Photo by Flickr user World of Oddy. Used under a Creative Commons license.

We’re being a little bit passive-aggressive about it, but Washington State is about to become roughly the 15th state to forego federal abstinence-only “sex-education” funding.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the story.

OLYMPIA — The Bush administration is cutting off funding for abstinence-only sex education in Washington because this state now requires schools to provide additional, medically accurate information about preventing unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Up until this year, the state has received an annual $800,000 federal grant for abstinence-only sex education. The money was used to produce and air public service announcements as well as developing abstinence-only curriculums for schools.

The programs had been used in many cases alongside more comprehensive sex education programs taught at the discretion of individual school districts.

...

This year, however, the Legislature passed a law that makes comprehensive sex education compulsory for all schools.

Read the rest of the article here.

Speaking of passive-aggressiveness, though, the Feds could be a little less squirrelly as well.

Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, sponsored the bill and was unapologetic about forgoing the money.

“I’m not chasing the dollar,” she said. “The state of Washington made its decision; we did as a Legislature, that we believe kids ought to be taught a comprehensive sex education with abstinence-only included in that program.

“If the federal government will not agree to that and will not fund it because we aren’t doing that, I guess that’s too bad. I wish they would look at a balance because that’s what kids need.”

Since comprehensive sex-education tends to teach young people to wait till they’re actually ready instead of when they’re just “too horny” and/or “too captured by the romance of the moment” to stop, my guess is that the loss of $800,000 for a failed curriculum funding could result in a marginal savings for overall State savings.

Photo by Flickr user Kriegerinhummel’s. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bean of the political blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money says about the recent increase in teen pregnancy…

[T]eenage sex rates have risen since 2001 and condom use has dropped since 2003. Abortion rates have held steady for a decade, although numbers from 2005 and 2006 are not available.”

So, abortions hold steady, condom use goes down and sex rates are up. Seems like a no-brainer that such a situation would lead to more pregnancy.

But it’s not…

Because, despite the Democratic Congress, the U.S. still spends about $176 million annually on abstinence only “education” programs that don’t work. Abstinence only programs don’t keep teens from having sex, and, what’s worse, they leave kids (who are still having sex) without the tools to prevent pregnancy and STDs.

...The Heritage Foundation helpfully calls blaming abstinence only education for rising teen pregnancy rates “stupid” (they prefer to blame the women themselves).

Read the quote in context here.

Right. Because the Heritage Foundation, like nearly all organizations dedicated to perpetuating male superiority, hold actual men in such contempt they feel they/we can’t be trusted to be responsible for anything, let alone be responsible for contraception.

I swear if conservatives, men and women alike, don’t have this bizarre, incest-related notion that women should all behave towards men as if they were instead doting, indulgent, sacrificing mothers spoiling their kindergarten-age, center-of-the-universe-ly self-centered little boys. “Don’t fuss, mommy will put the condom on you, honey. Ooh, honey doesn’t like the nasty condom? Mommy won’t ask him to wear it again. Ooh, mommy got pregnant so now honey will have to share Mommy? Bad Mommy! Slut Mommy! Mommy’s so sorry, honey, let me suck-um’s little dickie.”

Geee-rossss!

And yet feminists get blamed for being man haters?!?!? Uh-uh, it’s the opposite, isn’t it? Unlike conservatives and other anti-feminists, feminists want men to be men! Real men! Real adult men! Men with brains who know how to use them. Men with cocks who know how to use them, and when.

And, if I may push from a direction feminists haven’t been going lately, a lot of women, especially non- and anti-feminist women, need to grow up and (paradoxically) stop parenting their partners!

Contrary to the Heritage Foundation, the Abstinence-Only movement, and the general impulse to blame women for men’s misbehavior, choosing to have or not have sex is not 100% your responsibility. Contrary to anti-feminists everywhere (and even some feminists), contraception is not 100% your responsibility, nor, in particular, is it at all your responsibility to suck it up, count backwards from your last period, and hope and/or pray that this time it’s “safe” to “let him” do it without protection. But the very real existence of such men in no way should condone (let alone excuse!) similar deference to the majority of non-violent, but no-less responsible men.

Yes, sometimes some women are too in thrall, or too much in very real danger from their partners to dare say no to anything, but I’d like to propose that a man who’s partners daren’t risk his tantrums is merely on the far end of a Bell curve of Heritage-Foundation-sanctioned, contemptuously infantilized expectation of men.

Real adult women (i.e. feminists) don’t want or need men who can’t rise above that level of expectation. Real adult men (i.e. we don’t really have a inclusive name for it yet but for the moment it probably starts with an “f” and ends in “ist”) don’t need that level of expectation either.

In fact real adult men ought to resent it bitterly! Resent it enough that *even if there were no women working on feminism to encourage us we’d still want to do something about it.

[Note: When I talk about women needing to stop “mommying” their partners I’m expressly not trying to write a new chapter of Phillip Wylie-style “momism,” which was, after all, just another way to blame women. —fl]

According to the editors at RH Reality Check...

This following letter was sent to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid urging Congressional leaders to reconsider continuing federal investments in abstinence-only funding. The letter was sent by John S Santelli MD, MPH at Columbia University and signed by nine other prominent researchers in the field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health last Wednesday, Nov 21. It was sent to RH Reality Check yesterday and we are thrilled to post it below.

As a public service I’m reproducing the letter as well. If you get a chance, would you mind forwarding it to your own Representatives and Senators regardless of party or persuasion? If your legislators support real, pragmatic, comprehensive sex education they could probably use the encouragement. If they’re opposed, then they need a reminder that young people’s health shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Thanks.

Dear Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid,

As a group of leading scientists who have recently conducted research on adolescents, reproductive health, and abstinence-only education, we are writing to express our strong concern about increasing federal support for abstinence-only education (AOE) programs. This federal support includes monies going to states (Section 510 of the Social Security Act) and those going directly to community and faith-based organizations (the Community-Based Abstinence Education program). Recent reports in professional publications by the authors of this letter have highlighted multiple deficiencies in federal abstinence-only programs. As such, we are surprised and dismayed that the Congress is proposing to extend and even increase funding for these programs. In this letter we identify key problems with abstinence-only education. We also have attached recent scientific reports that are pertinent to the debate over these programs. We note that many of these studies have used nationally-representative data from surveys sponsored by the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The federal programs promoting AOE have prompted multiple scientific and ethical critiques. These critiques were summarized in a January 2006 paper by Santelli, Ott and others. By design, abstinence programs restrict information about condoms and contraception – information that may be critical to protecting the health of young people and to preventing unplanned pregnancy, HIV infection, and infection with other sexually transmitted organisms. They ignore the health needs of sexually active youth and youth who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning for counseling, health care services, and risk reduction education. Withholding lifesaving information from young people is contrary to the standards of medical ethics and to many international human rights conventions. International treaties and human rights statements support the rights of adolescents to seek and receive information vital to their health. Governments have an obligation to provide accurate information to adolescents and adolescents have a right to expect health education provided in public schools to be scientifically accurate and complete.

Rigorous evaluations of AOE programs find little evidence of efficacy for federally-sponsored abstinence education. Several weeks ago Dr. Douglas Kirby, working with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, released a comprehensive review of prevention programs for youth (Emerging Answers 2007). This review found that none of the well-designed evaluations of abstinence-only programs presented strong evidence of an impact on abstinence behaviors. (By contrast, Kirby finds clear evidence that many comprehensive sexuality education programs, which include information on both abstinence and contraception, do help young people delay initiation of intercourse.) The large-scale Mathematica evaluation of the Section 510 program, released in April 2007, found no measurable impact on increasing abstinence or delaying sexual initiation among participating youth or on other behaviors such as condom use. This well funded and very well conducted evaluation examined four exemplary local programs, tracking youth over four years. One of the few measurable impacts of the programs was a decrease in adolescent confidence regarding the ability of condoms to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Similar results on program efficacy were found by Underhill, who reviewed abstinence-only programs in a spring 2007 systematic review.

Virginity pledging, one aspect of abstinence programming, appears to have little long-term benefit in preventing outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections, although prevention of these infections is a stated goal of the programs. A spring 2005 longitudinal study by Bruckner and Bearman found that abstinence pledgers, when compared to non-pledgers, experienced similar rates of sexually transmitted infection. Pledgers did delay sexual intercourse for a limited period, but when they did start having sex, they were less likely to use condoms. They were also less likely to seek reproductive health care compared to non-pledgers.

Abstinence until marriage is another stated goal of the federal program; however, evidence from the past several decades indicates that establishing abstinence until marriage as normative behavior would be a highly challenging policy goal. Teitler has shown that over the past 40 years, the median age at first intercourse has dropped (and stabilized) to age 17 in most developed countries.

At the same time, the median age at marriage has risen dramatically. Today, sexual intercourse is almost universally initiated during adolescence worldwide. A January 2007 study by Finer found that almost all Americans initiate sexual intercourse before marriage. In fact by age 44, virtually everyone has experienced sexual intercourse but only 3% have remained abstinent until marriage. Moreover this is not a new trend; Finer’s data suggest this pattern has been true for much of the second half of the 20th century.

Importantly, the emphasis on abstinence-only programs and policies appears to be undermining critical public health programs in the U.S. and abroad, including comprehensive sexuality education and HIV prevention programs. During the period of increased state and federal emphasis on abstinence, declines have occurred in the percentage of teachers in U.S. public schools who teach about birth control and the number of students who report receiving such education. In December 2006, Lindberg and colleagues found that the percentage of teenagers who had received formal instruction about condoms and contraception declined from 89% in 1995 to 70% in 2002.

We also note that a December 2004 Congressional report on federal abstinence programs from the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Government Reform – Minority Staff found that 11 of the 13 most frequently used curricula contained false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health – including inaccurate information about contraceptive effectiveness, purported health risks of abortion, and other scientific errors. Recent reviews of these abstinence curricula from Santelli and colleagues at Columbia University have found similar inaccuracies, particularly misinformation about the efficacy of condoms and contraception. This was the basis of an ACLU declaration on this topic from Santelli in the spring of this year.

Abstinence-only requirements also appear to be harming our foreign aid efforts. In April 2006, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report titled “Spending Requirement Presents Challenges for Allocating Prevention Funding under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” that concluded that the “...requirement that country teams spend at least 33 percent of prevention funding appropriated pursuant to the act on abstinence-until-marriage programs has presented challenges to country teams’ ability to adhere to the PEPFAR sexual transmission strategy…[and] challenged their ability to integrate the components of the ABC model and respond to local needs, local epidemiology, and distinctive social and cultural patterns.”

We would note that all of the mainstream organizations of health professionals that focus on the health of young people have strongly criticized federal support for current abstinence programs. These include the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Adolescent Medicine. We have also attached the weblinks to the policy statements from each of these groups.

The recent Congressional testimony of former Surgeon General Richard Carmona underscores these critiques from mainstream health organizations. Dr. Carmona’s testimony confirms the political motivations behind abstinence funding and the failure to address issues of efficacy and scientific accuracy. He suggested that ideology and theology have taken priority over women’s health in the current administration. Dr. Carmona reported that the Bush administration “did not want to hear the science but wanted to, if you will, ‘preach abstinence,’ which I felt was scientifically incorrect.”

Given these serious scientific and ethical shortcomings, we strongly urge the U.S. Congress to reconsider federal support for abstinence-only education programs and policies. We would be very willing to advise you on shaping alternatives to the current program.

Sincerely,

John S Santelli, MD, MPH

Columbia University

Peter Bearman, PhD

Columbia University

Claire Brindis, DrPH

University of California, San Francisco

Hannah Bruckner, PhD

Yale University

Lawrence B Finer, PhD

Guttmacher Institute

Laura Duberstein Lindberg, PhD

Guttmacher Institute

Mary Ott, MD

Indiana University

Julien Teitler, PhD

Columbia University

Deborah Tolman, EdD

San Francisco State University

Kristen Underhill, DPhil

Yale University

(Organizational affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.)

Cc Senate and House Leadership and Appropriations Committees

If you’re feeling civic-minded you might consider reposting this message on your own blog, with a link back to the original RH Reality Check post.

Finally, I think the ideas represented in the letter, as well as the policies proposed, are level-headed, moderate, and well-founded in the reality we’ve got rather than any of the various realities ideological prudes or libertines might wish we had. If you find any of the points raised in the letter objectionable and/or factually incorrect please let me know in comments. Thanks!

(Hat tip: Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon.)

Some time last Summer while I was getting excited about the genuinely great, and often hard-nosed advice the great sex-ed-for-young-people website Scarleteen.com, the anti-feminist author Wendy Shalit decided Scarleteen was sending all the wrong messages. (Meaning sending the wrong messages to young girls, of course, since in the world people like Shalit live in boys are evidently immune. Or expendable. But at any rate better left unreached because otherwise you couldn’t blame everything including their behavior on girls. But I digress….)

As her fellow anti-feminist Mona Charen columnist at the conservative Townhall.com put it in a review of Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild

Scarleteen offers a “sex readiness checklist” for young girls to help them gauge whether they should plunge into the fun. Among the items: “I see a doctor regularly,” and “I have a birth control budget of $50 per month.” The emotional readiness a girl should demonstrate is “I can separate love from sex.” Shalit notes, “Those who can separate love from sex are mature, like jaded adults. They are ready to embark on a lifetime of meaningless encounters.”

Charen said it here.

Here’s a link to the page in question: Ready or Not? The Scarleteen Sex Readiness Checklist. Let me know if you think Shalit, or Charen’s characterizations were accurate.

I know! Let’s make it a treasure hunt: How long does it take you to find those three bullet points on that page? And after you did find them would you consider them the most characteristic points on the page? Actually probably not.

In fact what you’d probably take away if, unlike Shalit or Charen, you’d read it would be that whereas Scareleteen is very non-judgmental about sex itself it’s actually pretty hard-assed about whether and when you’re ready to have it at all. Which, as we’ll see, is probably why Shalit didn’t pull somewhat different quotes instead.

How about:

Why do I want to do this?

If either of you wants to do it because you feel you must or should, because one of you is pressuring the other, you’re getting pressure from friends, or if you’re having troubles in your relationship and you think sex will fix it, stop right there; wake up and smell the double-latte. You’re completely off-base. Another thing to give you pause might be if you’re fantasizing about sex based on movies or television: remember how in Tom and Jerry cartoons, Tom could hit a wall and walk away from it just fine, and you knew that wouldn’t work in real life? Same goes with a lot of sex in movies and television; it isn’t often as it appears. Also, if you simply want to unburden yourself of your virginity with no one in particular, you might want to think again. In most studies, most women (and some men) who have handled it that way weren’t so jazzed about that choice later.

Op Cit. or some other fancy citation thingie.

Woah! Instead of telling girls “sex isn’t for you it’s for your husband” it tells boys and girls to question their motivations for having sex. (And, I might add, every word on that page just as valid after marriage as before! Since “a minister signed a piece of paper” doesn’t make you ready either if you weren’t ready before.)

And how about:

...there isn’t a statute of limitations on your sex life, and it doesn’t begin or end with intercourse. You can initiate any level of it at any time during your life, and change what you want to do as you go along, determining at any time what is best for you, and for your partner(s). If you haven’t checked almost all of the things on those lists, take a look at the ones you didn’t check and try and figure out what you need to do for yourself right now. There is no reason to set yourself up for a fall, or rush into something that won’t be enjoyable or rewarding, when it isn’t going to go away if you wait. Be honest with yourself, and above all else, do what is right for YOU.

Again, not telling girls not to let unworthy men take what’s rightfully their husbands, and therefore probably of zero interest to the “modesty” (a.k.a. pussy-bank trustee) obsessed Shalit. But, when you think about it, a far firmer exhortation to abstinence than conservatives are ever able to muster because for Scareleteen, and me (thus the blog title) virginity-ending intercourse inside or outside of marriage is just the beginning of what one should expect to be a long and enjoyable sex life.[*] Meanwhile conservatives, who see their job as sort of moral refrigerators struggling to keep “meat” from spoiling till it’s ready to be consumed, could give a flying fuck what happens to girls after they get lint on their lollypops (or, in conservative John Derbyshire’s case, hair.)

And another thing. Assuming they bothered to read it at all, the real clincher, the real red flag to conservatives and other anti-feminist women would be

Who do I want to do this for?

If it’s for you, and your partner as well as you, then that’s great. But if it is for someone else primarily, and not for yourself — or JUST for yourself — stop now. Other people, just like you, have hands and fingers. They know how to use them to get off, and you can rest assured they’ve been using them long before you came along. Sex with someone else shouldn’t be about self-gratification; that’s what masturbation is for. If your friends are saying you should, with no understanding of your relationship, or your own needs, they’re being crappy friends. Nine times out of ten, a lot of friends who pressure their friends to have sex do so because they don’t feel all that good about their own choices, and want to hide behind endorsing sex to make themselves feel better. Tell them to carry their own baggage, not try and pass it off on you.

Because with these people if you’re a woman there’s only one person you want to have sex for and that’s whatever man gets the contract. And because with these people if you’re a man then you don’t want to go thinking about anyone else’s feelings because then the system would fall apart.

And finally?

And not to grind it in or anything but let’s look at that one line both Shalit and Charen got all scandalized about: “I can separate love from sex.”

This is not an digression: You wanna know my favorite dirty joke? Ok, Question: what happened to the couple that couldn’t tell the difference between vaseline and window putty? Answer: Their windows fell out.

Now why do I love that joke? Because it’s only a dirty joke if you’ve got a dirty mind. And why is this not a digression? Because conservatives assumed Scarleteen meant can you avoid love and have sex anyway when it’s pretty clear from the context that the question instead is can you avoid confusing sex and love! Because, think about it, how many young people have included “but we’re in love…” when trying to explain what might have been an avoidable catastrophe to their parents? Again, for conservatives those catastrophes are important object lessons (just like recessions and depressions) and permit a sense of smug superiority to those who don’t get caught. So anyway, like my favorite joke, complaining about Scarleteen’s sex-vs.-love distinction indicates whether or not your mind’s in the gutter. (They might need a towel but don’t let them use your nice ones.)

Now there’s a reason I bring all this up, and that’s because around the time Shalit’s book came out I discovered that I’m practically neighbors with Heather Corinna, who runs Scarleteen. And because I was totally impressed with how hard Corinna works to make sure that young people grow up wisely and well so that they can have long, happy, non-fucked up adult sex lives I contacted her and we quickly became friends, fellow brainstormers, sympathizers, and weekly coffee buddies. Call that a disclaimer if you like, or a “full disclosure,” but just remember that it was her work that drew me to contact Corinna and not the other way around.

And anyway, because I was impressed with her work, and because from my background in instructional design for adults and curriculum design for children I know just how incredibly hard it really is to knit stuff like that together. And so when knuckleheads like Shalit go nutpicking minor points it ticks me off (just as it ticks me off when their counterparts go braying about how there’s too much emphasis on personal responsibility and too many warnings about predatory partners male or female.)

The bottom line, anyway, is that there’s more to real, responsible sex education than utterly ignoring one gender while exhorting the other to keep their knees together till their husband buys his license to pry them apart. No matter how terribly romantic that sounds to people with their minds in the gutter.

[*] Actually, of course, even for heterosexuals penis-in-vagina intercourse is only one of many sexual milestones. Millions of other perfectly sexual content people may never have it.