I want to talk about abstinence for a moment.
I don't mean "I've been fucking way too many people and I need a break to cleanse my palate" (or wherever), and I don't mean "The Lord Jesus told me that the pleasures of the flesh will put me smack on the cast iron skillet of the Great Fry Cook," either.
I'm talking about the kind of abstinence our local school boards and Algore and W and Bill Clinton think should be taught to impressionable 15-year-olds.
This is the new wave in sex "education" and there's something in particular I want to say about it: if we believe in it, even for our beautiful daughters who are growing up way too soon, we're running the risk of killing people.
We all know the endless research data which shows that giving kids practical help with disease and pregnancy-prevention helps bring significantly lower rates of those problems than does the absence of such instruction. That argument is hard to bring home into your heart, though.
What we care about is our kids, and the kids around them. We want our kids not to fuck. Not to fuck anyone from the opposite sex and, though we'd never admit it at a PTA meeting or even to our spouses -- unless you are, as Sen. Bob Kerrey might put it, in an "unusually bigoted town" -- we definitely don't want them fucking someone of the same sex.
And who can blame us? Geez, we're all grown-up, and we look back on how little fun we had fucking when we were 16, how rushed and ignorant and pressured we felt. How incompetent we were, how (if you're a girl) painful and unorgasmic it was, and you think, "Why would anyone risk AIDS, or pregnancy, or herpes, or whatever other nightmare you might have in mind, for that?"
So why did you?
You have your garden variety "I was drunk at a party" fucks and your "I just wanted to lose my virginity and get it over with" fucks, but mostly what I think you have is, "god, that (guy or girl) was so hot and I was in love." Looking back, what you felt in your own personal Dark Ages little resembles the intensity and depth of what you feel now. But you had to start somewhere, and at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. At least for a few minutes.
And that's the problem with abstinence programs: sex is a natural process, emphasis on both words. It requires growth, both physically and emotionally. It requires practice for it to become a whole expression of yourself and your feelings for someone else.
When we teach kids not to start that process, we leave them in a horrible box. They can either distance themselves emotionally from their objects of desire and learn how to close themselves off, or, when they have those feelings, they can go the other way and tell themselves, "If I'm feeling sexual, the only acceptable context for that is deep and profound love, so that's what must be happening to me."
The consequence of the first, of course, is denial. The kids won't learn how to talk about their deepest feelings, not with themselves or anyone else. When they end up having sex -- which they will because hardly any kids have the kind of impulse control it takes to bottle up that flood of hormones -- they'll have to do it with an absolute lack of self-awareness.
That means getting drunk. Or high. It might mean, if they're a gay boy, a stranger who no one will know or see. It means no precautions because precautions would mean a consciousness of the act. And you know what? That boy will probably get away with it a few times; he won't get the HIV virus because getting it isn't like falling off a log. But some of them will. More of them will the fifth or twentieth time they do it, and those people will die.
And there are the girls, of course. They're vulnerable to the HIV virus, too, but even more than that, they're vulnerable to a starry-eyed marriage at 19 and, shoot, since they're in a love that will last forever, let's get started having kids at 20. That route often leads, as we know, to divorce at 28, and often to brutally truncated and poverty-stricken lives, for those girls and for their children.
There are a few kids who will take abstinence to heart, and abstinence is the fantasy we have for all our children: a risk-free world in which they never come to harm. But the hard truth is that our kids will learn about love and sex with or without our help. They will take risks to do it. If all we do as parents is simply tell them to wait, our kids lose a chance to get our help, to have a source for facts and a sympathetic ear in school or at home, and we will have missed a serious opportunity to teach our children well.
