Life in the Bubble
Ross Douthat wrote a fairly innocuous column in the NY Times recently. In it, he argues what I have long held: sex education programs in schools – abstinence and otherwise – are largely ineffective. Again we are largely dealing with the clinicalization of a social problem where the remedy is more education. The idea that young women aren’t engaging in pregnancy avoidance, because they aren’t interested in avoiding pregnancy is an idea that seems completely alien.
Reading the comments to that article has been quite disheartening. The coup de grace of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is of course offered. The argument is impressive in the bubble, but is born of ignorance, something those that offer the argument imagine themselves fighting against. The Palins specifically seem to have been quite proud of the pregnancy. According to media reports, Bristol Palin’s sexual activity was not hidden and even occurred in the Palin home. And while Sarah Palin has been vocally supportive of abstinence education, she never undertook abstinence initiatives while in office. (For those unfamiliar with my previous writings, I have been termed a Palin hater in the past, belief in competent governing will result in that I guess.) More generally, there seems to be this understanding that American Protestantism rejected condom and contraceptive use. Inconveniently, American Protestantism accepted this long ago, considering opposition to condoms, contraceptives, and marital creativity to be artifacts of Romanism. Yes, American Protestantism still doesn’t, for the most part, believe in sex before marriage.
Most sane people, religious and otherwise, don’t believe that sex before marriage is efficacious. The greatest predictors of unintended pregnancy and STD infection remain number of sexual partners, age difference between partners (in particular, older men targeting young women), and sexual technique. I wish I had the citation handy, but a secular researcher noted that were sex precluded until after the 3rd date, we would see significant reductions in STD infection rates and pregnancies. And while the theoretical effectiveness of contraceptive use is high, the practical results are that 10-15% of sexually active women that report using a condom as their primary form of birth control will become pregnant each year. The reason is simply that they don’t always use a condom. (Similar results are common for other methods.) And while it would be convenient to think that all the kids getting pregnant are Jack and Diane like, the reality is that the teenagers becoming pregnant or infected with STDs are not predominantly doing so in long-term and stable relationships. A couple of years ago, we had the case in Massachusetts of 17 women making a pact to get pregnant, and we have people in the bubble bemoaning birth control, as if the availability of birth control would have induced girls that wanted to get pregnant to not get pregnant.
Although I don’t have time to do this justice, I will address briefly the comparisons to Europe. American culture is simply different than Europe. In America, sex is like most other things here, driven to the point of excess. Perhaps, in Europe one could find places where over 10 sexual partners by high school graduation wasn’t exceptional. Like drinking, there are certainly extremists on the other side of the pond, but the U.S. seems to hold its own in ridiculous indulgence.
Comments are closed.
Good stuff M.Z. That bit about the third date really struck me. It makes a tonne of sense. How many people do we get to the third date with? I remember seeing a poll in some magazine (like Cosmo) years back that showed that the 2nd date was the #1 time that people felt first intercourse should take place. In other words, if I am not so put off by the first couple hours we spend together, well, what the hell.
What waiting until the third date really amounts to is “Don’t sleep with strangers, scuzbags or morons.” You’d think everyone could get behind that, but we wouldn’t want to interfere with people’s “sexual rights.” The amount of physical and emotional damage that people could be spared from encouraging simple common sense is staggering.
There is a story in today’s Washington Post about a new and very carefully executed study that purports to demonstrate that “abstinence focused” programs can be effective:
Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.
Of course, the average age for marriage in the United States is 27.8 for men and 25.6 for women, so from the perspective of those who believe sex outside of marriage is always wrong, I am not sure how much of a success it is that “only” a third of sixth- and seventh graders were sexually active by grades eight and nine.
Strict Dad: “No sex before the third date, young lady.”
Teen Daughter: “Oh, daddy, you never let me have any fun!”
It is time to realize that schools are not a panacea for childhood problems. Let’s take sex education out of schools.
If Bristol Palin wishes to use her experience as a teen mom to promote abstinence, more power to her. I don’t view her family as being proud of her pregnancy. I see them as forgiving and supporting their daughter in time of need. Isn’t that a good example of Christianity?
And, yikes:
http://lifestyle.ca.msn.com/health-fitness/womens-health/rodale-article.aspx?cp-documentid=23328059
Does anyone know of a good book treating the odd combination or social contradiction of American attitudes toward sex, which are on the one hand strongly influenced by a puritanical (I did not say Puritan) embarrasment of the body and are on the other much more permissive and cavalier than those we find ( generally) in Europe. I imagine that an interesting account of this could be written from the perspective of critical theory/ Marxist analysis: I.e. How does the excess in the American economic order translate into sexual practice?
Wj,
I like where you’re going. I think another good account of it could be written by a Thomist virute ehticist interested in the relationship between (at least) gluttony, sloth, avarice and lust.
I’m not clear it’s actually the case that teens in the US have sex more (either percentage sexually active or frequency of activity) than teens in Europe.
If one is to believe this study:
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3324401.html
It sounds like it’s more a matter of teens in the US simply using birth control a lot less than teens elsewhere. (The percentage of US teen pregnancies that are aborted is also much lower than elsewhere — for example, only about 1/2 of Sweden’s teen abortion ratio.)
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3324401.pdf
Clearly, there’s some big cultural difference which is probably the source of this discrepency. I think MZ is dead on in pointing out that claiming that this is the result of lack of education is foolish.
But it doesn’t seem to be an issue where US teens are having more sex despite more puritanical cultural attitudes. They’re having the same amount of sex, but using birth control less — whether because they’re careless, or because a larger percentage of US teens actually _want_ to have children than is the case in other developed nations.
I’m not clear it’s actually the case that teens in the US have sex more (either percentage sexually active or frequency of activity) than teens in Europe.
If it’s the same in the US as in Europe, maybe it’s just a natural, to-be-expected phenomenon, and people should stop trying to lower the incidence and just try to make young people responsible.
A hint of the difference would be the difference in scandals. We had the scandal of Senator Larry Craig soliciting anonymous sex in an airport bathroom stall. In Italy, there was the scandal of Buscalioni taking his long-time mistress out in public. You also have the difference in what bath houses are used for around the world. You don’t hear talk about a hook up culture in France.
Wj,
That would be a great book.
Cathy,
Schools are great institution for cultural norming. Their effectiveness toward any given problem varies though. When a college girl says she is going out to get laid, she will not encounter disdain at the idea. If a college boy says he is going out to get trashed, he likewise isn’t scorned. This isn’t the case in other cultures.
I apologize for the tangent, but the question of whether Americans are significantly more promiscuous than those in other countries has me rather curious now.
It appears that one professor Daniel Schmitt has done a study on promiscuity in different countries (defined by one night stands, “poaching” people from other long term relationships, etc.) which ranked the UK #1 among large developed countries and the US #6. A couple links:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5257166.ece
http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/asia-pacific/study-finds-uk-men-women-most-promiscuous-7051/bradley-promiscuity-index-western-countriesjpg/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20030803/ai_n14555793/
David,
Two points occur to me:
1) Just because something seems to appear in equal quantities in two places does not necessarily mean that it ought to be accepted as “natural” and not discouraged. Whether one does that has a lot to do with whether one considers it wrong. If shoplifting were equally prevalent in the US and UK, that wouldn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t try to reduce it.
2) Even if teen promiscuity is similar in the US and Europe now — it was much lower in both places a century ago than it is now. If it was lower in the past due to social and cultural mores, one must assume that if social and cultural mores changed it could be that low again.
Darwin Catholic,
Well, there’s no arguing with statistics–at a certain stage of the game, anyhow–so without countering your point I’ll just remark that, strangely, all my anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite. Having lived in Germany for a period and having traveled extensively through most of Western Europe (though not in the U.K.), I encountered many young people “in relationships” who were sexually active, but who all seemed to be in more or less “serious” relationships. Friends from the continent in the U.S. have also remarked to me, several times, about the strangeness of the U.S. “hook-up” culture, which they didn’t quite seem to know how to navigate. (I do think you would be hard pressed to find a more permissive sexual environment than the average U.S. university.) This evidence, as I said, is merely anecdotal, and there are probably ways of accounting for it–socio-economic strata of the people I know from Europe, etc.–that can be reconciled with the statistical evidence you provide.
If shoplifting were equally prevalent in the US and UK, that wouldn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t try to reduce it.
Darwin,
No, but there may be a certain rate of shoplifting (or sexual activity among young people) that it is easier to live with than to do something about. Every human life is priceless (at least if the people are white, affluent Americans), but a price is still put on human lives by organizations like the EPA in order to do cost-benefit analyses on projects.
If it was lower in the past due to social and cultural mores, one must assume that if social and cultural mores changed it could be that low again.
I am not sure that social and cultural mores are changed by sex-education classes in the sixth and seventh grades. If the general culture says “have sex” and your sixth-grade teacher says “don’t,” it is the culture that is going to win out. And I am not sure we can have a less permissive society. That would be turning back the clock. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a permissive but responsible society, though.
I suppose there is some good to raising the average age at which young people have sex (in our culture), but from the sex-in-marriage-only perspective, it is delaying premarital sex, not preventing it.
David,
If we want to talk sex ed in schools — I’m entirely okay with abolishing all of it: contraceptive-based and abstinence based. Neither kind has proved to be very affective at much of anything, and I don’t see how we got into thinking that teen agers (who mostly don’t like to listen to their teachers in regards to anything else) would listen to them when it comes to not having sex or always using birth control.
(Plus, I don’t even send my kids to school, so sex ed is not the first thing I think of in this regard.)
I guess when you said “stop trying to lower the incidence” I pictured that as advice to individual people. As the father of three daughters, I certainly don’t picture my wife and I saying: “Statisticaly, one and a half of you will have sex by age seventeen, so do please use birth control. Mum and Dad won’t be judgemental.”
Rather, we’ll put a lot of work into trying to make sure that our children follow the course which we think would be best for them in the long run: waiting to have sex will they get married. And I think it would be better for society if more parents did the same. (One can nudge these things a big, for instance my socializing primarily with other families of with a smilar set of standards.)
But as for sex ed and such — I don’t think that the national or even the city level is the right way of dealing with these issues. Schools should teach academic subjects and leave the parenting to parents.
WJ,
Probably one of the major questions would be how much the population is every actually part of the “hook up culture”.
Darwin
I agree that one question which we need to ask is who is part of the “hook up culture.” I myself do not know. I don’t run in the circles where it happens, or if it does, I’ve been left entirely clueless of it (I have only one friend I know of, an agnostic, who is of that culture, and he knows quite well my disapproval of it). Yet, when I explore the net, and the forums all over the net, and see what is being discussed, it seems quite strong and common with the youth today. It is a major problem, though of course, there are people like me, singles who are outside of it. I do know why I am not a part of it; but I don’t know why everyone is not a part of it. One question that needs to be asked of those who are not, is it lack of opportunity(temptation) or morals? And if it is morals, what exactly was it that led them to hold fast; what is it that really worked. I think interviews of such people would do wonders.
DarwinCatholic,
What I would like to know — and I am not asking you personally — is how you teach kids not to do something (say, have sex before marriage), and at the same time make it clear they can come to you if they disregard your advice and something goes wrong (say, they get pregnant). Another thing I would like to know is how parents are supposed to teach their children what the Church teaches about homosexuality, when there’s a not insignificant chance that a child will turn out to be gay. They are two rather different matters, in my opinion, but I think they are both cases where it would be very difficult for Catholic parents to get it right.
David,
I think those are good questions, and important ones for parents to ask themselves. One possibility for the first is to be clear that a baby is always a blessing and is always welcome. An indirect method one might use, is to talk about what would happen in another family if someone else (don’t let them see you winking) got pregnant. An older cousin with a boyfriend or whoever, could be a great foil.
As to the second, for me the issue is that sex makes babies. If I do a good job on the problems with artificial contraception, then I am as well set up as I can be should one (or more, who knows) of my children feel attracted to people of the same-sex. That doesn’t make it easy. In any case, I will have no part in vilifying homosexuals or giving my kids the impression that the church thinks they are bad people.
I think Brett touches on several of the important points in regards to David’s question. It’s a rare extended family or social set which doesn’t include a couple teen parents, and how parents respond to that will help telegraph to children that there is life after mistakes — while also keeping clear what the stakes are in regards to life changes.
Some other things that occur to me, in no particular order are:
1) Teach your children a truly Catholic sense of sin and forgiveness. Too often, in Christian circles and in the wider culture, people talk about “being a good person” versus “being a bad person”. The implication being “good people don’t do X” — and thus if one transgresses, one is either cast out as a “bad person”, or one revises one’s ideas of right and wrong. This is totally different from a traditional Catholic understanding of sin and forgiveness, and I think it leads a lot of people astray.
2) Emphasize that things have a purpose. Sins such as lust, greed, adultery, fornication, gluttony, homosexual activity, sloth, lying, etc. all involve perverting the purpose of human acts. It’s not simply a matter of “you’re not allowed to do that”, but that God intends us to work in certain ways — ways which often don’t fit with our desires. This doesn’t apply only to gay people — all of us have desires, sometimes near crippling desires, which are not in keeping with our purpose. A “everything is okay so long as you don’t violate a couple of key sexual norms or kill anyone” attitude is going to make morality seem like it falls much more heavily on some than on others.
3) Help your child understand from an early age that often, through no fault of your own, you don’t get what you yearn for — either temporarily or ever. You may feel terribly in love with someone, but not be able to “do anything about it”. Or you may wish very much that there was someone you could be happy with, yet never find anyone.