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December 16, 2002
| OPINIONS |
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| As any former smoker knows, you can't make the one thing you're trying to avoid the subject of fervent conversation if you really want to abstain. Have you ever heard two ex-smokers bonding over how glad they are to have quit? Within minutes, the discussion will turn to "my first cigarette" or "my favorite time to smoke" — it's like nicotine porn — and before you can say "government health warning," one of them lights up, and bam, they're a smoker again. It's too bad no one told CEO Bush this before he embarked on a campaign to re-brand one of his favorite commodities: the virginity of his youthful citizens. Since arriving in office, Bush and his band of merry men have been brainstorming ways to get sex out of the classroom and back into marriage where it belongs.  No doubt they consider the media's recent focus on abstinence a victory: two weeks ago, Newsweek's cover story examined "The New Virginity." If you believe that one, American teens — led by supercute Miss America — are falling head over heels for Bush's just-say-no message. (Or maybe it's American magazine editors who are falling head over heels for Bush.) Unfortunately, spin and hype aren't much help to the eleventh grader in heat. It has never been easy to be a virgin in high school, and it's no easier now that it's supposedly cool to abstain. The only thing that's changed is what's being taught. In Grand Old Party tradition, the means is bribery. Bush has set aside $135 million for abstinence instruction next year — almost twice what was spent in 1998 — and here's the bitch: Most of these funds are reserved for programs that promote abstinence until marriage as the One True Way (as opposed to abstinence as a fairly sensible option in one's teens, which is an idea that many more sensible people can get behind). The problem with this kind of instruction isn't that it makes you think about sex — teens don't need much help in that department — but that it gives you blinders. For as long as it sticks, abstinence is the only way to protect yourself from STDs and pregnancy. But let's just say it doesn't stick — let's say you lapse somewhere along the way, like I did. Then abstinence-only education leaves you completely unprepared for the emotional and physical realities of sex. When I was growing up, our local preacher in Westfield, New Jersey, would refer to marriage as "being under the dome." I would imagine this huge Greco-Roman structure, and little me standing underneath it in a frilly white wedding gown. | ||
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I used the dome as an excuse to tune out sex-ed classes from fourth grade through college. The "Harry gave it to Sally" AIDS charts, the condom-on-a-banana demonstrations, the "Does this look infected?" slide show: I decided that none of it applied to me. I even left my flour baby in my high school locker over the weekend. During sex-ed workshops, I'd look around at my classmates and think about how lucky I was to be ignoring our earnest teacher. It all seemed so icky and complicated. If I needed any proof that God knew what he was talking about, it was how messy and contagious things got when you disobeyed. Of course, the Bible doesn't go into specifics — the baseball model wasn't in effect back then — and in the absence of a rulebook, my virginal friends and I created our own code of sexual etiquette. Our Christian youth counselor told us that if we didn't mind our parents walking in on what we were doing, we could be sure we weren't "going too far." But because the idea of our parents catching us on the phone with some guy was mortifying, we decided this rule of thumb didn't quite work for us.
Instead, we did anything that could be discreetly halted if we heard our parents approaching. (Any parent who equates "abstinent" with "chaste" has been reading too much Newsweek.) Everything happened under the clothes, and one's face was never at eye level with another set of genitals. 
My boyfriend and I surreptitiously shoved our hands down each other's pants while we read in the hammock, cuddled under a blanket on the beach or watched a movie in the den. My brand of the high school hook-up never went beyond sticky fingers.
Meanwhile, my friends and I talked in hushed tones about our friend Allyson's propensity for going down, but only because Allyson was supposedly abstinent too. (We couldn't have cared less about the heathens who were getting head.) Blowjobs weren't part of the agreement, and cunnilingus wasn't part of our vocabulary. Among our born-again friends, we were the prissiest: during senior year, our Christian friend Catherine went all the way, and we never spoke to her again. I took abstinence to the extreme and swore off masturbation. (Bush would have been so proud.)
Back then, I didn't need anyone to hide the sex-ed pamphlets from me, because I wasn't interested in reading them. But now I know how a lack of information can fuck with your head and your genitals. Anyone who vows to say "no" until the unconditional "yes" of marriage is unprepared to say "yes . . . but" when they change their mind: Yes, but let's use a condom. Yes, but when were you last tested? And so on.
When I finally gave up the cherry, I didn't have the vocabulary to talk about sex. I was too embarrassed to buy condoms, and I never mentioned them to a guy for fear he'd ask me to put one on. 
(I had no idea how.) As for knowing how to ask for what feels good, I'm still getting there almost a decade after losing my virginity. I was as clueless about good sex as I was about safe sex. And I was terrified — not of sex, but of doing something laughably wrong. I didn't even know if you were supposed to move when you got on top. You know those nightmares where you show up for an exam and realize you missed every lecture that semester? Imagine feeling that panic about your sex life.
Fortunately, most teens aren't as naive as I was; they can handle multiple-choice sex ed. In fact, their sex lives depend upon it. A recent Bush appointee, Claude Allen of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that including condom coaching in abstinence education is "like telling your child, 'Don't use the car,' but then leaving the keys in the Lamborghini and saying, 'But if you do, buckle up.'" But this assumes that parents and kids see things as black and white as Republicans. Most parents probably feel that their kids start humping way too early, but, when given the choice, would prefer they do it safely. And most kids can tell the difference between education and permission.
What kids don't need is to be scared off sex by gory images of oozing genitalia. This tactic has a shelf life only slightly longer than your average horror flick. The second a teen boy slips his fingers under the waistband of a real, live girl's underwear for the first time, that feeling will wipe out any memory of the gross-out slide show he saw at the abstinence workshop. The pus-filled imagery only sticks with the kids who aren't doing it, who don't have any actual images of sex to replace the ones on screen.
To be fair, many programs and schools do promote abstinence as merely one option (albeit the preferred one). But the message needs to be even more mixed. Abstinence isn't a sprint to marriage. It's an option that you can employ at any time, and for any period of time. 
You can leave it behind and return to it later. (Just don't call yourself a "secondary virgin.") You can be abstinent during high school. You can try it during your sophomore year of college if freshman fucking wasn't all you'd hoped it would be. You can take a year off sex to "find yourself" (as long as you don't call it that). Abstinence isn't a before or after, and it's not all-or-nothing. The holier-than-thou, souvenir-necklace-wearing virgins should be forced to pay attention to the safer-sex lectures along with all the slutty kids. Someone needs to tell the virgins they might not make it to the finish line. And yes, do tell all of the kids — even the sluts — what teen abstinence will save them from: the post-prom disappointment, the pathetic fumblings of inexperienced boys with no staying power, the nasty case of chlamydia going around, the blowjobs from girls in braces. But you've also got to admit to them that it's actually kind of fun when you get around to it, braces and all.
So maybe that looks like giving out the keys to the car, but it's too late to be tight-lipped about teen sex — the cat's out the bag, the kid's on the cover of Newsweek. And, as I learned the hard way, ignoring the issue is never the answer. So let's do this in public. Let's throw a big fucking rally and encourage all the teens to stand up and proudly declare: "Abstinent . . . until I get a better offer." n°
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Commentarium (44 Comments)
This isn't feedback to "Can'tHardly Wait" (OK, it's a good column). Only, I eventually reached the end and found a list of Em's writings. I clicked "Are you there God? It's me, Emma", but instead of getting this article I was offered a form offering Premium membership in Nerve. Hell, I *am* aleady a Premium member, and I still want to read Emma's letter to God (and some to the other texts, none of which materialized on my screen). What shall I do? Regard,
Bertel Stenius
most sensible thing i've read in some time...
This is fantastic! So poetic! I love the angst when she described the loss of her virginity. This is great stuff.
Nerve censors its feedback! I wrote a note critical of Emma Taylor's prose style and the photo editor's Britneyesque picture, and I was deleted from the feedback page.
Nothing like the smug self-satisfaction of ersatz sexual chic, especially when it's rigorously maintained by stifling critical engagement.
So did I ZC. From now on all I'll say is pap. That's obviously want they want.
Liked the essay, but you don't understand GOP politics. Twenty percent of the base is religous. That means they believe in God, and a smart Gop politician will throw some money their way. Having thrown a bone, you can go after tax cuts for real people and maniacs like Saddam. Get it?
Get over it, 'ZC'; if you want to be free to post hyper-critical and self-rightous feedback drivel whenever and wherever you feel like it- start your own damn website.
Moving on- BRAVA, Emma! A wonderful essay that really makes far more sense than 99% of current media coverage of Abstinence-only-until-marriage "education." Oh, the disservice we're doing our current students here in America. And the dramatic increase in rates of HIV,STDs, and unplanned pregnancies (AND abortions- take THAT "Religious Right") we're to see in the years ahead as a result...It's a shame.
Liked the essay, but you don't understand GOP politics. Twenty percent of the base is religous. That means they believe in God, and a smart Gop politician will throw some money their way. Having thrown a bone, you can go after tax cuts for real people and maniacs like Saddam. Get it?
could you be any more Condescending RAR?
Hey MJA, glad to see you Nerve interns are put to good use posting cheerleading pabulum. As "H" and I pointed out, Nerve censors its board to produce a false sense of being "daring" and "edgy." Everyone loves us! We're so cool!
I wish I WAS an intern- hey Nerve staff, if you're looking for one, I can give you my name and the names of about 10 others who would kill to work with you...!
Emma: Just to let you know, I'm with you. I was totally dedicated to "saving myself for marriage" as a good Mormon boy should...right up until that snow day when my girlfriend said "do you wanna?" and I said "sure!" A minute later I was naked...
What's funny is how unprepared I was. I'd been masturbating for years; but that's not sex, right? So when I came...I didn't know that I had, because if I'm with a woman now, it's got to be something different, right? So I kept going...and going...and going...(ah, youth!) and quite a while later, she said "Oh, my god, I've created a monster!" She explained that yes, orgasms are in fact the same, quantitatively, whether by hand or other organ...and over the next 6 months, many other secrets I'd not known.
Best of all was my Mother's Talk with me a few months later, and too late. "You know how they show sex in those James Bond films?" she said. "It's nothing like that. A man can only do it once a night, it only lasts about 15 minutes, and it's no fun for the woman at all." Unfortunately for her, I'd been proving all of those wrong for the 3 hours before this talk, so it didn't stick...but it did serve to totally undermine any confidence in my parents opinions.
that's a consequence you didn't mention..
Dear MJA, Thanks for the props! We love ourselves too! If you would like to be an intern, please take the following quiz: Nerve magazine is A) a brilliant, visionary website revolutionizing sex for the new millennium OR, B) a fancy shell for personal ads
The reason talk radio has become a significant cultural force, for good or bad, is that talk radio takes on all comers. Call a talk radio show to critize or praise, it's all the same. And sometimes the callers do win and change hearts and minds with a good point of view. Okay, Nerve is yours, no denying that. If you want to censor your critics, and spend your days telling each other how brilliant and smart you all are, please, go right ahead. But without the push, without the challenge of the readers, Nerve will sink under the weight of a blissfull banality. It was your choice to make, and it looks like you all made it when you started censoring. But that's what has to happen when deep down you don't have clear positions to defend with a passion and conviction. To spell it out: "critics good. Censor bad." Criticism never weakens, only strenghtens. That is, unless you're weak to begin with...
zc why don't you use the word 'ersatz ' one more time to to prove just how smart and edgy you are? oh, i forgot, everyone knows a large vocabulary = intelligence.
Dear Hype,
I agree entirely. My post this morning had two points that Nerve evidently wanted to keep off the page of comments
Emma here. If you think you've been unfairly censored, feel free to email me directly at emma@nerve.com. And as for our policy concerning feedback in general: We never delete a message just because the poster disagrees with something we said, though occasionally our editor will delete a post if he feels it's a very personal, petty attack on the writer rather than an analysis of what they wrote. If you're confident enough in your point, then why defame the author, too? By the way, our interns are far too busy feeding us grapes and giving us footrubs to be bothered with censorship.
By the way, to respond to ZC: 1) It wasn't a "recourse" to memoir; this article was always intended to be a personal take on the political. In fact, Nerve itself has always been about mixing the two. We thought it was worth mentioning that the reason I'm so passionate on the topic is that I have personal experience with abstinence (and its opposite). If you don't like your news mixed with memoir, there's always Newsweek. 2) How'd you know that's not how I looked in high school?
so it is the age old question to tell or not to tell. when i was a kid no told me anything or i don't remember what the did tell. i remember in ccd all i thought about what was under the girls clothing and how i could see it or whatever so all the religous bs was lost on me. my parents didn't tell me anything and in regular school the ccd thinking about sex played out there to.i learned about sex the old fashion way. on the street and in porn magazines disgarded by someone else. so i don't recommend the old fashon way it turned me into a hopless jerkoff so what can i say but i think i would have been better off if i'd have gotten some sex when i was younger and nothave waited until i was older and got the girl with no nipples in her dorm room what a disapointment
Emma, thanks for the response. You didn't mention my critique of the style, in particular your habitual use of the dash, colon, semi colon, and parenthesis. (The recourse to parenthesis appears even in your recent post on the feedback page.) My problem with the odd--self-interrupted--style is that the sentences don't run into each other; semi-colons and dashes are (I think) a sloppy way of organizing your writing--really, what they do is jumble the words together rather than present a cohesive--pleasant to read--article. (Ultimately, they are syntactical shortcuts and potholes, not unlike mixed metaphor or pronouns with distant antecedents.) As for the photo, your snide comeback at the end belies what you must really know: the picture was a throwaway to garden-variety, Maxim-magazine aesthetics.
Great article, absolutely correct. The problem with sex ed. is that as soon as you even get a taste of what sex REALLY is like, everything you learned in school goes out the window.
Loved your Article. awesome insight !! Made me remember my high school days. And be proud of the way I first lost mine.
I hope bush reads it :) ha-ha Honestly the amount of religion that is getting pulled into politics is beginning to scare me.
I look forward to reading more of your work :)
Josh Gillick
San Jose, Ca
schiller1978@yahoo.com
Thank you for your insightful piece on the downfalls of abstinence education, "Can't Hardly Wait"!
I went to a teeny-tiny high school in the South, and we had NO sex ed - not even abstinence ed, but something close: AIDS education, in grade 8. Grades 8-12, not a word about anything else related to sex, except when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke and the civics/AIDS teacher glossed over the "b-- j--" page in Time Magazine! To put an even stranger spin on sex ed/ abstinence ed/ lack thereof: I was raped the year I went off to college (early, at 16). I had no idea what to do, and developed PID cos I never got proper medical care. Several studies (pioneered by Dr. Mary Koss in'87, consistently replicated by the likes of the CDC and the DOJ in subsequent years) have documented that 1 in 4 American women have experienced rape or attempted rape by the time they graduate from college... It seems to me that perhaps even if we don't teach kids to celebrate their sexual agency in responsible contexts (God forbid we teach young girls that their bodies belong to them), sexual agency and sexual health are issues for most Americans, even if (don't tell Bush) they're not married. To place the emphasis in sex ed on marriage and value-based abstinence is not only detrimental to young people's ability to act as responsible sexual beings - it also sends a message to those who are sexually active (by their own agency or nay) that sex is something to be ashamed of. And, as you noted, it's not terribly effective. I fail to see who wins here, except on election days.
So thanks for the sex ed-espousing, Bush-bashing, well-researched piece. I felt you left out a bit in not touching on issues of sexual assault, but I suppose that's not your bag. (Though if you have any sense of solidarity, you'll smack Keck or whatever his name is upside the head for me - it is *not cool* when professors hit on young girls!)
Keep up the great work.
There sure seems to be some heated discussion here, but most of it seems to involve a thread that's irrelevant to the subject at hand- uh, we're talking about Abstinence only Education here, not whether we all like Emma Taylor's writing style. This is a really important subject because more and more federal money is being given to the abstinence folks everyday and this is not a good thing. Write your representatives if this is something that you feel needs to change! ZC seems to be a bit obsessed with something s/he claims to hate so much. Don't let your anger eat at you Buddy- put it somewhere productive and maybe you can actually change the world for the better instead of letting it go to waste in a useless rant against the writing style of someone you've never met. Bless!
Heh. I grew up going to church in Westfield, NJ around the same time, Emma.
It's hard to comment on Emma's article. On one hand, she's arguing against abstinence-only sex-ed. At the same time, she didn't receive an abstinence-only curriculum. Her school taught about birth control and STDs and condoms-- she simply didn't pay attention because she didn't plan to have sex before she was married. Whose fault is it that she simply ignored the school's lessons? Are we going to blame the preacher or Emma's parents or her camp counselors for sending a "conflicting" message to abstain (in vain) while her school tried (in vain) to teach her about safe sex practices? Or are we going to blame Emma for not playing catch-up on what she should have learned before she decided to start having sex?
Great points, and you missed one more: what about the kids who DO have success in their waiting and end up never havins sex outside marriage in their lives? Abstinence-only education doesn't even help them enough! Of course premarital virginity and marital fidelity lowers the odds of STDs (if done by both spouses)...but unwanted pregnancy is totally possible within marriage too (for example: "don't worry, all you need is your husband's support" totally falls apart when you've been married for 5 years, had 5 kids, and he just can't afford to feed and shelter a 6th). Therefore, even people saving themselves for their wedding nights need to learn how to use birth control.
Emma, I really identified with your essay, albeit my take is from a different angle altogether. You see, I was overweight from all through high school and college. My high school had some good Sex-Ed courses teaching both abstinence and safe sex practices. However, I never had any options or opportunities to advance my sexual knowledge. So here I am at 24 years old, and still a virgin. I'm in great physical shape now, too, and accordingly I get a lot more attention from women. However, I don't have the slightest clue how to act with women. I'm doing everything for the first time, and I feel both scared and ashamed every time I flirt with someone. It's not east going through puberty at 24. We all have issues, I guess.
Do you find it as interesting as I do that the current administration is more worried about sex in high school than guns?
I also find it interetesting that teenagers that have taken the abstinence pledge are OK with oral sex as a way to prevent all the supposedly "bad" things that go with sex.
Hey CM, that 'OK with oral sex as a way to prevent all the supposedly "bad" things that go with sex' thing is a downright medieval attitude. Back in the day the reasoning went like this: Suppose you still have a hymen. You have a hymen, therefore you are a virgin. You are a virgin, therefore you never had sex. You never had sex, therefore anything you did have (including cunnilingus and fellatio and anal penetreation) was not sex. Meanwhile, some people just found "stay a virgin because I'm your father and I say so!" easier to tell their kids than "stay a virgin because unwanted pregnancy is bad!" (because the latter requires actually explaining where babies come from) and apparently some people still do.
Read this originally on Alternet. Great article. Great argument. Too bad the Bushies just don't care. Happy Jesus Day!
You said that teen abstinence will save people from blow-jobs from girls with braces; however, I happen to have greatly enjoyed the head I got from my girlfriend with braces. So there.
Let's just say that this was Emma's best article yet. Any other comment is garbage.
Dear Emma,
I commend you on this article, despite those who might dismiss my positive reaction as "pap". I have read the Newsweek article you mentioned, as well as an article similar to it that recently appeared in The Arizona Republic. I am in total agreement with your view that the "abstinence until marriage" message that these articles are promoting leaves their target audience, America's teens, "completely unprepared for the emotional and physical realities of sex." Let's face it, despite what these articles are suggesting, teens who are sexually active are still in the majority. Thank you so much for presenting the flip side of the coin. Yours is the first article I have come across to voice this opinion, and I hope it will stimulate more. Incidentally, I thought that you looked lovely in your picture, not at all trashy as ZC's "Britneyesque" comment would suggest. As for ZC, you bring to mind the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail shouting "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" I find your comments masturbatory. If Emma's writing style is too bourgeois for you, why don't you go write your own article instead of jerking off for an audience to your ability to criticize someone else's work while flaunting a lofty vocabulary. It might be pedestrian to say so, but get a life!
Em --
It's hardly like teenagers are going to listen much to anything you say. At least the virgins figure they're going to have sex sooner or later, so they listen some. But most of the kids I knew who were sexually active when I took sex-ed, didn't listen at all. They figured they knew it all already (they didn't). And trying to get either group to be "abstinent ... until I get a better offer" well, good luck. It's amazing that pop culture can mold teenagers behavior so much, but when you try to shape it deliberately, it's almost impossible.
Bush should worry about his daughters' sex lives before he starts worrying about abstinance for every other teen in the country.
Trust me, the Yale one gets around.
I'm 18, and still caught up in the sloppy web of teenage sex. I'm also stuck in liberal New Jersey, where the abstinence education is going to do jack for all the kids having sex in the school parking lot.
Sex-ed or no, society had morphed girls into crazed nymphos a la "Sex in the City" and Christina Aguilera. With the young female population just as anxious to get laid as the football team, I don't see abstinence education going anywhere.
p.s.- i could write a kickass article about gender reversal in generation y- girls as the "new" guys, and guys turning femme. keep it in mind!
All my highschool ever taught was abstinence. And we had one of the highest pregnancy rates in the state.
Your writing is simple great, Especially for beginners!
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Man, you wrote a long text.
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nice, you wrote a nice one.
How many childs are you have?
In your book Position of The Day, sex every day in every way, December 26 stacking the boxes and July 7, The Cats Cradle are the same exact sex position.
Now you say something