Saturday, April 02, 2005

sex ed saturday

from my morning perusal of feministing.com, came across 4parents.gov, a site created by our gov to help parents embarrassed to talk with their kids about sex.

feministing thinks it's appalling; i wanted to see for myself so i read the site, especially the parts about contraception and sex ed. at first i thought, well, it looks ok. then i thought, well, you've internalized all your lessons about sex ed already (it's already a part of my thinking) so you're not a good judge.

so i decided to compare its information on contraception to planned parenthood's information.

(and hey! planned parenthood also talks about abstinence! whaddya know.)

in this day and age i can't believe parents are *still* skeeved out talking to their kids about sex. come on! my sister and i can remember the day, hour and context of our conversation with our dad about sex. (we had german shepherds and our bitch was in heat.) we were in elementary school. and we were in junior high when our mom told us to 'explore our bodies.' (gasp - a minister's wife!!)

knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to action, you know. (for me, it was at least a 15 year gap between one and the other.)

2 comments:

tm said...

The problem with the contraception part is that its stats are viciously circular. The failure rates assume that people don't know how to use a condom or take a pill (once a day, same time).

Failure to teach people to use contraceptives correctly, in turn, results in the failure to use contraceptives correctly, which in turn is used as evidence that contraceptives don't work.

It's a profoundly disingenuous method of arguing.

Delia Christina said...

there's much about the arguments against comprehensive sex education i find disingenuous.