It is true, that I walk through the world relating back most of what I see and hear to questions of human sexuality and gender. But this time I’m definitely not just “seeing things”, there really is a win for “free love” a la a study from the good folks at University of Virginia psychology department. They examined 534 pairs of same-sex twins, who had sex two years part. And it seems that, the twin that has sex earlier had lower levels of delinquency and anti-social behavior. This of course is good news, for those of us who think that engaging in what is normal behavior is actually likely to promote normal behavior.
This leads to a fairly straight forward conclusion. There is no public policy reason to stop horny high school-ers from having safe sex, with age appropriate partners. The adults responsible for the health of teenagers should teach the teens in their life to be responsible sexual beings, just like adults teach children to be responsible street-crossers and ultimately responsible car drivers.
This of course is not the message of 4parents.gov, a website of the Department of Health and Human Services, their commercial features a bunch happy go-lucky pre-teens, asking their parents to talk to them about sex, and tell them to wait till their married before having sex. This “moral” propaganda clearly, presents statistically speaking, anti-social behavior, likely to lead to delinquency.
Why do some forces in society want kids to wait to have sex, clearly it is not for the stated reasons of helping young people grow into “health adults,” (as 4paretns claims) since becoming a healthy adult does not seem to have a correlate on with not having sex until marriage. Why oh why, then does the government have an investment in virginity?
The easy answer to this of course is religion thinly veiled as “health.” I however, think that really this campaign is not about female virginity at its core. What lead to this silly idea? The curriculum of a fairly popular abstinence only workbook. Checkout “Sex respect” or yourselves.
The curriculum then focuses on the differences between males and females when it comes to sex and relationships. It explains that, “a man can experience sexual release with a woman even if he doesn’t particularly like her. A woman, however, often experiences more sexual fulfillment with a person she trusts and whom she believes is committed to her.” (Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11) To make this simpler for students to understand, it goes on to say, “some people describe the differences this way: Boys tend to use love to get sex; girls tend to use sex to get love.” (Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11) This paragraph is from: http://www.communityactionkit.org/reviews/SexRespect.html
