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.