Mermaid Musings

hooray for Virgina (Virginia!?) becoming the 14th state to reject Federal funding for abstinence-only sex education.

Meanwhile, Congress is planning to give an extra few million dollars to abstinence only programs. Hello? As evidence mounts that abstinence-only curricula actually do more harm than good and do nothing to prevent teen sex, the Federal government is planning to spend even more money on it. Yes. This country is fucked. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

So, from the list of 55 fun things to do instead of have sex, brought to you by the lovely anti-abortion, anti-sex crowd:

Bake cookies (I once knew a guy that used this as a euphemism for sex)

Slide down a grass hill on a block of ice (that’ll cool you off!)

Go horseback riding (that’ll get your mind off things)
Dress up and go to McDonald’s (are they for real? do people still eat at McDonalds?)

Have breakfast at sunrise (looks like we’re too late on this one…)

Hide love notes where the other will find them (kinky!)

Which all just goes to show that people telling teens not to have sex, have not had much experience with, well, good sex.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for teenagers waiting to have sex (I myself was a late bloomer), but what we should be teaching is not the immorality of sex, but rather the skills teens need to recognize whether or not they are ready to have sex, and how to negotiate their own bountries and protect themselves from having sex before they are ready - without stigmatizing young folk who ARE ready at an earlier age - and then we should be teaching them how to protect themselves from STIs and unwanted pregnancy.

We should also do something about the whole culture of negative self-image that often contributes to teens having sex before they are ready.We should also be teaching young people about their bodies - how they work, how they can learn what they like (through masturbation and self-exploration) so that when they do decide they are ready, they can have GOOD sex. How many issues around sex that come up later in life and require therapy could’ve been prevented if we’d known at a younger age what actually constitutes GOOD sex?!