And Then the Male...

Among all age-groups—teens especially—sex has always been a topic of conversation. Movies like “American Pie” and television shows like “Sex and the City,” “Entourage,” and “Desperate Housewives” thrust sex further and further into the public consciousness. But there is no reliable source of information about sex and everything that comes along with it. Not even Cosmo.

High schools are in a position to provide better information to more of the population than the “he said, she said” currently relied upon by most high school students and even adults. They’re in a position to lift the puritanical veil of secrecy off of sexuality and espouse some real information—information that can help those who are already sexually active to be safe, and those who aren’t yet active to be safe and comfortable in the future.

The Bush Administration has been adamant about promoting abstinence-only sex education. Yet, abstinence-only sex education, instead of providing students with information, leaves them uninformed and vulnerable to potentially dangerous behaviors.

A study recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that more than half of all teenagers ages 15-19 have engaged in oral sex. The study also showed that, while oral sex still carries a risk of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), teenagers who had oral sex were unlikely to use condoms to decrease that risk. This implies a dangerous naiveté; teens don’t seem to associate the same risks with oral sex that they do with sex—something they might do with more honest sex education.

Sex education has the potential to be incredibly informative. It has the ability to arm students with the information they need to guard against STDs, it can help students guard against unwanted pregnancy, and it is capable of enabling students to make better decisions when it comes to sex and relationships in general. But if a frank discussion of sex is taboo in schools, and instead sex education focuses only on abstinence, teens will instead rely on the dangerous misinformation and half-truths passed along by friends and pop culture.

Even if students pledge to abstain from sex until marriage, most will, someday, get married, and then (hypothetically) have sex—even if it’s only for the purpose of procreation. When people finally have sex, they ought to know what they’re doing: they need to know how to protect themselves and hopefully how to enjoy themselves. Foreplay and orgasms are part of sex, a part wholly neglected by sex education; no one talks about them, and as a result, students—and many adults—don’t know.

It’s not that students don’t want to talk. When a consortium of student groups hosted a workshop on the female orgasm last semester, the room was packed beyond capacity and many students were turned away. Students want information. They’re just waiting for people to provide it to them.

And so it is time for America to face the facts: teenagers are having sex. Until schools and other organizations in positions of power acknowledge that sex is a part of life, it will continue to remain taboo, people will continue to be uninformed, and STDs and unintended pregnancies will continue to be problems plaguing America. People who can educate youth should (parents included), because otherwise it will continue to be the case that teenagers learn everything they know about sex through the grapevine. And in this case, that is not the best thing.

It’s time to talk. We’re listening.

Reva P. Minkoff ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.