Is it good enough if I follow 90% of the rules?

With all this talk about sex in red and blue states, I thought it would add to the conversation to re-post this thing I wrote a long time ago.  Enjoy!

I saw a screening of The Education of Shelby Knox today at the UI Women's Center, and it made me think about the temptation to trade on one's privilege in activism. I've had lots of time on my hands since I got sick, so I've been trying to figure out if there's any kind of local sex ed program I could volunteer with, especially now that Idaho has rejected federal funding for abstinence-only education. Having never had an unwanted pregnancy or STD, I figure I can offer good first-hand experience to kids who are trying to figure out how to begin their sexual lives. I am not the cautionary whale. I also have benefited from economic and social privileges that surely have made coming out of my early sexual life mostly unscathed a bit easier. I had fairly comprehensive sex ed in my public school, and come from an economically and emotionally stable family. I married in my very early twenties, so I didn't have a lot of time to get into trouble. Middle-class white people in the Northwest US, who, it's true, are the only people I've slept with, are relatively hard to catch HIV from. So there is the temptation to say out of one side of my mouth that here I'm a perfectly good, unsullied white married woman, and out of the other that hey, stuff happens, but not to me! It's not entirely by happenstance that I've avoided becoming pregnant or catching any sexually-transmitted bugs. Birth control and condoms work most of the time. Abstinence fails, even over the teen years. 

I basically am living the end result that abstinence-only education seeks, but if I were a lesbian, I wouldn't ever get to be the object lesson in the way a person can be comfortingly conservative and lustfully liberal. In the film, Shelby makes clear that she does not plan on having sex before marrying, and distances herself from teens who do decide to have sex, and/or aren't conservative Christians. She can make political hay out of her identity, and in doing so, undermines her case against the abstinent-until-married ideal. Pledging abstinence did not help the youth of Lubbock, TX, so we don't have any reason to believe it's going to help Shelby outside of the political realm. It certainly won't hurt her, but neither will knowing how a condom works. 

Shelby is looking for results in the form of fewer teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted diseases amongst her classmates, not guilt-free sex for teens. As far as I can tell, she thinks - or thought - guilt and fear are fair game for sexually active teens, but teen pregnancy and STIs just aren't necessary. To the parents and school officials in Lubbock, premarital sex itself was the problem ensnaring their children, and any means, like teen pregnancy or STIs, to keep them from engaging in it were going to justify the sexually pure ends.

 If I'd reserved sex for marriage, I don't think I'd have ever gotten into a serious relationship with Andy. Abstinence pushers would call my premarital sex unnecessarily risky. Me, I'd rather have gonorrhea for a couple of weeks*, or decide what to do with an unexpected pregnancy than have missed out on my marriage.  I never really planned on marrying.  I knew it might happen, but it wasn't an inevitability.  Not only do I value my relationship with my husband, but I also value my premarital sexual experiences.  No one can convince me that premarital sex was a mistake.  I know it's cold comfort to be smart when you've been unlucky and had a great loss. In nonreproductive areas of my life, I've learned the intimate emotional details of when the smart decision turns out to be the wrong decision. You don't care that it was unlikely that you would get pregnant while you were on the pill and taking antibiotics, you care that you did get pregnant. I don't deny or downplay the downside of risk, but I revile and live to tell the tale of the intellectual dishonesty in abstinence-only attitudes about birth control and protection from disease.

*Things have changed since my salad days: apparently, gonorrhea is acquiring some nasty antibiotic resistance.  

Comments

[minstrel hussain boy]

i told my kids "things were a lot easier when i was your age. back then sex was fun and motorcycles were dangerous."

even though, as a touring musician, i engaged in lots of extremely risky behavior (a stones tour is more dangerous than a tour in vietnam) i somehow managed to dodge the bullets of disease. despite using IV drugs, i was a pampered junkie who always had access to clean disposible needles. and my rule regarding casual sex was that protection is one of the things that helps to keep things casual. no helmet? no play football. no raincoat? no go out in the rain. no parachute? don't jump out that plane.

my daughters and son had free access to condoms, with me going as far as to make sure they were in the glove compartment, and stashing them in purses left lying about. i figured better safe than sorry. if they wanted the pill it was provided. i told them that in this time of history there should be no such thing as "accidental" pregnancy. that shit happens on purpose to my thinking.

my oldest used to call me the "condom fairy" because of my habit of tossing them about like confetti.

thing was, i brought up four kids, all through those dangerous and volitile years of teenage and did not ever have to deal with problems bigger than making sure that the protection supplies were ample and constant. no pregnancies, no disease. that's 100% success. i know that there was a lot of luck involved too, but still, 100% success means that most of that luck was the residue of design.

i figured that with my life playing music, i really didn't have any kind of moral high ground i could occupy comfortably. besides, since when did not fucking assume any kind of moral high ground to begin with?

[Sir Charles]

Sara,

Good post. I came of sexual age largely before AIDS became to be considered a threat in the heterosexual world -- which I'm grateful for.

Abstinence only education is just so absurd.

mhb,

You get good father points. And lucky junkie points as well.

[kathy a.]

sara, great post. MHB, great comment.

i'm on the verge of telling a story of how i know for sure that the one time can result in a pregnancy, and it's a good story that embarasses my sweet daughter to death, but this synopsis pretty much tells it all. except, we were in a position for a second child then, and we could not have been luckier.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

I was going to get back to this rolling discussion yesterday, but, as I said, I watched the LOST finale Sunday night, and it took most of the day to pick all the shards from my tv set from the rug. (Not realy, but I did have the impulse. I like and respect tv and consider it important -- and would love to start that discussion some time, but not necessarily now -- but ths was awful. I wouldn't have minded if they left some of the questions open, or answered them badly, or gave theologically coated answers I didn't like. But their solution to all the puzzles from polar bears to wheels that cause time travel to the mysterious Charles Widmore to the Dharma Initiative, to the 'cursed numbers' was that none of it mattered. They could have put Wile E. Coyote, a couple of Daleks, a nude statue of Jean Harlow and the River City Ioway Marching Band on the Island and would have made no difference to the ending, and that was the only unforgivable way of wrapping it up -- worse than the ST. ELSEWHERE solution (the whole series was a dream by an autistic kid) or the DALLAS shower story.

Anyway, gettting back to the more interesting topic of sex and red and blue states and sexual ethics, I want to start with my usual 'absurdity from the land of the religiously weird.' And this at least deserves a couple of 'style points' for originality, a group of pretty standard pro-forced pregnancy groups have decided to protest the 50th Anniversary of the Pill -- on ecological grounds. Gee, I didn't know they cared.

But on more important matters, Sara, I loved your testimony, and mhb's. What i want to know is how long it will be before you could hand them out to a sex ed class in, say, the fifth grade, and ask the class to discuss them.

We discuss fighting the 'sex-negative' abstinence-only policies, but when is it going to be possible for any school anywhere to introduce a truly 'sex-positive' sex ed course.

I'm not just talking about one that teaches how to prevent STDs without the slightest implication that they are 'punishments for being bad.' Or one that teaches 'there's nothing wrong with masturbation,' or that contraception is a necessary evil.

I'm talking about a class that starts from the idea that 'it is not up to us to tell you whether to be straight, gay, bi, or abstinent. That's a personal decision and up to you and your personal beliefs and values -- though we can have a couple of hours of class time discussing the various arguments. Our job is simply to give you all the information we can to help you make that decision, and to be sure you know the 'right way' -- and I mean both technique and ethics -- to procede if you decide to.' (And an important corrolary of this is that whatever decision a person chooses should not be criticized or mocked -- or looked on as a challenge to be overcome. In this class it would probably be the abstinent who were most in need of this 'protection.')

I want a class that may say that 'sex in a committed, emotional relationship' may be the best sex, but that there is nothing inherently wrong in (consensual, responsible, protected) 'sex for its own sake.'

I want a class that at least permits a discussion on the 'cases for fornication' that you, oddjob, and I have made during these discussions. I want a class that treats masturbation as a positive thing that should even be taught and certainly should be encouraged -- both as a good thing in itself and as a way of keeping the decision to have sex one you make, and not your 'sense of urgency.'

I want a class that discusses the pros and cons of oral and anal sex as 'pregnancy preventers' as well as things that can be pleasurable (for both participants) in their own right, and i'd like at least a few basic 'tips and techniques' to be taught as well. ("Keep your lips over your teeth" or "use lubricant and take plenty of time to see your partner is relaxed")

I'd also like to see the class discuss another thing. Whatever the origin of sexual orientation (and i've at least implied that i feel it is a very coomplicated question and that 'we were born this way' is, to put it mildly, an oversimplification) it is not something that is immediately obvious to the person him or herself. Maybe it makes sense to try both before you settle on one. (And maybe, just maybe, 'settling on one' is a culturally-driven choice that need not be made. Maybe more attention needs to be paid to the possibility that most people are not on the ends of the Kinsey spectrum, and that even if you 'prefer' one gender, you might not feel the urge to stick with that preference 100%)

Well there you have a truly radical suggestion, but it is coming from someone who is, by choice, childless. (I never had a strong parental urge, and didn't want the responsibility of shaping another person's life when I was not sure I could do a good job, and had seen too many examples of the 'consequences of failure' throughout my life.) I'm curious as to what the parents think.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Two things more. First, I didn't stress in this post that one of trhe main reasons for having this sort of class is so that you can focus on the ethics of having sex, not just on the ethics of whether or not to have sex.

And while I asked 'what the parents thought' I'd love to know if any of you discussed these ideas with those children you viewed as 'old enough.' What would be fascinating would be if you could get them to provide 'guest posts' on the topics discussed.