Something Good, on a Monday Morning

[geminigirl]

I'm not anti-abstinence, but I am not in favor of abstinence only sex education. (Duh!) So when I see articles like this one it makes my heart happy.

Comments

[malte.livejournal.com]

So do these abstinence initiatives get bags of support from other religious groups than christians?

/m, who thinks abstinence is mostly alright, but it's not for everybody

[geminigirl]

Because Christianity is so dominant here, you almost always only hear about the Christians. I suspect that some of the Islamic organizations and more religious Jewish organizations also would support this kind of teaching.

Setting aside the issue of religion in public schools, my issue is abstienence only education. Absitinence is an important part of any sex education and sexual responsibility program. I'd tell any sex educator who said that it wasn't important, or that it was the only way that they were on crack. It needs to be supported and validated and recognized as a choice, for some people. And it needs to be given equal credence as safer sex information. Abstinence isn't the right choice for everyone, but neither is sexual activity.

In looking at my own past, I wonder why young people are making some of their choices, and will they look back in ten years or so and say what I do now about some of the things I did. I don't regret what I did then-it shaped me into who I am now, which is generally satisfactory, but I do know that the reasons behind some of those choices weren't necessarily good or healthy ones.

[malte.livejournal.com]

It's just struck me that abstinence-only sex education might be a whole lot better than no sex education at all, which I suppose has been the norm in many of these communities.

I dunno, as far as the choice things go, I don't remember ever feeling I had a choice at all.

[geminigirl]

Well...

Every abstinence only program I'm familiar with uses some combination of scare tactics and misinformation. Is misinformation better than no information?

Felt like you never had a choice about what? I was referring to some of the decisions I made in my personal life-about who I was dating, about staying in relationships, about how physical those relationships got.

[malte.livejournal.com]

Maybe no information is better. The sex education I got at school didn't say a word about homosexuality, which was kind of liberating in a non-liberating sort of way.

I didn't do relationships at all, so the choices didn't arise. Probably related to the above (and my being a bloke, I suspect).

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed. We were taught abstinence in that way. We were taught all about STDs and their long, lingering effects, and how once we'd got one we'd be tainted for evermore. The upshot of this was that I had only been taught about thrush as something that "dirty girls got", and when I got it as a result of having diarrhea (compromised immune system coupled with difficulty keeping that area clean), I had no idea what it was. Horrible, absolutely horrible.