Above: image I shot of a French American Apparel ad in my copy of last month’s French Playboy (print) See also.
This week’s SF Chronicle column explores what kids these days in public schools must be doing to learn about sex, and follows a bit of where all that abstinence-only education money is being funneled. From like, presidential candidates moving millions in government funding to shady religious organizations. Even the Moonies get a nod. Snip from Abstinence does not make the heart grow fonder – What a girl needs: Real sex education:
If he pulls it out, you can’t catch anything. Like a baby. All girls know that if you take it in the back door, you’re still a virgin. My friend’s sister told me that oral isn’t real sex. If you shower after you do it, you have nothing to worry about. If you do it standing up, or if you jump up and down after, you won’t get a baby. Same if you do it underwater. And if you rinse your coochie with Coke, you’re in the clear.
So many questions. It’s like we need a teen sex “MythBusters.”
Much like Mary (and not the much-loved Marys in my comments), Jamie Lynn Spears was like, rilly surprised she was pregnant. I mean, I’m sure she followed all the “facts” she learned from our national abstinence education programs, and everything her friends (and mother, and sister) like, totally told her worked. I mean, she’s a good girl — for a Spears. Or, more sadly, for a typical modern American young woman. When hormones rage and the only answer you hear is “Just say no,” you have only your friends to turn to for … cola douches.
In fourth grade, I was one of those lucky Bay Area kids who got a day of reproductive education — mind you, it was all illustrated genitalia, had nothing to do with pleasure, and told me nothing about saying no or yes, or if what I was doing with girls and boys was “normal” or dangerous, or healthy (yes and no to all, thank you very much). But still, it’s more than kids have been getting for the past seven years under the turkey-baster sex philosophy program known as Title V. Not V for Vendetta, or even V for Violet, but V as in Vaginal, Anal and Oral Disasters for All.
We’re no strangers in this country to policymakers with not-so-repressed, excessive moral zeal about homos, underage sex and porn. The relationship is like a nonconsenting “friends with benefits.” Except when you peel back the Saran Wrap your brother’s cousin’s friend told you worked as an “OMG-AWESOME” condom, you get to see exactly who’s benefiting from all that abstinence education — and no, it’s not the kids, and especially not the 14 (and climbing) states that have refused the blackmail-style federal funding to push suspiciously privatized agendas in public schools.
Abstinence education is a failure, but at the 11th hour of 2007 it still got a huge pile of Bush-approved money.
How much cash are we talking about to pay teen girls to give their hoo-hahs a Coke and a smile? (Make mine a double, thanks.) (…)
Link.
