I canceled my subscription to the New York Times shortly after they hired Bill Kristol, and yet, every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. Case in point, today’s Ross Douthat column, Sex Ed in Washington, seems to exert some weird, subversive influence on my better judgment — although perhaps it’s just the sad spectacle of Ross spending 700 words trying to talk us all out of ever having sex again, when really, a single picture is worth a thousand:
Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education.
To be fair, if Bush had devoted the same amount of time and money to promoting phrenology, I think most liberals would have shrugged it off, if only because nobody ever contracted the clap from having their skull groped by a natural philosopher.
The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.
But enough nitpicking…
So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication.
Ross wouldn’t have even felt the need to defend an increase in teen pregnancies as another Bush Administration success story, if it hadn’t been for all those snotty girl bloggers doing the end zone dance and making L’s on their foreheads and getting all smarmy about Mendel pwning Lysenko.
On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”
In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Yes, Republicans greatly increased both funding and ignorance by slipping support for abstinence-only “sex education” into the Welfare Reform bill, but the federal government has been bankrolling this boondoggle since the Reagan Administration.
If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.
True, assuming that you, like Ross, are incapable of distinguishing between “despite” and “because.” As Jill at Feministe points out: “When the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, it was largely because of increased contraception use.”
But under Bush, guidelines for federal grants “required states to provide assurance that funded programs and curricula ‘do not promote contraception and/or condom use.’” Also, the Administration urged the CDC to tell school girls they could catch chlamydia from a miasma, so at least those abstinence-only classrooms had a lot of cross-ventilation.
More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate.
Exactly. This is the sort of enlightened, let-bygones-be-bygones attitude that was encouraged by the parish priest whenever some medieval family called in a barber to treat their ailing child, and the subsequent surgery went a tad awry. “Look, my children, you asked Theodoric for help, and as far as I can tell, he correctly diagnosed your son as suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors and a bad pageboy, and took the only sensible course of action by bleeding him. True, he could have gone a bit easier with the lancet once you started bandying around ten-penny words like ‘hemophiliac,’ but let’s not bicker and argue about who desanguinated who.”
The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.
Except, the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, largely because of increased contraception use!
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.
That’s true, man — I got nothin’ out of school. Everything I know about algebra and social studies I learned on the street.
(And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show “Teen Mom” is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)
So in Ross’s considered opinion, the most effective form of sex education is a show called “Teen Mom.” Well, that explains why he can’t get an erection around any woman who’s on the pill, but I could have done without the glimpse into his porn preferences.
None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless.
Just your column.
But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.
Because it’s not like those two are related in any way.
Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.
You know, I took Sex Ed in California, which has never bought into the abstinence-only scheme, and I don’t recall pro-masturbation proselytizing, or, in fact, any editorializing at all. It was taught by the school nurse, whose obvious boredom with the task and poorly veiled impatience with us drained the subject of any potentially enlivening prurience or risibility, and was delivered in a series of brisk and vague bullet points: Here’s the rhythm method, and since this isn’t a Catholic school I can mention that it has a high failure rate. We’re not going to discuss your mucus. Here’s the pill, it has a low failure rate, but it doesn’t prevent venereal disease. Here’s a condom, relatively low failure rate, will help to prevent certain diseases, I’m going to sort of generally describe the right way to put it on, but I’m not going to demonstrate because then you’ll all start giggling and I hate you little bastards enough already.
Basically, it was like Drivers Ed, except Red Asphalt and Blood on the Highway were replaced with gruesome slides of patients with tertiary syphilis. I don’t know what fundamentalists imagine goes on in sex ed classes, but I’m pretty sure even people from Alabama would have found it dull.
We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.
Because eliminating government interference in a woman’s right to choose is the same as empowering government to interfere in the rights of gay people to choose whom to marry. You’re right, Ross, your examples do make me want to kick something, although it’s not a habit.
If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached.
No doubt you would have made this same argument for a neutral, high-minded, hands-off approach to sex education before your abstinence-funding peeps were kicked out of office, but you were probably held up in traffic.
Anyhow, while I disagree with Ross’s conclusions, I would never imply that he’s a sexually repressed gynophobe who resents women who’ve callously turned their wombs into a rocky place where his seed can find no purchase:
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”
In a sane world — not a perfect world, mind you, just a marginally better one — Doghouse Riley would have a weekly NYT column, and this douche-nipple would be manning the steam trays at the Old Country Buffet.
You ask me, The New York Times can’t get that pay wall up fast enough.
Do any of these clowns ever write anything that isn’t weasel words? And that isn’t followed by a screed along the lines of “Right & wrong: Everybody knows the difference, & there are no gray areas?”
On a positive note, today is S. G. Prebleman’s birthday (1904).
Left by M. Bouffant on February 1st, 2010