Crazy U.S. Thinking: Rampant Sexually Spread Diseases and No Talk About Sex!

[marmar]

from RH Reality Check, via AlterNet:



Crazy U.S. Thinking: Rampant Sexually Spread Diseases and No Talk About Sex!

By Lara Riscol, RH Reality Check. Posted March 27, 2008.

A fourth of American teen girls have an STD. Playing sex police only makes the problem worse.



Spring fever has sprung! Just as a sobering CDC study report breaks that one in four American teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease, crime-busting Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigns for itching an eighty-grand, reportedly unsafe prostitution habit. Instantly the scandal storm blows bigger and more bizarre as New York's new governor holds an emergency press conference to confess -- also with wife by side -- to several affairs, one over several years. Meanwhile, journalists struggle for truth in the public dispute between New Jersey's former "I'm a gay American" governor and his divorcing wife about their alleged three-ways with their young male driver. News hasn't been this salacious since the Starr Report. And camera crews still have to dispatch to spring break hot spots to capture the bouncing B-roll of oiled and bronzed female flesh so news pundits can opine on America's moral decline.

Family values conservatives are spinning the current chaos to pin the blame on sexual health education and to push for more abstinence-only programming, already a $1.5 billion social engineering boondoggle that mandates the expected sexual standard for children (up to 29 years old!) be within marriage. Never mind that most of us at some point explore our sexuality outside of marriage -- even chastity champions like Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), a longtime patron of prostitutes. Never mind that real life proves that a wedding ring doesn't protect you from disease and despair, even if you're not a political wife. Never mind that the United States leads developed nations in rates of HIV, other STDs, teen births and unwanted pregnancies -- purity pushers don't want to send our kids any mixed messages. "Our challenge is that the government wants to talk about preventing the spread of STDs and HIV without talking about sex," says sexuality educator Deb Levine.

In our sex-saturated consumer culture, abstinence-only-unless-married is a mixed message. How can we talk about sex in a way that makes sense to us, and to our relationships? What is healthy sexuality? And how can we teach it in such a toxic environment of extremes?

"We sell and promote sex with everything from soap to cars, but it's still for the most part a closeted discussion. It is most absent in a meaningful way in curricula geared toward our most vulnerable sexually active populations," says Lennie Green, who at John Hopkins University facilitates communication among groups of young African American men who have sex with men -- a community the CDC reports to have experienced a spike in HIV infections.

"We seem to have this Sunday morning church mentality when we discuss sexuality, but when we review societal practices there's a major dichotomy in our rhetoric and what we actually do," says Green. "The weakest link has been 'family values.' They strike out against subcultures they find amoral, and crusade to establish law and order in bed. Even in the face of disease we hang onto old archaic beliefs that sex will not happen until marriage. Our public health record has been trashing that theory for decades." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/80535/

[Avalux]

1. These people are foolish enough to believe if they don't talk about it, kids won't do it.

It's their own insecurities and religious hangups that prevent them from educating children properly about sexual activity and the ramifications of engaging in unsafe behavior. The fact that our society sells everything with sex is the reason why adults should be educating their children, not sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming abstinence.

If children don't learn from their parents, they find out on their own which is where they get into trouble.

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. So, is the author saying, "Go for your life. Fornicating and talking about it is the answer?

Judaeo-Christian precepts are archaic, but promiscuity is freedom and so, so cool? Such a progressive and advanced development!" Even as the rates for venereal diseases are rocketing.

There seems to be some failure to face the reality of cause and effect, however unpalatable it may be, given that most males and many younger females at least have raging libidos.

Lara Riscol is knocking old-fashioned Judaeo-Christian values on the basis of the lasciviousness of one/some of its advocates, but is she really saying that talking about it is going to stop the pandemic? If she has a better idea than talking about it, let's hear it. It seems to me that she is the one who needs a reality check. A major reality check.

In the UK they've been teaching about sex in the schools for a long time, and the situation has deteriorated pro rata.

[Avalux]

3. It's not just talking about it; it's discussing it and continuing to discuss it.

Having someone speak in schools means nothing if the kids are hearing a different message from their parents and churches. I agree with you that Lara Riscol's message is somewhat unrealistic. Parents need to discuss the facts with their kids without promoting promiscuity; they need to discuss it within their own religious boundaries and teach RESPONSIBILITY. That's the main component.

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. That makes sense. But, imo, it needs to come from their parents and churches.

In the UK, the problem is that the louche, local councillors who push sex-education in the schools the most fiercely, do so as a pretext for teaching pre-pubertal children about homosexual sex, when most people consider it is too early to teach children about sex, period. I think it's a phenomenon that has only arisen in the UK.

As regards a desire to teach young people to take prudent precautions, I believe condoms have not proved reliable safe-guards against the transmission of veneral diseases, though, like the various forms of contraception, presumably they are better than nothing. However, from a Christian angle, they send the wrong message, as we've seen in the UK. Although that conclusion is perhaps, to some extent, open to question with regard to contraception, since motherhood is the only way a young woman can be assured of obtaining accommodation outside of the family home, which could be an intolerable environment for her.

Also, to have a baby, even as a single mother, will give many young women, whose families have been pushed to the margins of society by a succession of unspeakably wicked right-wing Governments, the first sense of any self-worth she has ever had, at least since they were toodlers.

I'm inclined to think that the authority that my church, the Roman Catholic Church, has in proscribing contraception is severely vitiated in most people's eyes, in that it has, historically, signally failed to campaign in the political arena against poverty with anything like the power it has, and indeed used to wield against the formal materialism of the Communists - or indeed to reiterate Christ's emphasis on the negative nature of worldy riches. To me, a vow of poverty by ministers/priests would make much more sense spiritually than the vow of chastity, and send the proper message to the most affluent in our materialistic, consumer society.

It seems ironical that Margaret Thatcher and Karl Marx shared the same opinion concerning what they both considered a sad lack of material acquisitiveness on the part of poorer folk. In saying that the tragedy of the poor was the poverty of their desires, Marx, it seems to me, was moved with compassion. I don't think it takes a great leap of the imagination to fathom the likely motivation of the far right - what with most people wanting a 36, or is it 32 hour week, and no week-end work, for example. And horror of horrors adding to their tax burden. Although the former tax-lawyer and her successors have put paid to that in no uncertain terms, chiefly by reducing the tax burden on the richest, shifting it onto the less rich, with a host of flat taxes, and decentralising funding of the welfare state onto local councils, who of course, will have differing levels of resources, according to the level of affluence of the citizenry. But this is digressing, I know.

[Demeter]

4. Kids Kept in the Dark Do Stupid Things

Especially if they see their parents doing them.