It has been a hot and heavy season for studies on teen sex. American teenagers have been prodded to provide, in graphic detail, the who, what, where, why and even — perhaps especially — the how of their sexual desires and practices to curious (and sometimes salacious) journalists, talk show hosts and researchers. Adults, one-time teenagers who betray a haunting self-loathing about their own adolescence, wring their hands and debate issues of morals and values, while a new presidential administration prepares to make its mark on the country’s always impressionable, always malleable and frequently demonized youth.
At the moment, there is a great deal of support — cultural and institutional — for programs that suggest adolescents should not have sex lives. Forty-eight states use federal funds for abstinence-only education — that is, programs that teach abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage. And last week, a federal study splashed down in media large and small to claim that the “virginity pledge movement,” a campaign initiated by the Southern Baptist Church in 1993 that requires teens to abstain from vaginal intercourse until marriage, is effective in delaying sexual activity among adolescents.
But what, exactly, counts as abstinence? Last month, the Alan Guttmacher Institute published the first national study to look at the sexual practices of adolescent boys, ages 15 to 19. Researchers found that while 55 percent of boys in this age group claimed to have had vaginal intercourse, two-thirds of the boys surveyed said they had engaged in oral sex, anal sex or “masturbation by a female.” More than one in 10 boys had engaged in anal sex, half had received oral sex from a girl and slightly more than a third had performed oral sex on a girl. What’s more, many of these teens said they do not consider oral or even anal sex to be sex — some even called it “abstinence.”
Lynn Ponton is a San Francisco psychoanalyst and adolescent psychiatrist who has spent more than 20 years talking directly to teens about their school, family and, yes, sex lives. She is the author of “The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do” and “The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls.” She is also the mother of two teenage girls.
“All adolescents have sex lives,” writes Ponton in “The Sex Lives of Teenagers,” “whether they are sexually active with others, with themselves, or seemingly not at all … If more people could view adolescent sexuality as a potentially positive experience, rather than sanctioning it as one fraught with danger, young people would have a better chance of developing healthier patterns and making more positive choices.”
Salon interviewed Ponton about the current American (adult) obsessions with teenage sexuality.
The recent Alan Guttmacher study tells us more than we’ve ever known about the sex lives of boys. Are they getting the kind of sex education they need to deal with the activities they are engaging in?
Put simply, conversations with boys — as reflected in “Sex Lives” — indicate that they function with very little information and many myths about sexuality.
The most obvious risk comes from the myth that boys won’t — or can’t — transfer HIV to girls via oral sex. You could say that they create this myth out of self-interest; but the truth is, they’ve never really had discussions. Many of the boys I talk with say they’ve had fewer than two hours of sex education in their entire middle school and high school lives. So they have a very limited amount of sex education of the sort that would be useful.
And what sort is that?
Here’s what I think would be useful in sex education: Conversations with role-playing would be useful; conversations in groups about morals and values would be useful; debates where [each student] takes a different side of an issue would be useful. There are ways that we could get our young people involved. [Teenagers usually] have a semester-long course in sex education — which is probably 15 to 20 hours — but a lot of that course involves very passive activities. You know, watching movies, reading a book. There’s very little actual discussion.
I would also like them to know more about girls’ orgasm and pleasure and what’s involved in that. We’re beginning to see studies — and it’s a big point in my book — that tell us that girls are not having orgasms. And many girls see their first sexual episode as being forced. Large numbers of girls — 63 percent in one study — reported that they felt afraid of their first sexual experience, compared to only 17 percent of boys. In 1994, the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that 74 percent of the girls who had intercourse before the age of 14, and 60 percent of those who had it before the age of 15, reported having had sex involuntarily.
But in talking with boys, I hear that they are concerned too. They don’t want to be seen as forcing sex upon girls. The fact that they are more aware of that gives us an ideal opportunity to work with our boys and to educate them, too, about what’s involved in girls’ sexual pleasure.
Girls are really educated about what’s involved in boys’ sexual pleasure — not in class, but by their peers. They spend hours devoted to how to give a good blow job. And they talk about technique. I don’t want to go into it in great detail, but there’s a lot of discussion about it.
In my entire existence — some 20 years of listening to kids talk about sex — I have never, ever heard a group of boys discussing how to give girls good [oral sex].
One of the things that I found interesting in the recent study on teenage boys’ sexuality is that while 50 percent of boys claim to have received oral sex from a girl, only one-third claim to have performed oral sex on a girl. Has the emphasis on avoiding intercourse put girls at a disadvantage?
Absolutely. It has shifted the focus. One of the negatives to abstinence-only education is that within many of those programs, maintaining virginity is the top priority. So it’s to girls’ advantage to view oral sex, or even anal sex, as not being “sex.” Oral sex and anal sex have always been there. I did my first study on oral and anal sex rates among teens in the early ’80s. We surveyed kids in San Francisco and found very significant rates, even for anal sex. I was surprised: Twenty percent of girls reported that they were having anal sex. So that’s been around for a long, long time. It’s nothing new.
I actually think that vaginal or penetrative intercourse [among teens] is probably declining slightly. And that’s consistent with the decline in pregnancy rates, and other things would indicate that. But we would hope that [a decline in teen intercourse] would result in girls’ having increased self-esteem and feeling better about their sexuality.
What seems to be happening is that girls are still being pressured to serve boys — and that’s what I hear about, you know, that all boys now expect oral sex, that the boys themselves say, “This isn’t sex,” and that they are intent on getting it. It’s put more pressure on girls in this area.
I don’t think that the Guttmacher statistics accurately reflect how many boys perform oral sex on girls. If you ask boys: “How many times did you perform oral sex?” I think you’re going to get, “Well, I tried it. Once.” If you ask the question “How many times have you brought a person to orgasm via oral sex?” you would have many, many girls checking that box. With boys, I’d question whether you’d have 4 or 5 percent.
Wow. What does that do to the overall sexual health of teenagers?
Well, I think the focus on abstinence only is not necessarily a good one for all kids. I believe that we need to focus instead on healthy sexual lives. So what are the parts of healthy sexual lives? Good self-esteem. Reciprocity. You need to have a reciprocal interaction, where you can give, you can take. Trust. Intimacy. Pursuit of pleasure, but also giving pleasure. Those are the parts that we hear very little about, at least when we are talking about teenagers.
The early part of “Sex Lives” is about the return of studs and sluts, these mentalities. I think that the abstinence-only movement has even more clearly defined girls as sluts if they become sexually active. If — that’s the caveat. So it demarcates — if you’re sexually active, with intercourse, you’re a slut.
In the last year and a half, perhaps ever since the Monica Lewinsky incident, we’ve seen a great interest on the part of adults in teens who have oral sex; they’re talking about teen oral sex as if this is the first generation of teenagers ever to have oral sex. Do you think that there is a movement by adults to brand this generation of teenagers as being more promiscuous than previous generations?
Yes. Interestingly enough, often when an adult makes a mistake — and in this case, it was the president of the United States who made a mistake — then the kids are branded [as bad]. I don’t think that he caused the teens in this country to have more oral sex. I think he actually brought out what was happening. I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from men and boys saying that they supported the president and that they did not believe that oral sex is sex.
Do women and girls agree with men and boys that oral and anal sex is “not really sex”?
Yes, but it’s disturbing to me because, again, I do not believe that girls are recipients. I believe that girls consider giving oral sex to boys not to be sex, and don’t see the service aspect to all of this. So I don’t really see it as a sexual interaction for girls. I don’t think that it brings them a good deal of pleasure. It brings them status within their community, with their boyfriend, but not trust, pleasure and an understanding of their own sexuality.
A smaller percentage of girls than boys say that oral sex isn’t sex. There is a growing number of young women who are more informed about their sexuality. They’re still a small percentage, but they are out there.
There is a girl I talk about in the book, Miriam, who had sex at 15. She was very informed about orgasm, her body, her feelings. A small group of girls like her is present. But it takes a while, I think, to understand how girls’ sexuality is not served in our culture.
I think that we can educate our girls about the double standard. And we could also educate them about how to protect themselves in a world that validates male sexuality, but not female.
How would you do that in the classroom?
You can role-play. One of the most successful things is to reverse genders, to have girls be boys and boys be girls and to play different roles. That helps with the double standard because you allow [boys] to see what it’s like being asked to give oral sex.
And there really are gender differences. Girls tend to rely on relationship-based issues to develop their morals, whereas boys, in general, will rely on principles. This in itself is not bad, but it’s something that certainly would come up in debate and discussion.
“Morals and values” is such a loaded phrase. Many times it is used to indicate one thing: abstinence. How do you talk about morals and values to kids who have decided to be sexually active?
For so long, we’ve looked at kids who are sexually active and said, “They are immoral” or “They don’t share our values.” I actually believe that teens learn morals and values best by first watching ours, and second by discussion. They don’t learn by having somebody like me lecture them. They learn by participating in a discussion where they are pushed to define their own particular morals. That’s why parents need to be willing to talk about it.
In this country, the perception is that these [values] are just adopted lock, stock and barrel from an older generation. That is not how morals and values are learned. In fact, quite the contrary occurs: Kids don’t listen to that type of format and they lie about what they are doing — they go behind their parents’ backs.
Many of the boys in the Guttmacher study seemed to be participating in activities that adults are uncomfortable talking about. Adults have a hard enough time talking to kids about vaginal intercourse. When it comes to oral sex, and especially anal sex, you’re talking about a group of activities that a large number of adults consider immoral, and are in fact still banned in many states.
In 20 states, to be exact.
I have a hard time imagining a sex education instructor in this climate walking into a public school with a copy of Jack Morin’s “Anal Pleasure and Health: A Guide for Men and Women.”
Anal sex is not the place to begin sex education, but it’s something that our kids are doing, so we have to be aware of it. Now that oral sex is such a topic of discussion, we have an opportunity to really educate our kids about this.
We are a sexually restrictive culture, with strong taboos, poor communication and restrictive gender roles. But to begin to have more discussion you have to look at what the kids are actually doing. A study like the one done by Guttmacher helps us to understand what kids need to talk more about.
Let’s talk a little bit about Bush’s choices for Cabinet positions. What do you see as the future of sex education under this administration?
Well, the nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson, is the former governor of Wisconsin. I think with him, we really don’t know what’s going to happen. But I am fearful that we might see a movement toward less sexual education and more abstinence-only education. And most of that is, you know, abstinence until marriage education.
Just to clarify: When we say that 48 states take abstinence-only money, does that mean that once they accept the money, the only sex ed programs they can teach are abstinence only? Or can the funds be used for, say, a portion of a semester-long sex education curriculum with a broader scope?
It means that a particular program is regulated. It doesn’t affect the entire educational program, but it affects the part that the money is being used for. For the states using large amounts of abstinence-only money, there is a board that reviews the program and can cite or remove teachers who are too open. There also are sanctions involved with abstinence-only money that many parents are not aware of.
With the country as fractured politically as it is right now, adults can’t even agree on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, much less whether or not premarital sex is acceptable. Does it still seem possible to have a sex education curriculum in the public schools that serves everybody?
Remember the recent Kaiser study? It came out about three months ago. Three-quarters of the parents in the survey felt that sex education programs in this country are limited and that kids need more education about a range of issues.
Parents may not want their child to be gay, they may not want their child to be sexually active, they may not want the child to have an abortion, but they recognize that for the good of their child, and other children in this country, this type of education is necessary. So I think that’s the mandate that we need to respond to. If, in any other situation, such a large group wanted this to occur and we did not do it, there would be an outcry. Unfortunately, small groups that are very noisy about their discontent can prevent education for the majority.
Parents are now recognizing that if my daughter is not educated about, say, rape, I am depriving her of something she really needs. But it’s going to take a long time to backtrack and rework our sex ed.
A quarter to a third of all parents have fairly negative views toward teenage sexuality. I think that’s what we really have to worry about. We need to have sexual readiness workshops for parents in middle school and high school. Parents could come in, hear lectures, ask questions and participate in discussions. You think about sex ed for kids, but many of our parents are not ready to parent kids throughout this period.
Most parents loathe talking to their kids about the birds and the bees, let alone pubic hair grooming, faked orgasms and “water sports” — but most parents are not legendary “sexpert” Susie Bright.
Better than talking about these things, she penned an advice column in 2009 with her daughter, Aretha, then 19, for the ladyblog Jezebel. Their answers to questions about everything from porn to Paxil were unflinching but playful, and at times controversial. Now the pair have collected those columns into a new e-book, “Mother/Daughter Sex Advice.” Together, they read as an irreverent version of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” for the Internet age. The mother-daughter team also reflect on what the experience of writing the column was like, and it turns out it wasn’t as weird as many would think: For the most part, it was just a continuation of conversations they had been having throughout Aretha’s life.
I spoke with them both by phone about sex-positive parenting, where they draw the “TMI” line with each other, and their tips for making “the sex talk” less awkward.
Aretha, this might be an annoying question, because I’m sure you’ve gotten it for most of your life, but: What’s it like having a “sexpert” for a mom?
Aretha: I’ve been getting this question since second grade. Kids brought it up in the line at the cafeteria. I remember being way more defensive about it then, because just saying the word “sex,” it was like a four-letter word.
But now? It’s the same answer I always give, which is that it was pretty cool. I was the envy of all of my friends throughout puberty and high school. It’s interesting because now that I’m college-aged, I can see differences in how kids were brought up and, you know, I can see how my upbringing has affected me.
Did you have friends in high school who desperately wanted to come over and ask your mom for advice?
Aretha: I started community college when I was 13, so I had college friends who were in their 20s and late teens, and they felt really comfortable talking to my mom. Sometimes I got really jealous because they’d want to have alone time with her to talk about their relationship problems. With my high school friends, they felt too shy and inhibited. It was more that they’d come to me with a crisis and then I’d bring it to my mom.
Were you ever uncomfortable talking to your mom about sex when you were younger?
Aretha: No. Never. From age zero to now, I don’t think it’s ever been uncomfortable.
Susie: There’s an important distinction between “Do you feel comfortable talking about your personal sex life with your parents?” and “Do you feel comfortable talking about other people’s sex lives and sex in general, sex in the news and ‘what if’ sex, where you say, ‘I have a friend …’” All of that we’re very comfortable with. I think anybody would be shy when you feel like you need a little distance between you and your parents.
Sometimes I talk to kids and they tell me, “I have the opposite problem. My parents confide to me as if I was their little friend.” For me, that isn’t a healthy, sex-positive parental frame any more than being uptight and refusing to let a single word be said about it. Somehow, it’s the opposite but the same thing. A good parent says, “You can talk to me about anything and it can be in general terms. If you’ve got a physical problem and you’re uncomfortable talking, can I help get you to a clinic or a doctor that you would feel comfortable talking to?” Don’t get all hurt that they don’t want to tell you, just help them find someone that they can talk to instead of getting all sulky about it and saying, “You have to tell me everything or else I won’t help you!”
Aretha: I think we’ve always been sensitive about talking about each other’s sex lives. Except for when it comes to things that happened earlier in her life. I remember being really curious about how my mom lost her virginity. I could hear that story a million times.
Susie: There’s so many different levels of what it’s like to have conversations about sex, and because so many families don’t discuss it at all, they think that once you open the door it’s somehow like there’s no privacy, there’s no boundaries, there’s no self-respecting way to talk about anything. But I knew that wasn’t the case, even from my own growing up. My mom told me about getting her period, which I thought was fascinating, because she told me about the nuns stuffing a rag down her pants and they wouldn’t tell her what was happening. Her moral was, “I’m telling you this because you’ll never have to go through that, because I’m going to tell you the scientific reason for menstruating.”
My dad was the same. He would say, “I was so shy, I never kissed anyone until I kissed your mom, and I was in college,” but there were other things he wouldn’t have expressed to me — and of course not. It just starts to feel creepy, and I guess not everyone’s creep line is in the same place.
It’s just knowing that you can hold your privacy and yet you can share things that are part of a valuable conversation. Part of what I liked so much about writing the Jezebel column, and writing this book, was that I could hear Aretha’s reactions to things and it made me realize how strongly she felt about certain topics. I wasn’t going to just say to her, “So, Aretha, what do you feel about oral sex personally?” No way, I would have been too embarrassed and she would have been like, “Are you out of your mind?” When I heard her sticking up for other girls getting satisfied in bed and not just lying there and crying afterward …
Aretha: Why would I want them to do that? That makes no sense!
Susie: Well, you say that, but I know plenty of women who would say, “What do you expect, you shouldn’t be so romantic or you should try harder.” There are some really negative, shaming answers. The fact that you were such a good advocate, it just made me so happy inside. It wasn’t like I had dragged you over to a desk every day and said, “Now, Aretha, how do you spell ‘orgasm’?”
Susie, what sort of parental anxieties did you have about sex?
Susie: Well, I still have them in the sense — this is more dating and relationships — when she meets someone new, I wonder if I’ll like her boyfriend. If I don’t think they did something right or they hurt her feelings, there’s part of me that wants to run over and slap them — even though I’m supposed to just listen and be cool because they’re probably going to make up in 10 minutes and then I’ll look ridiculous.
Aretha: From my side, I see my mom worrying, like, “I want Aretha to feel like she can ask for what she wants with anyone, because not everyone’s had the same upbringing she’s had, so they might not know that everything’s supposed to be egalitarian.”
Susie: Yeah, but you haven’t had any really terrible sweethearts. You’ve had pretty open-minded people in your life so far.
Aretha: Well, there might be ones that maybe you don’t know about …
Susie: OK, now it all comes out! [Laughs] When you first asked that question, Tracy, I wondered what you meant, if it was, “Were you worried that Aretha would get pregnant too young?”
Well, here’s another question: What do you think most parents are afraid of when it comes to sex and their kids — is it the fear of them getting pregnant, of them having sex too soon?
Susie: I think the fear of having sex too soon is this big, tender topic that covers a lot of things. On the surface, they would say, “An early pregnancy or some sort of STD could be tragic and wipe my kid’s life out.” But if you scratch at that a little bit, lots of times it’s because the parent identifies with the kids and is having memories about regrets, about things they did or didn’t do when they were teenagers. So their child’s coming of age is like their chance of doing it over again.
As much as it’s true that I could just jump in there and completely micromanage every detail for Aretha, it is so important not to do that, to be a good listener and let them know that you hear them, to respond if they want your help but to mostly just be really solid and say, “I’m there for you.” You have to take every lesson you ever learned from a good therapist and bring it to bear and give them the space to figure it out on their own — not to be neglectful but not to be a busybody either. It’s such a hard line to walk, I’m not trying to make it sound easy.
Why is it so hard for most parents and kids to talk about sex with each other? We make such a big deal about the Sex Talk, as though it’s one talk that happens, ever, between parents and their kids. Why is that?
Aretha: Where to even start?
Susie: There’s so many fingers you want to point. For me, it had a lot to do with being raised in a religion that was very condemning of sexuality outside of procreation and women’s subjugation.
That sure covers a lot territory. So how can you make talking about sex with your kids, or with your parents, less awkward?
Susie: I got some of my first lessons of how to handle this when I worked in a vibrator store and someone would say, “How do I raise this with my husband?” or “How do I raise this with my wife?” I got really good at answering this: First of all, if talking is the part that freaks you out, buy a book and leave it in the bathroom or on the coffee table.
Aretha: I think you have to be careful with that, though! So many people complain, “My parents left a book under my bed about our changing bodies and they never said word one, they just expected me to find the book and come to them with questions later.” And guess what, they never came to them with any questions because they figured, “My parents are too shy to talk to me about it so I shouldn’t talk to them.” Not to, like, totally slam your suggestion, mom.
Susie: But they did something! People are always asking me, “Are there any particular books I should have in my house for sex education?” and I say, “You know what? If you have books at all, that’s great.” Books! Newspapers! Talk about what you’re reading on the Web! Sex will inevitably come up if you’re talking about it like you’d talk about anything else — in politics, in science, in arts. It’s not a ghettoized topic.
Here’s another thing: I call it “the cool aunt theory.” You realize that you, the parent, are too upset and uptight about sex to say anything, but your sister or friend or ex or someone you know very well has a sense of humor and has a good head on their shoulders and you go to them and ask, “Could you do this?” Or here’s another thing, when your kid raises an uncomfortable question, to just say, “You know, that is a really good question and I’m not sure I know the answer.” You’ve given yourself some time, but you’ve been friendly about it and then you can decide if you bring in somebody in the family or you get a book or find a documentary on PBS. The point is you don’t just freeze like a deer in the headlights and go, “Ahh!”
You can use that for a million things. People act like this is the only difficult topic — try talking about death in the family or money issues. There are so many things where people feel tense and if you can find some calming, loving ways to handle touchy questions in one area, you can pretty much apply it to everything.
Aretha: And definitely you can never start too early. Kids are talking about sex in one way or another starting in kindergarten.
Generationally, how were your youthful sexual experiences different?
Aretha: My mom was in high school in the ’70s — you know, a lot of free love everywhere. Seriously, when I was in high school and I liked two boys at the same time, my mom would suggest that we have an open relationship, like it was the most normal thing in the world! And she was like, “Why are you so possessive of each other? You’re so young, you don’t know who you are yet, so just experiment! They can’t even say they’re straight yet.” I just remember feeling like, “She does not understand. It is so different now.”
There’s also way, way more virgins and people who are waiting to have any sexual experiences. In some ways, I think kids know more, but they also know less, practically speaking.
Susie: I knew I was being kind of snotty when I was saying, “Why not have an open relationship?” but I just had to make my little feminist point.
Aretha: Well, you said it a lot.
Susie: I have a lot of feminist points to make, I guess. You know, all these people that are trying to live out the romance bible are going to grow up and realize that life is more complicated, and why not be exposed to reality? People either are having open relationships or they’re cheating, and here are these people in ninth grade acting like they’ve got to take their vows and it’s just so silly!
I not only came of age in the ’70s, I was also in a major urban high school and I was in a feminist consciousness-raising group, I was involved in an underground commie anarchist newspaper. So it’s like, yes, I was in an extremely different scene, but the tenderness, the inexperience, the shyness and all the drama that happened every day, that was the same.
Did you notice any themes in the questions that you got for the column?
Aretha: Um, that they have horrible boyfriends and that they should dump them?
Susie: The funniest line was people would always say, “Our sex life is awesome, but …” and then they would tell me this problem that would negate it being “awesome.” This is from my crabby old feminist dyke warrior lady position, but I was constantly saying, “Why would you give a fuck what he thinks?” Or I’d think, “What you need is a nice, big lesbian experience.” I would think that the lesbian cure, if you were in a lesbian milieu, you wouldn’t be so second-guessing yourself and your femaleness all the time, but I realized that’s a generation gap too. I get some questions from young lesbians and some of them are just as fragile as any straight girl. I realized it’s more my feminist point of view rather than gay or straight.
What was your favorite question that you got for the column?
Aretha: This wasn’t my favorite question, it was what happened afterward: Someone sent us a picture of her hand and an engagement ring on it and I was like, “Yes! It worked out!” I liked the throw-up column, the girl who throws up every time her boyfriend comes in her mouth. I liked the boyfriend who asked how he could ask his girlfriend to shave her pubic hair, politely.
Susie: Aretha’s answer to that is, “There is no polite way!”
Aretha: I stand by that.
Susie: My favorite was we answered a question from a girl who was given a Paxil prescription after a five-minute intake and it had a terrible impact on her libido. We wrote her a super-sympathetic, supportive thing that basically said, “Go see someone who will pay attention to you.” We thought it was a great answer, but it got a lot of pushback from people who are using and approve of the SSRI’s in their life. The Paxil cheerleaders were enraged!
But the girl who wrote the question really, really liked our answer and felt encouraged. It felt good, it makes you feel great when you’re a total stranger and you’re able to make a positive difference in someone’s life or their health. That’s what I like about my job in general, and it was even more poignant to do it with Aretha. It was like suddenly having a million daughters instead of just one.
In the week since sex educators and activists called out the Obama administration for getting in bed with Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education, the Department of Health and Human Services has stayed silent on why the program had been added to a list of approved, “evidence based” programs for teen pregnancy and STI prevention – until now. In an interview with Salon, HHS spokesman Mark Weber said Heritage Keepers had met the criteria, “gone through a transparent, rigorous review process” and had “demonstrated outcomes” – in this case, delaying sexual activity, and that alone.
The controversy arose when, sometime in April, Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education was quietly added to an Office of Adolescent Health list of approved groups eligible for government funds — “the holy grail of the Administration’s commitment to a science-based approach to teen pregnancy prevention and a directive for grantees of the President’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative,” wrote four prominent sexual health experts in RH Reality Check. They accused HHS of “succumb[ing] to the political pressure of social conservatives and allowed the ideology of the right to prevail over the health and well-being of the nation’s youth.”
On April 30, over a dozen major organizations, including the ACLU and Human Rights Campaign, asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to explain Heritage Keepers’ inclusion. They said the program “ostracizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth; promotes heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable family structure; withholds life-saving information from sexually active youth; and uses fear-based messages to shame youth who have been sexually active and youth living in ‘nontraditional’ households.”
Like most abstinence-only programs, contraception and condoms aren’t on the agenda, nor is detailed information about sexually transmitted diseases or safe sexual behavior. Sample language from the student manual: “girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.” Both aspects are awkward at a moment in which the president’s reelection campaign is struggling to have it both ways on gay marriage, as well as to paint itself as a champion of reproductive health.
The RH Reality Check piece also says that there is “limited evidence of effectiveness” of the Heritage Keepers program. But Christopher Trenholm, associate director of research at Mathematica Policy Research, which conducted the independent research evaluation for HHS, and whose previous work is cited as proof that the Heritage Keepers program doesn’t work, told Salon there are actually two different programs in question. The one in the 2007 Mathematica study that was found to have little impact on sexual abstinence, a complementary after-school program called Life Skills Education Component, differs from the health class curriculum that ended up on the HHS list.
This time around, Trenholm’s task was to grade the outside research that purported to back up the organization’s claims. HHS decided that every organization that got a moderate or high rating on doing what it said it did would end up on the approved list. Mathematica took a look at a 2011 study of Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education as taught to 2,215 7th- through 9th-grade students, which found that a year after participating in the program, “sexual experience” increased from 29 to 33 percent of students, compared to 43 percent of students in the control group. The study quality was deemed “moderate,” allowing Heritage Keepers to tout its HHS seal of approval on its website.
In other words, Heritage Keepers simply followed the rules of the “evidence based” system – and prevailed. The problem for supporters of inclusive and comprehensive sex education is that the HHS criteria say that studies “must measure program impact on at least one measure of sexual risk behavior or its health consequences.” That measure can be contraceptive use or fewer sexually transmitted infections, or it can be simply delaying sexual activity, as Heritage Keepers was found to do – but it doesn’t have to do both or all. And as written, it certainly does not mean that the program can’t marginalize LGBT students or shame students about their sexual behavior.
I asked Weber, the HHS spokesman, what would have to change for such groups to be left out of the program. Would the criteria simply have to be revised? “What we’re committed to is an open and transparent scientific process,” he repeated. That process appears to have been followed here – but it shows the limits of a narrowly technocratic approach.
Update. Critics respond to the HHS rationale: “HHS is being frighteningly shortsighted,” said Dr. Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director for Answer, a national sexuality education organization based at Rutgers University. “Heritage Keepers relies on fear, shame, distorted information and biases. Why are we supporting any program that discriminates against groups of students and endangers their health? How can the HHS justify putting its seal of approval on a sexist, homophobic curriculum?”
Imagine a high school teacher having to separate a smooching pair outside the classroom door to protect herself from being sued for condoning “gateway sexual activity.” Envision a sex education class where the mention of homosexuality is forbidden by law and discussion of contraception, or even puberty, is deemed unnecessary.
That’s the world that would be created by a recent raft of abstinence education bills in Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. These initiatives are frightening — but, viewed the right way, they shine light on extreme conservatives’ deepest, darkest fears about sex. They’re veritable inkblot tests for right-wing sexual pathos.
This week saw the passage of a Tennessee bill that has the usual aim of abstinence initiatives — to “exclusively and emphatically” promote abstinence until marriage. But the bill ultimately goes above and beyond the usual. It allows parents to seek damages in court if a teacher “promotes gateway sexual activity” to their child. It’s unclear what exactly “gateway sexual activity” is because the measure defines it vaguely as “sexual contact encouraging an individual to engage in a non-abstinent behavior.” Critics of the bill have suggested that this could include everything from hand holding to french kissing. The bill also proscribes “implicitly” promoting or “condoning” gateway sexual activity (the latter could mean simply turning a blind eye to it, hence the example above).
The potential legal implications here are what’s most important, but understanding the philosophy behind this view of “gateway” sexual activity is crucial, too. The thinking here is transparent: Premarital or extramarital sex, even physical affection, is like a drug — all-consuming, addictive and life-destroying. Sen. Margaret Dayton, a co-sponsor of the bill, actually said, as the Salt Lake Tribune paraphrased, “Teaching children about contraception is comparable to telling kids not to do drugs, then showing them how to ‘mainline’ heroin.” Here we have that fundamental fear of sex, of the power it holds over us, and of the possibility of losing ourselves (or our kids) to it.
Shortly before the “gateway” bill, Tennessee lawmakers advanced Senate Bill 49, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which stipulated that “no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.” The measure managed to get Senate approval but, after intense public and legislative outcry, it was yanked by one of its sponsors before it faced a final vote in the House. An abstinence bill in Utah, which breezed through the state legislature but was ultimately vetoed last month by the governor, similarly banned any discussion of the gays. Wisconsin’s abstinence bill doesn’t prohibit the mention of homosexuality, but it does overwrite a current law requiring that teachers “use instructional methods and materials that do not promote bias against pupils of any race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnic or cultural background.”
Here we have that classic conservative view of homosexuality as a corruptive idea rather than an inherent identity; as a social virus — one that can be inoculated against through silence (or, as some of us might prefer to call it, censorship) — rather than an inborn reality. (What always strikes me about this attitude is that it seems implicitly to hold that gay sex is so awesome that just hearing about it will make folks want to try it; otherwise, it wouldn’t pose such a threat, now, would it?) It also gets at that right-wing sore spot: The possibility of sex for love or pleasure, rather than procreation.
Of course, homosexuality is far from the only thing that treads in this forbidden territory. The Utah bill forbids any “human sexuality instruction” from covering contraception, premarital sex or “the intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation, or erotic behavior.” (The ultimate effect of the extreme restrictions is a ban on human sexuality classes. Either teach anti-gay, anti-contraception, abstinence-only “human sexuality,” or teach nothing at all.) Contraception helps reduce the negative consequences for engaging in pleasure- or love-based premarital sex — and abstinence-only advocates desperately want to keep the sexual stakes high. (For the same reason we see attempts to restrict access to contraception and HPV vaccines.)
Speaking of negative consequences, the Utah and Wisconsin bills share a focus on STIs and unwanted pregnancy as the inevitable result of premarital sex. The Utah measure requires that human sexuality classes underscore “the importance of abstinence from all sexual activity before marriage and fidelity after marriage as the only sure methods for preventing certain communicable diseases.” The Wisconsin initiative mandates that human sexuality classes “promote abstinence and marriage over contraception” and “emphasize that abstinence is the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and avoid sexually transmitted infections” (which is patently false).
Even the acknowledgement of hormonal changes and natural urges is dangerous. Earlier this month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill that removed not only contraceptives but also puberty — puberty! — from the list of required topics in sex-ed classes. The concept of puberty itself makes natural what abstinence-only advocates desperately want to seem unnatural.
More relatable is the concern guiding the push for greater parental power in some of these bills. The Utah measure requires that guardians make up the majority of review committees for human sexuality curricula and that they be allowed to participate in the development of abstinence-only classes. This year, Arizona introduced a bill that requires schools to obtain written permission from parents in order to teach any form of sex ed and secures parents’ rights to opt out on behalf of their kids. Adults are desperate enough to control sex in their own lives — from the content of their, or their spouse’s, fantasies to the threat of infidelity. And, of course, there’s that universal desire to protect our kids from the dangers of the world (and you don’t have to be a right-winger to believe that sex can be dangerous).
Together, these recent bills make clear several fundamental fears — of the power of sex, of losing control of our kids and of the allure of non-procreative sex without consequences. Aside from their magnitude, those worries aren’t a uniquely right-wing phenomena. What is uniquely right-wing is taking such extreme attempts to legislate against those fears.
Just yesterday I wrote of how the war on sex has gotten worse in recent years and, what do you know, now comes news that an abstinence-only program has been added to the government’s list of gold-starred, “evidence-based” programs for pregnancy prevention.
The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t bother to issue a press release about the problematic addition, but a handful of tireless sexual health advocates — Debra Hauser, Monica Rodriguez, Elizabeth Schroeder and Danene Sorace — noticed the change on the department’s website and today took to RH Reality Check to spread the word. Previously, the only approved abstinence programs on the list were after-school programs.
The program, Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education, “contains little or no information about puberty, anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases, or sexual behavior,” they write, nor does it “include information about the health benefits of contraception or condoms.” Worse still, it relies on inaccurate, fear-based classroom exercises, promotes heterosexual marriage as the only happy and healthy life path, harps on the potential harm of premarital relationships, promotes hoary gender roles and stereotypes and entirely ignores the existence of LGBT people.
Oh, also? The evidence of the program’s effectiveness is highly questionable. A report ordered by Congress concluded that Heritage Keepers “had little or no impact on sexual abstinence or activity.”
Several years ago, the Sexuality Information & Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), where two of the RH Reality authors are employed, conducted an in-depth review of the Heritage Keepers’ curriculum and found it “relies on messages of fear and shame” and that even topics “frequently discussed in detail in other abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, such as condoms and STDs, receive very little mention.” The review offers up many disturbing examples of the fear-based messaging, most memorable of which is the following exercise:
Each student rolls a six-side die; the number that comes up corresponds to a particular consequence. Students who roll a one have contracted HIV, a two contracted herpes, a three HPV, a four untimely pregnancy, a five infertility, and a six emotional pain.
I believe that’s what you call a loaded die. All of the potential outcomes are crap; there is no chance in this “educational” exercise for emotional intimacy or pleasure. The game is designed to end with a simplistic takeaway: “Having sex outside of marriage is gambling with your future.”
It isn’t the only instance where the program presents marriage as an infallible guard against all potential negative consequences of sex. Consider this excerpt from the program’s student manual: “Sex is like fire. Inside the appropriate boundary of marriage, sex is a great thing! Outside of marriage, sex can be dangerous.” Right, because it’s never dangerous within marriage. A signed piece of paper from the justice of the peace magically eliminates risk of STIs, sexual violence, infidelity — you name it!
Seriously, though, I’m not being hyperbolic — the program actually presents marriage as a rape prevention tool. The program claims, “According to the data, 9 percent of married women are forced by their spouse to perform sexual acts, however 46 percent of women report that someone they were … ‘in love with’ forced them to have sex against their will, and 22 percent of women report being forced to do so by someone they ‘knew well.’”
First, as SIECUS beautifully points out, those figures come from a survey of women who had been forced to perform a sexual act — not of women in general. In other words, the correct factoid is that, at least within a small sample of women who had experienced sexual assault, 9 percent were assaulted by their marriage partner. Second, “even if married women as a whole face fewer incidences of sexual assault, for women in abusive relationships, marriage provides no protection,” says the SIECUS report. (Also, correlation ain’t causation.)
According to the Heritage Foundation, in addition to putting you at risk for being raped, premarital relationships may destroy your ability to bond. (I’m having Eric Keroack flashbacks! What is this, 2006?) “[It] may be that when people bond closely through sexual activity, then break up and bond with someone else, and then someone else, it may become increasingly difficult to maintain a lasting bond.” It may be that it may be? That’s considered evidence-based education?
It’s no surprise that the program calls on students to abstain from sex until marriage – not to think about whether that’s a choice that they want to make, just to do it, teacher’s orders: “Now is the time for you to make the commitment for the very best for yourself, to wait for the commitment of marriage to have sex.” The teacher is instructed to then hand out “commitment cards.”
None of that is to mention the sexual double standard in the curriculum. It invokes the ol’ saw about males being visual creatures and explains, “This is why girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex. For this reason, girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.” The familiar message is that girls are the sexual gatekeepers (there’s also an undercurrent of “don’t ask for it”).
It follows, of course, that the curriculum would ignore same-sex partnerships: It “operates under the assumption that all students in the class, or all people in the world for that matter, are heterosexual,” says the SIECUS review. “All references to sexual activity, arousal, and relationships are specific to male-female couples.” As the RH Reality piece argues, “The stigmatization of LGBT youth throughout the program reinforces the cultural invisibility and bias these students already face in many schools and communities. The curriculum’s focus on marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual behavior further ostracizes LGBT youth and the children of LGBT parents who still cannot legally marry in most states.”
No wonder HHS didn’t issue a press release. It’s hard to put a positive spin on the Obama administration giving its stamp of approval to a sexist, anti-gay, fear-based education program.
Earlier this week, when the CDC announced a record low in the teen birth rate, it listed two possible causes: “The impact of strong pregnancy prevention messages” and “increased use of contraception.” The Guttmacher Institute came out with an even stronger message: “The most recent decline in teen births can be linked almost exclusively to improvements in teens’ contraceptive use,” the organization said in a press release, which pointed to another CDC study for evidence.
But that hasn’t stopped conservatives from claiming that the drop is a result of, you guessed it, abstinence education and, paradoxically, an increase in abortions.
Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America expressed her outrage over the CDC analysis: “They don’t even mention the fact there’s been a tremendous increase in effectiveness and pervasiveness of abstinence education. They don’t mention the fact that teen sexual activity, by their own admission, is down.” As Think Progress noted this week, teen birth rates are actually highest in states with abstinence-only policies. Not only has it been widely documented that such programs are largely ineffective, it’s also been shown that such programs may prevent contraception use.
Now, it’s true that teens — specifically 15- and 16-year-olds — are delaying sexual activity, but the change in contraceptive use over the years has been much more profound, and there has been no significant change in sexual activity among 18- and 19-year-olds. What’s more, there was no change in sexual activity among teens, period, from 2008 on, says Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at Guttmacher, so the recent decline in teens births certainly can’t be attributed to abstinence. Also, it should be noted that abstinence can be the result of any number of social influences, not necessarily abstinence-only education. (Consider research showing that teens who receive sex education are much more likely to delay sex.)
Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told me that arguments like Crouse’s have a problem of “simple chronology.” The teen birth rate peaked in 1991, “some years before the federal investment in abstinence education,” he said. “So it’s clearly not responsible for declines that began in 1991.” In fact, he says, “The teen birth rate increased during the height of the federal investment in abstinence education. Those who would credit abstinence [for the decline] should also take the blame for the increases.” Albert added, “Researchers who have looked at it closely over the past several years tend to believe it is contraception that is making the difference. If the abstinence education programs are helping teens to use contraception more consistently, then we should thank them, but I don’t think that’s what they’re doing.”
Crouse isn’t the only conservative twisting the latest CDC news to fit an anti-choice agenda: In a piece titled “Credit Abstinence With Helping Reduce Teen Birth Rates,” on the anti-choice site LifeNews.com, Kristan Hawkins writes, “While the birth rate has fallen, it must be made clear that the CDC is looking at the birth rate and not the pregnancy rate in teens,” and then claims that the teen abortion rate has increased, without citing any evidence. She must have missed this headline from February: “Teen Pregnancy, Abortion Rates at Record Low” — that’s according to research from Guttmacher. In 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, the teen abortion rate was down 59 percent from its peak in 1988.
Hawkins’ next target? Why, contraception, of course. “It cannot be stated enough that 50% of women who are using some form of contraception find themselves unexpectedly pregnant.” Again, she offers no citation, but being a contraception user (i.e., you have used a condom recently) is different from using it correctly every time. According to Guttmacher, 54 percent of women who have had abortions became pregnant during a month when they used contraception — but a minority of those women used the method correctly. She adds that “contraception is not an effective means of preventing pregnancy 100% of the time” — right, just 99.9 percent of the time, in the case of oral contraceptives, when used correctly. (Abstinence, when it’s followed 100 percent of the time, really has that compelling 0.1 percent advantage.)
If anything, such data should recommend a need for better sex education and access to long-term methods of birth control.
My favorite part of her rant, though, is where she equates Plan B with abortion. This anti-science party trick just does not get old! “Most importantly, we cannot the [sic] measure the usage of abortion-causing emergency contraception (Plan B) and the role it is now playing in decreasing teen birth rates.” For the millionth time: Plan B is an emergency contraception. It prevents ovulation and fertilization, just as with all hormonal contraceptives. It does not cause abortion if the egg has already implanted, which is the medical definition of pregnancy, according to both the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In short: The increase she cites in Plan B use is actually yet more evidence for the argument that greater contraception use caused the decline in teen births.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, either: It happens every time the CDC releases a new report finding a continuing drop in teen pregnancy. What these reactions make clear is that no evidence — whether it’s on the benefits of making contraception widely accessible or the positive impact of comprehensive sex ed — will stop the war on sex. Where there is a scientific study providing such proof, there will be a right-winger willing to gesture vaguely in the direction of mythical evidence to the contrary. “In a way, I’m so tired of this debate,” says Albert. “Why don’t both sides declare victory and go home? If we say, ‘OK, you win,’ can we stop?”
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