"Abortion is the cornerstone of women's freedom," declared the early-'80s feminist agitprop troupe No More Nice Girls. In legalizing abortion, Roe v Wade gave youngsters what Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, called freedom to -- to have sex without suffering the consequences of pregnancy, motherhood, and social stigma. But such freedom, and the emotional liberty promised by the women's movement, wasn't easy. It arrived alongside other extremely unsettling social changes in the family, the workplace, sexual relationships, and the very meanings of being a man, a woman, or an adolescent. At first, the conservative response to such changes sounded like extremism to most Americans. But abstinence also hit a chord among those -- in some sense, practically everybody -- seeking shelter from the winds of liberation.
     Representing sexuality as a kind of voluntary slavery, a harmful drug "pushed" on vulnerable kids by addicted peers and a sex-drunk culture, the promoters of abstinence held out freedom from. It was a freedom not only from the physical fuss and muss of sex, but a promised escape from family fights, romantic failings, and emotional flailing -- in other words, from growing up itself.
     To kids, it was the same paradoxical promise sobriety offered to alcoholic twelve-steppers: freedom through self-denial. To parents, abstinence offered the opposite. Knowing (though not admitting out loud) that sex is a steppingstone out of the family, abstinence educators enlisted parents in doing what their hearts often yearned to do: "protect" kids through control, by keeping them (and their sex education) "at home."
     Freedom from the entanglements of sexual intimacy for kids, freedom from the loss of control for Mom and Dad -- abstinence education was premised on the idea that these could be won only by barricading the border between childhood and adulthood. By elevating what public-health people call "the onset of intercourse" -- the moment of first heterosexual penetration -- as the true and only rite de passage and by reconnecting it to marriage or a marriage-like relationship, abstinence ed perpetuated the illusion that "virgins" are nonsexual and therefore still children, still safe, still protected from the emotional and physical dangers of adulthood . . .