Matthew Yglesias relays a bit of research from Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee on the different behavioral outcomes of withholding information (limiting sex-ed to "just say no") vs. providing it (specific warnings about who's more likely to be infected with HIV.) Emphasis his.

The second strategy just involved telling the girls something they did not know: the fact that older men are more likely to be infected with HIV than younger ones. A striking feature of HIV is that women from the ages of fifteen to nineteen are five times more likely to be infected than young men in the same cohort. This seems to be because young women have sex with older men, who have comparably high infection rates. The “sugar daddies” program simply informed students about what kind of people are more likely to be infected. Its effect was to sharply cut down sex with older men (the “sugar daddies”) but, also interestingly, to promote protected sex with boys their own age. After a year, the pregnancy rates were 5.5 percent in schools that had not received the program and 3.7 percent in schools that had received it. This reduction was mainly attributable to a reduction by two-thirds in pregnancies where an older male partner was involved.

Source: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Now sure, some politicians believe not just that sex education should be restricted to abstinence-only education but that it should further be restricted only to girls. But... I'm pretty sure those same individuals would be surprised at how much boys too might benefit from having similar information provided rather than withheld.

Abstinence-only worshipers have long made a fetish out of what they call the “love hormone” oxytocin. Women and to a much lesser extent men produce it when they have an orgasm. And it really does seem to be present during post-orgasmic cuddling. Wingnuts say this weakens women terribly because, you know, women who have too much sex, especially, with too many partners just completely lose any ability to love anyone ever again. Especially, their subtext goes, the man who, eventually, is supposed to have complete legal custody of her.

Never mind that women’s bodies regularly produce great huge gouts of oxytocin during, oh, say, childbirth or while nursing. Nevermind that really whopping amounts of the artificial version of oxytocin, Pitocin, are routinely given to women to induce labor. And yet despite the oxytocin receptor exhaustion thesis you never hear of women who’ve given birth becoming incapable of loving their husbands, or moms and dads, or subsequent offspring.

Nope, to hear the ‘wingers talk (including Bush Administration family-planning czar and occasional licensed physician Eric Keroack) this evidently happens only when the oxytocin in question involves fiddling with lady parts. To climax. Which, I might add, suggests a touching faith on ‘winger’s parts that most women climax regularly during intercourse.

But I digress…

I really just wanted to mention that back in January Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones wrote a really great post about oxytocin that begins

Oxytocin: The Cuddle Hormone?

It’s actually my mother, not me, who is the oxytocin expert, so, Mom, if you happen to read this on Facebook and see that I get anything wrong, feel free to let me know in Facebook comments. But destinyinprogress, at Alexandria, asked me a question about oxytocin in reply to one of my posts, so, here is what I know, and my thoughts about what I’ve read.

My mother did research on oxytoxin, when I was a teenager, and wrote articles with titles like Oxytocin analogs with oxygen-containing side chains in position 3.

From dinner table conversation when I was young, I learned a few basic facts…

She said it here.

Lynn’s got the details. Bottom line: it does seem to facilitate bonding but not as much as abstinence kooks wish, there’s not much evidence of “exhaustion” from it, even though men don’t produce as much as women do it seems to have similar results. And finally, from Lynn’s somewhat more sexually conservative position, the oxytocin dodge is sort of a red herring anyway since even if it were true (and it’s not) there might be better, um, reasons to strive for monogamy and fidelity. And better explanations than “love hormone” exhaustion for why one might not.

In comments to my sports/virginity question where I questioned why, for instance, losing one’s virginity was supposed to destroy your life but blowing your knee out in high-school sports isn’t; why getting an STI (even a bad one like HIV) is supposed to ruin your life but picking up hepatitis while trekking in Nepal isn’t, MinorityReport (who blogs at, well, Minority Report) said

Great point. I wish that would have been the gist of my high school sex-ed classes.

An example: The school hired chastity speaker, Molly Kelly. I forget most of her talk. However, I do remember one very clear image she used. Throughout her speech Molly repeatedly dropped an apple. At the end of her presentation she held up the apple she had dropped and an apple that had been set aside. She then asked which we would rather eat, the apple that had been dropped on the floor (repeatedly) or the apple that had been set aside. It drove her point home, and for me at least it made an impact.

I would have been nice to hear something like, “But if you do _______, it’s not the end and life goes on.”

She said it here.

Oohhh, I had this realization after reading her Molly Kelly story and now I’m kind of beside-myself irritated.

You know all those abstinence-only metaphors of apples, roses, even gum and tape? Every one of them is a single-use consumable good. Bouncing an apple into apple sause just takes the cake though. The difference between apples and, oh, say, your body is even if you managed to get bruised during sex you’d still recover quickly. And most of the time, for most women and men, you’re not bruised during sex to begin with.

Apples, gum, roses, tape, suckers, etc., don’t recover at all but they’re fucking things, not people!

You want a better, but still-inanimate metaphor for a man or woman who’s had sex? Try a rubber ball. In fact try a superball since those seem to bounce with more energy than they begin with. How about a book? Try a deep pool that a pebble has been tossed in. A painting, an alarm clock, a window, a fireplace, a chicken and an egg (which came first?), a ski hill, a piano or flute.

And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for any of those because humans aren’t inanimate nor are we, women or men, either literally or figuratively consumed in the course of, well, intercourse.

A dropped apple is simply marvelous for propaganda in the service of patriarchy but evilly inaccurate for sex education.

Via Research Blogging, psychology blogger Dr. Deb says

Uh oh. 

This is sure to spark some debate.

The sexual behavior of teenagers who pledge abstinence does not differ from that of closely matched non-pledgers. Moreover, pledgers are less likely to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. 

Rosenbaum, J. (2009). Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers PEDIATRICS, 123 (1) DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0407

She said it here.

And while we’re at it, from the abstract of the actual paper by Rosenbaum. (Emphasis mine.)

OBJECTIVE. The US government spends more than $200 million annually on abstinence-promotion programs, including virginity pledges. This study compares the sexual activity of adolescent virginity pledgers with matched nonpledgers by using more robust methods than past research.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS. The subjects for this study were National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health respondents, a nationally representative sample of middle and high school students who, when surveyed in 1995, had never had sex or taken a virginity pledge and who were >15 years of age (n = 3440). Adolescents who reported taking a virginity pledge on the 1996 survey (n = 289) were matched with nonpledgers (n = 645) by using exact and nearest-neighbor matching within propensity score calipers on factors including prepledge religiosity and attitudes toward sex and birth control. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers were compared 5 years after the pledge on self-reported sexual behaviors and positive test results for Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Trichomonas vaginalis, and safe sex outside of marriage by use of birth control and condoms in the past year and at last sex.

RESULTS. Five years after the pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and anal and oral sex variables. Pledgers had 0.1 fewer past-year partners but did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers used birth control and condoms in the past year and birth control at last sex.

CONCLUSIONS. The sexual behavior of virginity pledgers does not differ from that of closely matched nonpledgers, and pledgers are less likely to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease before marriage. Virginity pledges may not affect sexual behavior but may decrease the likelihood of taking precautions during sex. Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially virginity pledgers.

In particular the bit about 82% denying having ever pledged five years later is kind of… interesting. Wonder what the difference is between those who admit and those who deny pledging? So do I! But I’m not going to cough up the extortionate subscription price to look behind the federally-funded-but-somehow-still-for-profit firewall the publishers erect only because for some reason it’s legal.