which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2004-12-03 10:59 am
which_chick) wrote2004-12-03 10:59 am
(no subject)
Waxman's report on abstinence education raised some ire over at Pharyngula so I decided to actually read the thing. Gotta get my RDA of ire, dontchaknow. Now, abstinence education, as you might expect from the name of the thing, is all about abstinence. The whole idea, as I understand it, is to fight teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs, including the transmission of HIV, by telling teens about abstinence... as if they hadn't been abstaining all their lives up to that point and it was a thing unknown to them. Oh, well. I agree that abstinence would certainly help fight all of that stuff, long as you could get the teens to abstain.
There are a couple of problems I see with the whole thing, though. The first problem is that fucking feels good. Seriously. Fucking while chemically impaired isn't unforgiveably bad. Fucking strangers isn't uniformly sucky. Fucking people you actually care about and have practiced fucking before is damn fine. Damn fine, I say. Anyway, fucking is, generally speaking, fun. If you're not having fun fucking, maybe you need to find someone else to fuck. So we're trying to convince young people, models of restraint all, to not-do this fun thing that is still pretty enjoyable even when it isn't top-notch.
The second problem is that fucking is grown-up. Children do not, by definition, fuck. One of the pretty clear dividers between 'adult' and 'child' is that adults fuck and children (barring the attentions of people like our sick puppy tenant, see two entries ago) do not. When you're thirteen, fourteen years old, you want to be an adult so badly that you can taste it, so badly that you frequently make decisions that aren't particularly stellar. Drinking, smoking, drugs, and fucking are things that adults do. They are activities that, aside from their intrinsic appeal, have added luster by virtue of being for grown-ups. From my vast, adult-ly height of thirty-four, I'd like to be able to claim that I never, ever did something just because it was for grown-ups and I was a whopping thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old trying like hell to be an adult. I'd like to be able to claim that, but (despite my political views) I'm trying hard to be a member of the reality-based community, here. I don't imagine young people have changed that much since I was one.
Finally, fucking is thrown at hetfolk as the holy grail of sexual gratification. In the baseball metaphor of sex (delightfully done by Meatloaf in Paradise by the Dashboard Light), fucking is getting to home plate. It's how you win at the game. I don't know how to fix this except to point out that I have never heard either of the following conversations:
A: "Yeah, I was gonna fuck Katie but instead she went down on me."
B: "Dude, that's cold. Dump her."
A: "I don't know what's wrong with David. He says he'd rather go down on me than fuck."
B: "Ditch him and find someone who will fuck you. Real men don't eat pussy."
Anyway, abstinence is a hard sell (oh, indeed!) and the stuff being bandied about with our tax dollars isn't particularly geared to succeeding or even equipping young folks with the tools to handle the advances of others. "No" is the only tool they're getting. Advice about birth control devices is limited to their failure rates, and those are fudged and warped to exaggerate their ineffectiveness. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. *sigh* Gotta love the religious right.
You know, I have a horse. And in my tack box, I have various goops and bandages and ointments and such like that to fix the sorts of scrapes my horse gets into. It's got shampoo and fly spray, furazone ointment and black-tar glop, vetrap, baby diapers (for bandages), duct tape, and so forth -- all the stuff I think I might need to doctor my horse. I sincerely hope that she doesn't manage to mangle herself too badly in the field she lives in, but she's a horse. Accidents happen, and I don't have full control of what she does all day. If she does get banged up, I am prepared to cope. I have the means to handle the situation. Also, in the bottom of the tack box, I have a firearm and bullets. I hope like hell that I never, ever see her coming out of the field on three legs, the fourth dangling uselessly at a horrible angle with bone sticking through the skin... but if I ever do, I have the means to handle that.
The abstinence education we're handing out... it's a tack box that's only got fly spray inside.
There are a couple of problems I see with the whole thing, though. The first problem is that fucking feels good. Seriously. Fucking while chemically impaired isn't unforgiveably bad. Fucking strangers isn't uniformly sucky. Fucking people you actually care about and have practiced fucking before is damn fine. Damn fine, I say. Anyway, fucking is, generally speaking, fun. If you're not having fun fucking, maybe you need to find someone else to fuck. So we're trying to convince young people, models of restraint all, to not-do this fun thing that is still pretty enjoyable even when it isn't top-notch.
The second problem is that fucking is grown-up. Children do not, by definition, fuck. One of the pretty clear dividers between 'adult' and 'child' is that adults fuck and children (barring the attentions of people like our sick puppy tenant, see two entries ago) do not. When you're thirteen, fourteen years old, you want to be an adult so badly that you can taste it, so badly that you frequently make decisions that aren't particularly stellar. Drinking, smoking, drugs, and fucking are things that adults do. They are activities that, aside from their intrinsic appeal, have added luster by virtue of being for grown-ups. From my vast, adult-ly height of thirty-four, I'd like to be able to claim that I never, ever did something just because it was for grown-ups and I was a whopping thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old trying like hell to be an adult. I'd like to be able to claim that, but (despite my political views) I'm trying hard to be a member of the reality-based community, here. I don't imagine young people have changed that much since I was one.
Finally, fucking is thrown at hetfolk as the holy grail of sexual gratification. In the baseball metaphor of sex (delightfully done by Meatloaf in Paradise by the Dashboard Light), fucking is getting to home plate. It's how you win at the game. I don't know how to fix this except to point out that I have never heard either of the following conversations:
A: "Yeah, I was gonna fuck Katie but instead she went down on me."
B: "Dude, that's cold. Dump her."
A: "I don't know what's wrong with David. He says he'd rather go down on me than fuck."
B: "Ditch him and find someone who will fuck you. Real men don't eat pussy."
Anyway, abstinence is a hard sell (oh, indeed!) and the stuff being bandied about with our tax dollars isn't particularly geared to succeeding or even equipping young folks with the tools to handle the advances of others. "No" is the only tool they're getting. Advice about birth control devices is limited to their failure rates, and those are fudged and warped to exaggerate their ineffectiveness. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. *sigh* Gotta love the religious right.
You know, I have a horse. And in my tack box, I have various goops and bandages and ointments and such like that to fix the sorts of scrapes my horse gets into. It's got shampoo and fly spray, furazone ointment and black-tar glop, vetrap, baby diapers (for bandages), duct tape, and so forth -- all the stuff I think I might need to doctor my horse. I sincerely hope that she doesn't manage to mangle herself too badly in the field she lives in, but she's a horse. Accidents happen, and I don't have full control of what she does all day. If she does get banged up, I am prepared to cope. I have the means to handle the situation. Also, in the bottom of the tack box, I have a firearm and bullets. I hope like hell that I never, ever see her coming out of the field on three legs, the fourth dangling uselessly at a horrible angle with bone sticking through the skin... but if I ever do, I have the means to handle that.
The abstinence education we're handing out... it's a tack box that's only got fly spray inside.