, you could teach a comprehensive sex education and qualify for funds as far as the guidelines for abstinence teaching

[Chris OFarrell]

I first came in to know about this whole abstinence only deal years ago by catching a movie. It as about a US highschool that started teaching abstinence only and it utterly mocked the whole thing as ineffective as people kept 'cheating' to get around their pledge cards, resulting in the student council president continually having to bend further and further to justify the pledges still being valid.

On the other hand, it followed a girl who was smart enough to see through the abstinence only crap and refused to sign a pledge card. Not that she slept with anyone, she didn't, but she didn't want to. And all the social and school pressure brought to bear on her to get her to pledge by the school, her peers and that council President...despite the fact that the students were freely engaging in all manner of sexual acts still outside of school.

I remember watching the movie and thinking 'Man, that would really be a fucked up education system! Good thing that doesn't actually happen in real life...'

Boy was I stunned to find out I was wrong on THAT score...

[RazorOutlaw]

In going with the rose analogy for virginity, a mandatory high school assembly that I had to attend at one point had a video that pushed "waiting until marriage" too. My school never blatantly pushed abstinence because I think they expected us to know by that point and most of assemblies, or rather the videos they played on giant screens, were more like reminders.

However the analogy they used, with a tween emphasizing her actions dramatically, was that having sex before your wedding was like re-wearing the same old smelly pair of underwear. This was also one of the actors who pledged to a "new virgin" or to never have sex again until she was married. Although men in this group of actors had apparently pledged to be virgins again my mind was never really turned away from the fact that it was the always the woman to mention first that she was or was not a virgin. She also usually the first to tell her story about not being a virgin and how rotten that made her feel. The misogyny was a little more subtle (hey there's men that are new virgins too!) but there's no denying that the spearhead of the entire presentation was aimed at all of the teens in the auditorium/gymnasium.