Men's reproductive choices: children and rape

photo credit: bondidwhat via http://photopin.com cc

A father discovers birth control, and wants to keep using it to limit his family size to five (five!).  His wife wants more children, but will please her husband by refraining from more children.  He goes to the rabbi, expressing anxiety about providing for more than five children, and the rabbi says that money comes from heaven.  When he lies, and says that his wife is stressed out with five children, the rabbi allows birth control.

I love how this story makes five children seem so natural, like a small number, when that's more children than most people would ever consider.

The idea that someone could not know about birth control is strange to me, and I wonder if he's exaggerated his story, or told it in a way that parallels the stories we've heard so often about women's constrained reproductive choices.  Chassidic men's lives are often more sheltered than chassidic women's, but are they really so sheltered not to know that most people in American society have fewer than 3 children?  He had access to the internet, so how could he have gone so long not knowing about birth control?  


Meanwhile, in evangelical 9th grade English teacher has an important piece on how she taught her students not to rape.  The classroom dynamic seemed to change from initial doubt that high school athletes close to their age could be rapists and that consent was always necessary, to a clear recognition of these facts among most in the class.   It's easy to speak about these issues in the abstract.  I'm so grateful that courageous teachers raise these issues again and again, when it's still possible to impact adolescents' thoughts.  I'm grateful that my teachers did. 

Is parents' aversion to teens' sexuality an extension of incest norms?

Amy Schalet has an op-ed today about parents allowing a teen to have their boyfriend/girlfriend sleep over. I think she's right that it's partially related to sex education, but I think that answer is too facile.

Another issue that she doesn't mention in her op-ed: parents' aversion to thinking about teens' sexuality may also be about incest norms. I have known Dutch young adults who had their opposite sex parent sleep with them when the parent came to visit, and that would never be done in the US as well. Many Americans would find this unusual, at minimum.

Even the most liberal parents are comfortable with their teens' having premarital sex but hope that won't be until after the teens go away to college, and they are uncomfortable teaching their teens about condoms because they're afraid that sends the wrong message that sex now is okay. One question is whether the key ingredient there is the developmental stage represented by being 18 and at college, or whether the key is being AWAY at college. Are parents of boarding school teens relatively accepting with their teens having sex at age 16 since they're out of the house?

Conversely, what many Americans find strange about virginity pledges is how they violate incest norms by drawing the wrong kind of parental attention to teens' sexuality, such as this piece also this week in the NYT. (As an aside, the author also exhibits an all/nothing view about her "purity ring", saying that for awhile she felt that she had to take it off once she had sex, thus making her sexuality even less private than it would have been in a more liberal setting.)

Certainly in some cases, there's a prudery element, but I think it's a broader cultural phenomenon about whom Americans are comfortable talking about sex with, possibly relating to incest norms, which seem to differ between here and the Netherlands.

Raising kids to deal with frustration

Interesting article by Lori Gottlieb about the neuroses of children with overly involved parents. Frustration and failure is a natural part of growing up, and parents who shield their kids from these negative feelings inhibit their children's abilities to deal with them later.

“'Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,' Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. 'But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.' It’s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively—only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?"


Teaching offspring how to deal with negative feelings apparently occurs in other species as well, not just humans --- perhaps implying that modern parents' attention to happiness is even more maladaptive. I've read that mother cats will deny their kittens the chance to nurse or stop their kittens from nursing before the kittens are done to accustom their kittens to frustration, and kittens who didn't have this experience will grow up to be cats who get frustrated more easily (sharp exhales when something goes wrong.) Apparently, this inability to deal with frustration happens more with cats who grow up without mothers to teach them how to deal with negative emotions; I don't know whether there are overly indulgent mother cats.

This phenomenon of overly attentive parents coincides with the advent of emerging adulthood. Simultaneously, the research finds emerging adulthood is often positive with, for example, better marriage outcomes among those who waited to marry.

Rediscovering second wave feminism

My college friend Jonathan Liu wrote an incredibly inspiring piece about the sacrifices he made by choosing to be a stay-at-home dad that also applies to making any life decisions: once you make a decision, don't keep looking at all the decisions because "the grass is greener where you tend it." (I'm sure he's not the first to say it, but I've never heard it before, and it's a wonderful saying and a vital point for anyone making any decision.)

His piece was in reaction to another piece by a mother who went part-time in her career after becoming a parent, but who divorced and now wishes that she had been more active in her career. The trend of the last decade for highly educated women to become stay at home moms was treated as a third wave feminist phenomenon --- the trope went that second wavers overemphasized career at the expense of family, but third wave feminists can be confident in their position enough to take time out of their careers to raise their children. (Likewise, some third wavers thought that second wavers were too sexually conservative, and thought that the circumstances had changed enough that it was safe to be promiscuous, but even setting aside questions of the sexual double standard, third wave feminism hasn't erased the economic factors at play in the sexual marketplace, which I've discussed in previous posts about hooking up.)

The third wavers certainly have a point --- some latch-key kids of the past wish their parents had been around for them, and the third wave stay at home phenomenon tries to rectify this. But truly this article just points to where the second wavers were right: economic forces can't be ignored. Women who have prestigious and/or well-paid careers outside the home in addition to children have a more secure position if their marriages fail, as many marriages do --- marriages don't have a 50% failure rate as many say, and everyone has to work to make their marriage as good as possible to avoid divorce, but divorce is certainly common enough to be worth thinking about. And it might even be that women who work outside the home in good jobs might even be less likely to get divorced. I'm not aware of the research on that point, but my knowledge of the research says that they are better off on a range of other metrics.

None of this is to say that anyone's choice is right or wrong. That's an individual decision. To the contrary, as Jonathan said, everyone has to be aware of the true costs of their decision, rather than believing that one choice or the other is an optimal choice. There is no optimal choice in general, but each individual has to figure out what is best for them. Second wave feminism is not a religion, and there's no virtue in adhering to its foundational "tenets" out of blind faith. But there are reasons why stay at home moms of previous generations were not content to stay at home and put their careers second. Many circumstances have changed, every family is different, and so on, but these reasons have certainly not expired. The modern world has made so many things possible, but widows and divorcees are still worse off than married women, working women with good careers are still better insulated from hardship, and second wave classics like the Women's Room are still relevant.

Parent sex education

A recent XKCD notes that parents may need to teach their parents a lot more about sex now that there are internet popup ads. While it's a funny exaggeration of the situation and it seems to be a new situation, it does illustrate the age-old truth that kids always know more than adults think, making it clear that all the time discussing whether to teach contraception in schools is a waste. A study that I did found that most Southern Baptists surveyed in church Sunday School learn about birth control and STD prevention from their schools and from their peers. Take away the schools, and you are left with peers. And internet pop-up ads.

Utah's sex education

Utah is considering new sex education approaches. They recently changed their sex education laws to allow teaching of contraception in school sex education classes, but teachers are still apparently afraid of saying the wrong thing and getting fired, so the new sex education law is aimed at mandating teaching contraception. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board endorsed the bill.

I spoke with a group that is helping out the legislature about ways to bridge the ever-present gap between conservative and liberal views of sex education: conservatives are afraid that teaching contraception encourages kids to have sex, and they were confused that some programs that teach birth control actually cause kids to DELAY sex. The most obvious explanation, of course, is that teens are terrific detectors of propaganda. They want to make their own decision, but they need to be given the autonomy to do so, not just told what to do. As everyone knows, to order a teen to do something without giving them alternatives risks losing the chance to influence them at all.

I also suggested that they include parents in the sex education curriculum somehow, such as through take-home assignments that adolescents complete with their parents. It's a good idea to get parents and adolescents talking about sex, and it may reassure conservatives that the role of schools and parents in sex education is complementary.

I'm excited to see what happens. Utah!

Meanwhile, Oregon just passed a new sex education bill that requires that all abstinence sex education must also include "other material and instruction on contraceptive and disease reduction measures."

Parental monitoring and virginity pledges

A new op-ed about my paper written by an evangelical motivational speaker in the Christian Post and I actually agree with it. He says that parents give their children too much privacy in which to be sexually involved, and they are deluding themselves to think their children are not taking advantage of the privacy, and being lured into false complacency by their children's involvement in church activities. Definitely, parental monitoring is more important than any program that a school or church can run. As for the specifics of what parents' policies should be, it's of course up to the parents. Banning teenagers from being behind closed doors with the opposite sex is one approach, but of course far from fool-proof. Some parents would say that their teens are eventually going to be behind closed doors, and they would rather it be in their house than being somewhere else without parental back-up in case they find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.

I once met a woman raised in one of the most right-wing Chassidic groups where boys and girls never interact at all, where they are thrown out of school if they are seen together in public, where everyone in the neighborhood knows everyone else, and are certainly never allowed to be behind closed doors, and somehow she managed to have premarital sex when she was 16. Her first language was Yiddish, and her English was not terrific, so I never found out exactly how she circumvented all the controls, but she did. So it's not clear how often the op-ed writer's strategy works, and he may not know himself.

Also, his logic that it's better to keep teens from dating one person consistently because that leads to emotional ties that leads to sex assumes that teens become physically intimate only with people that they have emotional ties with. Many parents would say it's better to learn to have emotional intimacy with the opposite sex and have sex with at most one person, than to prevent emotional intimacy and risk that their child would become physically intimate with more than one person.

None of these questions have easy answers: there are positives and negatives for all parental policies, and mistakes are inevitable no matter what. But it is good to see such a frank discussion of the importance of parents and parental monitoring.

Best quote.

I am stunned at how blatantly stupid some Christian parents seem to be when it comes to sexual things. They let their kids watch all kinds of blatantly sexual images in movies and on television with little thought of how those images and messages can affect them. I know of a pastor friend who allowed his young daughter to see the movie Titanic at least 11 times. This same pastor was all worried about anything she saw that he deemed to be satanic, like Harry Potter, but not at all concerned about his 14 year old daughter learning the lessons found in a movie like Titanic. And the lessons are very simple: If you really like a boy you can let him see your boobies and he can draw pictures of your boobies, and if you really like him, you can have sex with him two days later…

Look, the chances of your teenage daughter wanting to jump on a broom and fly around the room are pretty low. But, the chances that your daughter’s boyfriend will want to touch her boobies, well… I’d give that a pretty big chance, wouldn’t you? Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! We need to get our priorities straight.

What's wrong with the word "breasts"? I think that's a far less objectionable word choice than his.

The dream is alive

I grew up just north of Chicago in Evanston hearing about Dr. King --- my elementary school was named for him, the principal and some of the older teachers had marched in the civil rights demonstrations, and everything was 50-50 white-black. We listened to his speeches for a few days every January, sung the civil rights songs, and learned about Africa. At the same time, it was so clear that the inequalities he spoke about persisted: only a few white students came from families with single moms, while almost all the black students did; some were raised by their grandmothers, in retrospect because some of their moms were really young; the black students came from one set of neighborhoods and the white students from others; I remember in 6th through 8th grade one of the 35 girls in the 8th grade was pregnant by middle school graduation, which in retrospect is even more shocking than I thought it was at the time; I also remember an African-American friend in 8th grade talking about her older boyfriend who could drive --- at the time, I was impressed, but now I realize how creepy that was. My best friend in middle school was black and was constantly called an Oreo: she lived in the same neighborhoods as the other African-Americans and went every Saturday to get her hair straightened and every Sunday to church on the south side, but she had gone to private school K-5 and spoke more like her white classmates than the blacks from her neighborhood.

We were all told that we could all be president if we wanted to --- black or white, male or female --- but it was clear that some had a heavy disadvantage and fewer role models. We learned about the same figures every black history month: George Washington Carver and all the uses of peanuts, Frederick Douglas --- and while these were impressive men that anyone could look up to, I think it felt a little stale to list a small number of black male role models, some from the 19th century, when over 10% of young black men were in prison at any given time and a black male had more than a 20% chance of ever being incarcerated. So it was a huge deal when Harold Washington was elected as the first black mayor of Chicago. And, a decade later, Carol Mosley Braun as senator.

Living around college-educated upper-middle-class people, it's easy to forget how viscerally important the election of an African-American as president is for young people. Yes, it's a first in the sense that we can mark it off in the history books as done in the same way that it would have been if a woman were elected. But it is much more than that, and we will only begin to understand it during President Obama's term. For one thing, every child called an Oreo has the best response ever. "Is the president an oreo?"

Teen sex by teens

How to talk to kids about sex on a 2007 This American Life's episode called "How to Talk to Kids". The teens interviewed for the episode give just two tips --- give facts and attempt to talk to your kids --- and also acknowledge that it's an inherently awkward situation. A mother narrates her experience reacting to her teenager's revelation that she has had sex.

They feature this website by teens teaching each other about sex which was started because adults gave unhelpful information.

Wrong number

Last night I went on a second date with someone.

The next morning at 6:45, I was sitting down to breakfast and had just finished a reprint of the NYT article about need for Orthodox Jews to be more open about sex, and the phone rings. I run to get it.

Guy, sounding a bit muffled for the entire conversation and at times inaudible: "Hi. How are you doing?"

Me, assuming it was my date: "Pretty good. You're up early."

We exchange the usual generic preliminaries. I had been in the kitchen preparing to put breakfast together, but went into my room and sat on my bed to avoid waking up my roommate.

Guy: "It sounds like you're still in bed."

Me: "I've been up for awhile. I was just preparing breakfast, but went back to my room to talk to you."

Guy: "I really wish I could be there with you and hold you. Are you dressed? What are you wearing?"

Me, thinking that this seemed pretty premature: "I'm not dressed yet. I'm thinking about going jogging, so dressed for that."

Guy, wistfully: "Do you want to run together? I'll come over."

Me, thinking doesn't he have to get to work?: "Well, I don't run very fast. I think you'd be disappointed."

Guy: "But we could run together holding hands... Say something sweet."

Me: "Chocolate. Popsicles."

Guy: "Something sweeter."

Me: "Um, .... I can't perform on cue. Aren't the sweetest things the things that come up spontaneously? Anyhow, I didn't peg you for being such an early riser."

Guy: "I just missed you."

Me, thinking it's been less than 8 hours and wondering whether I would hear from this guy every 8 hours from now on: "Um, I missed you too. So, shall we get together later this week?"

Guy: "Wait, is this Shira [not the name he used]?"

Me: "Shira?" My first thought was that my second date was seeing other people, which is totally reasonable, but how tacky after the conversation.

He gets embarrassed as we figure out it's a wrong number. He tells me his name, say Yonatan. I give my full name, first and last. I explain that I thought he was last night date, and somehow he asks me if I'm religious, and how religious. We establish that we're both observant Jews. In spite of the confusion somehow it was a comfortable conversation and this being a huge coincidence, it is the kind of thing which is always billed as fate (I've heard at least one wrong number story where they ended up getting married), so he feels the need to add, "But I have a girlfriend." Obviously. We exchange sociological affiliations, high school, synagogue, grew up where, which yeshiva in Israel, etc., and establish how this mistake happened. I'd never heard of his synagogue, high school, or Israel yeshiva, so I assume that they are black hat (yeshivish).

I'm ready to hang up, but somehow it feels momentous that we had this phone call, and maybe we should keep in touch, though that would be ridiculous, so I settled for saying that I'm sure we would see each other around given how small the world evidently is.

But he asks my advice what to get as a gift for his girlfriend for her birthday. She's just-out-of-college age from a very religious background, and he's a few years older, and they've been together 2 years. He remarks on the irony that she's from a much more religious background, but rebelled a lot more than he did, and I ask if it's really an irony.

I ask why they don't get married already: 2 years is a long time, and honestly I'm a bit afraid for her that the relationship will drag on and break up and she'll lose the time. Her family wants her to marry someone more religious, and continues to set her up with more religious guys. It's unclear whether her family knows about him, but she apparently isn't willing to go against them at this point, or maybe she doesn't feel that it's necessary to think about marriage yet. Around her family, she adheres to the standard dress code, but in other circumstances she wears pants (normally not worn except among the most liberal Orthodox), and her roommates think she is with relatives when she is staying over at his place. He says dreamily, "It's so nice just to spend the night together, just kissing and holding each other, nothing else."

We have a generic conversation about gift ideas, almost anything he gets her she'll love etc etc, somewhere in the middle of which he says she wants to be shocked and he wants to get her something "shocking, sexy and fun."

"Sexy" seemed like a funny word to use --- obviously he and his girlfriend were somewhat intimate, but I had no idea how much. I was thinking of recommending one of the women-owned sex shops in NY, but didn't want to make any assumptions, so I asked what he meant by "sexy."

He tells me that they're going upstate for her birthday, and I exclaimed what a wonderful birthday present that was, but apparently he has to get her something in addition. He says he's also worried about spending shabbat in the hotel because of electricity is prohibited on shabbat, and that brings questions about the TV (don't turn it on?) and electric beds (?!). I suggested he bring a timer for the lights (he joked maybe they should just have the lights off the whole time), and added that if he's really concerned about the electric locks, in a pinch he has what to rely on to use electric locks on shabbat, but obviously other key options are better. After we talk a bit about the keys, he adds, "Will this rabbi say it's okay to make as much love as we want?"

I said that I didn't think that was likely, but some rabbis are accommodating about premarital sex using the mikvah, following usual procedure of married couples.

He says, "The thing is, we've done everything and anything. Everything! But not the act itself. And now we're planning to do the act while we're away."

I ask about protection, and he responds immediately, "Birth control or condom. We haven't decided yet. She doesn't want to use a condom because she wants to feel [incomprehensible]." I get worried, but apparently she started the pill awhile ago in anticipation, so they're safe.

I repeat the textbook line about condoms always being a good idea just in case and to get into the habit, although in this case, it seems unlikely that they're likely to have sex with other people --- it's already a big deal with each other after 2 years of dating. I think about mentioning UTI risk, but don't.

We talk about mikvah and premarital sex, and what different people do. He's been resigned that premarital sex was wrong, ans they decided they were going to break the law, and there was nothing to do about it. He knew that it was better for his girlfriend to go to the mikvah, but the force of the social stigma against premarital sex was so strong that he was willing to do a huge sin rather than violate the social norms. This is unusual, so I'm going to repeat it: he clearly cares about the religion, but he was willing to pick the worse option religiously rather than violate a social norm.

When we think about other religions that ban premarital sex, they can't mitigate it. In Judaism, everyone agrees sex without following the ritual laws involving mikvah is a huge sin, at least as bad as eating on Yom Kippur; premarital sex following the mikvah laws is more murky, but almost everyone will agree that using the mikvah for premarital sex is better than not using the mikvah for premarital sex, and there's a substantial opinion that it's negligibly wrong compared with the alternative.

He was amazed that people talk about religiously reasonable ways to have premarital sex, and I gave him some tips on ways to get around the social issues (i.e., not going to a formal mikvah, but instead using a body of natural water, even with a bathing suit (kashrut.org)), but ultimately it's a matter of conscience how much to keep the laws.

He seemed happy to bring his actions a bit closer to Jewish law since that's the usual framework he's working in, but then he realizes that if they're going to have sex for the first time, and follow the Jewish law, they can't have sex again for 7 days, which uses up the time that they have upstate. He really wants the first time to be special. I break the news that of course the first time is special for being the first time, but it tends to last 30 or maybe 90 seconds, and it's only on the second time that couples start to figure everything out. That seems to sober him: if he's going to think about keeping the laws, having sex for the first time will last a very short time and then they won't be able to have sex again for the rest of the vacation, so the vacation can't be so momentous.

He tells me how much he loves her, and from his tone at the beginning of the conversation, it was clear, so again I asked about marriage. We talk some more about the possibilities, and the fact that sometimes people keep the laws and sometimes not. He says he'd like to be more religious; as excited at the prospect of having sex he sounded, he even sounds a little relieved about the idea of marriage, but he's not sure she would be for it. (He didn't say why: liberals would say it's because he doesn't want to sneak around anymore and this is the only way he saw not to sneak around; religious would say that he want to do the right thing; my guess is a bit of both.)

In the end, it sounds like he decided not to have sex and maybe to think more about marriage. It's not clear.

"I have one final question. But I'm too embarrassed."

"It's okay." We go back and forth a bit, with lots of silence on my end to give him space to ask the question before I add, "If you have any further questions, please feel free to call, or I can give you my email address. You can send a question by email if you prefer." It was probably a bit much for him to anchor the conversation more in the real world, so he asked me to hold on and the line went dead.

The conversation lasted half an hour. Presumably he has my number, but I'm sure that's the last I'll ever hear from him. So many times he said, "I can't believe we're having this conversation." Neither could I.

My reactions:

1. What a coincidence that out of all the phone numbers in my city, he reaches someone who speaks a religious language he recognizes, who had personal circumstances such that the first few minutes of the conversation were able to turn into a longer conversation, who at that very moment had just been reading the next page of the newspaper which was about premarital sex among Orthodox Jews, and who was open to having a balanced discussion about the big problem weighing on his mind.

2. Her family likely has no idea how little control they have anymore. They think that they can constrain her marriage choices, but in fact they're just delegitmizing marriage and making it more likely that their daughter is going to have substantial not-leading-to-marriage relationships.

Religious groups lament decline of marriage, and wonder why. In this case, it seems pretty clear. Here the family probably feels more religious pressure than they would have felt in the past to adhere strongly to ever-stricter social norms, so they pressure their daughter, probably about trivial issues. The daughter lives in a different city than her family and has enough autonomy to pursue this relationship, but it takes a real act of courage to stand up to them for a more public issue like marriage, especially given that she doesn't feel any real pressure to get married right then.

3. This guy so clearly wants to do the religiously acceptable thing, but he is also feeling constrained by social norms . He of course wants to have sex, and he was quite proud emphasizing the Everything! they had done prior to this, but he is not too impatient to wait for marriage. I was saying pretty radical things about how it's not unreasonable to have premarital sex with mikvah, so I probably did not prompt his self-presentation instinct to kick in. I think he really did seem to be reconsidering having sex with his girlfriend, and proposing instead.

4. I'm really not primed for early morning counseling. I was groggy and spoke way too much and told him things he already knows. Now that it's afterwards I have so many questions. Perhaps better under the circumstances that I didn't get to ask them.

All parents are for truth

As Congress considers Abstinence-Only Sex Education funding, the Parents for Truth campaign has put out a video with dramatic music about comprehensive sex education. A startlingly well-coiffed blonde woman comes home to her daughter doing homework at the kitchen table and the kind of music in the background which cues the viewer that a red phone is about to ring in the white house. She receives a cell phone call from an African-American friend telling her about the content of the sex education course, which lists "showering together" as an activity that a couple can do together. The woman asks her daughter whether they learned in school that it's okay to shower with boys, and the daughter says yes. The woman retreats into indignant thought.



1. It violates the one rule of sex ed that Focus on the Family and Planned Parenthood agree on: parents should discuss sex with their kids. Instead of retreating into silence, the parent in the PFT video had a perfect teachable moment. She could have asked her daughter what they said about showering with boys --- I'm guessing it was on a list of "things to do instead of intercourse" --- and what she and her friends think about it. "Ick," seems like the most likely response from a 13 year old. The mom could then ask the daughter whether they could talk after dinner about the day's lesson, so they'd get to talk about the subject and the mother could convey her nuanced views. Parents don't realize how much influence they have on their kids' decisions.

2. Parents For Truth doesn't like the showering-together text, and they don't even quote the grape jelly lubricant sex ed text, but I find it hard to believe there's not a single comprehensive sex education curriculum that they'd find acceptable. Textbook companies produce different products for red and blue states/school districts. Reasonable people can disagree about the content of sex education, and they inevitably will. We don't need one national sex ed curriculum.

Of course parents who are upset by a specific sex ed curriculum should speak up, but there's no excuse to assert a national conspiracy theory. The campaign's main website says that comprehensive sex education folks are deliberately misleading parents in order to teach kids about sex. That's needlessly paranoid.

3. I would expect real conservatives to recoil from tying funds to curriculum content. Federal funding mandating a specific piece of school curriculum whose content meets eight distinct criteria is anomalous. There's no federal funding for private organizations and states to develop new statistics or calculus or physics curricula. Frankly, I think the federal government ought to create a $200+ million statistics education program, in which students are taught that evidence-based policy is the only right way: the abstinence slogan is that only abstinence is 100% effective; statistics would claim effectiveness with 95% confidence.

4. Abstinence is a life situation in which many adolescents find themselves, some unwillingly, so should be affirmed. Sex education should address the entire population of the abstinent, whether they're popular kids who have been dating since 6th grade and choose to be abstinent or geeks who don't find someone willing to hold their hand until well past high school graduation. Religion aside, it's a hard balance: sex education has so much to teach about sex --- mechanics, decision-making, motivations, alternatives to intercourse, condoms, birth control choice, and grape jelly --- and yet if it's not carefully worded, the socially marginalized might feel even more marginal. The painful cycle of hope and rejection is something we'd all rather forget, and debates about sex ed sometimes proceed as though it were obvious how you find a person to abstain from sex with.

It's an issue rarely addressed, except in the paper with perhaps the best name ever, "Smart teens don't have sex (or kiss much either)".

Making curricula be sensitive to its diverse audiences' beliefs and circumstances is common courtesy, and shouldn't require a federal mandate to accomplish. If there are curricula that aren't, they should at least remember the geeks.

5. The vast majority of even the most religious teenagers have sex, so are at risk for STDs and pregnancy. Adolescents who know accurate information about the effectiveness of birth control and condoms are more likely to use them, and there's no excuse in the age of google for presenting inaccurate or outdated information or any other type of propaganda. As Santelli says, it's unethical and a violation of human rights to withhold information or give misinformation that could preserve health and save lives.

There are ways to present accurate and comprehensive contraception information in a religiously-acceptable way. "Even if you don't plan on having sex, you should know this so you can teach those who are having sex." And they might. I had a case of condoms in my dorm room during my freshman year of college. I put them in a bag hanging on my room's door handle, and every night would hear rustling. I had no use for them myself, and (despite my liberal school district) I'd actually never seen one in person until I volunteered to be a peer counselor where they taught us how condoms were used.

Going back further, I remember at the beginning of AIDS when I was too young to know anything about drugs, my synagogue assembled all the religious school classes and taught us about HIV prevention. One of the things they taught us was that we should not reuse needles after injecting drugs, but if we did need to reuse the needles we should sterilize the needles in a solution of bleach and water. At this point in my life, I didn't even know what bleach was and I'd never seen it in person, or held a bottle in my hand. I remember the first time I bought and used bleach in my laundry, it felt so transgressive. A fortiori, drugs were completely off the horizon, and learning about needle sterilization didn't make them seem any more desirable.


If I could be Philosopher King for a day, I would let states and school districts go back to choosing their own curricula with no subsidies to any curricula. The curricula would be up to local control, but ideally they would (1) include accurate information on condoms and instructions on condom use (fortunately many states mandate review for accuracy), (2) affirm those abstinent whether willingly or unwillingly, and (3) have a few homework assignments in which kids have to talk with their parents about specific issues. Finally, I would direct the $200 million to a federal statistics curriculum.

That fantasy aside, no matter what the outcome of this Congressional vote is, the arguments and polarization will continue unless people learn to find common ground and agree to disagree on the rest.