(loop)holes
This is why abstinence-only sex education does not work.
There’s a post on the Blowfish Blog…about a question that showed up on Scarleteen… Basically a couple of kids were fooling around, did everything except actually put his penis in her vagina… But she thinks they might have slipped up and gotten the holes wrong and she’s worried that she might be pregnant now.
There are so many things that are just plain mind-blowingly wrong with the letter to Scarleteen that you really have to read the whole thing, and their terrific response to it…
These kids evidently thought that as long as his penis wasn’t in her vagina they’d be OK. No reason to worry about pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases or anything else. Furthermore, the girl seems to think that there’s something wrong with her vagina…that if she let him in her it would instantly ruin their relationship… And it sounds like this was all basically his idea and she was just going along with it. And apparently they’re both so unfamiliar with their bodies that neither one of them could actually tell for certain which hole they had it in.
Frankly, I think pregnancy is probably the least of their worries at this point…
And this is what is wrong with abstinence-only education. People are taught that as long as you avoid penis-in-vagina sex you’ll be just fine. That all the other stuff just doesn’t really count as sex. And if you aren’t actually having sex then you don’t have to worry about pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.
Sure, it’s great to tell people not to have sex. That’s fine. And abstinence is the only 99.9% effective way to prevent pregnancy. And it’s also the best way to prevent diseases. But just telling folks not to have sex ignores a couple very important things.
Human beings are sexual creatures. We are attracted to eachother. This is normal and natural. If we didn’t want to touch/hug/kiss/fondle/grope/screw there’d be something wrong with us. And part of growing up is discovering those feelings and dealing with them. And you can’t just ignore the fact that people have these feelings.
Human beings are also very good at rationalizing things and coming up with justifications/excuses. People have been playing games with the definition of “sex” since the dawn of time.
Good sex education can’t just say “don’t have sex” and leave it at that. Good sex education needs to cover how to be safe(r) regardless of what you’re doing and whether it genuinely counts as sex or not.