“It’s been a central plank of George Bush’s social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 — posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys. The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn’t worked. At all. A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed… In the context of findings like this, health workers and statisticians conclude that it is far better that children have safe sex, with knowledge of and access to contraception, than that they are preached a message of abstinence only to ignore it. Anti-abstinence activists have long argued that the movement is dangerous because it leaves young people exposed to the risk of teen pregnancy and infection because the teaching shuns any mention of condoms or contraception. Of about 19m new STD infections in the US each year, almost half are recorded among people aged 15 to 24.” — Guardian (UK)

The results of this research will surprise no one who reads PervScan. You know only too well that it is absurd to impose a social policy of celibacy on the biological wilds of desire. For every preacher who tells you to wait, a little voice inside — a Darwinian homunculus in your brain — tells you to perpetuate your species, and there’s only one way to do that. Fuck, just like the billions of people who preceded you and hopefully the trillions who will follow you. Fuck. Fuck. It’s as ineluctable as death.

And if you understand that biological reality, it’s hard to stomach the thought of the government spending a billion dollars — of taxpayer money — on propaganda dooomed to fail. It’s like spending a bunch of money on posters that say, “Don’t die!”

If you want to understand the failure of abstinence education beyond the biological reality that it tries to combat, there is an interesting document by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. It excerpts some absurdities found in the actual propaganda being given to young people. For example, check out this gem:

Couples who use condoms for birth control experience a first-year failure rate of about 15% in preventing pregnancies. This means that over a period of five years, there could be a 50% chance or higher of getting pregnant with condoms used as the birth control method.

You hope that whoever wrote this was as ignorant of math as he was of sex. It is difficult to believe an “educator” would knowingly use such bad math to make a point. For the record, condoms prevent pregnancy at a rate of 98% — when they’re used correctly, and you could certainly teach young people how to use them for less than a billion dollars. It’s not that hard.

Here is another excerpt:

Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots… a woman is stimulated more by touch and romantic words. She is far more attracted by a man’s personality while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.

A microwave and a crockpot? A man heats up in a minute and a woman takes a day of simmering to get hot? Wow. That’s so ridiculous that the only response it deserves is the one given it by the teens who ignore it.

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