current tune:
It seems apple has unlisted sex-related podcasts, again. it seems they're laboring under the same delusions as abstinence-only sex ed programs. somehow, teaching people about sex is a form of smut, in their minds.
this has been bugging me since i saw Kinsey (the movie, i still haven't read the original research) with the wifest. what really got me about that movie was that most of the couples in the movie could have been any of the kids i went to church/youth group with. and probably most of the kids i went to high school with (god bless the conservative suburbs). people are growing up handicapped by the same blind assumptions that were disproven nearly 60 Years Ago. This handicap is enforced by parents, churches, and educators who think that teaching kids about sex is the same as encouraging promiscuity.
I finally isolated the reason this bothers me so much, while reflecting on Guns, Germs, and Steel (it's proving harder to finish the second half when i only read on the train to work and back). In his discussion of Atahualpa and Pizarro's showdown, he points out that even though Pizarro himself was illiterate, his literate culture (spanish), afforded him the knowledge of the Cortez' conquest of Aztecs a few years before, by a similar trap. Atahualpa, although geographically closer to the event, had no knowledge of it, because of the lack of communication between indigenous american peoples. To draw an analogy, the american people, or at least most of them, are Incas. we are illiterate by choice. we are actively obscuring every chance to learn from the past. This is why AIDS and other STD's refuse to be exterminated: we are ignoring the lessons of the past that are right in front of us. I'm not exaggerating when i tell Nick or Amy that teaching abstinence-only is negligence. there's a war on: americans are the incans, and AIDS (and all STD's) are the spaniards.
Violet Blue talks about a lot of things that are really impressive. like how the gay porn industry is safer than the straight porn industry, even though AIDS transfers more readily through homosexual sex than heterosexual. that's because the gay porn industry assumes that everyone is infected. the straight porn industry assumes that everyone is clean. the GAYVN awards refuse to consider any film that doesn't use condoms. how simple would it be for the AVN awards to adopt a similar procedure? Another thing that i like about her is that she describes her work as "open source sex ed". The idea being that most of the sex ed taught in schools is incomplete at best, and most people learn about sex from porn. porn is a bad, bad, teacher. but if we keep marginalizing any real discourse on sex, that's all people are left with.
anyway, i think everyone should subscribe to open source sex. but it's best to do it by right clicking the "POD" link at the top of this post, copying it, and going to the advanced menu in iTunes, and clicking "Subscribe to Podcast" and pasting in the link. apple's podcasting may not have an open directory, but at least it's an open protocol (mostly).
6 Comments
I admire your clarity of thought. It seems that we agree here. Well written.
P.S. I agree that abstinence-only really is based on a Christian worldview and isn’t realistic to be taught in public schools. I think there is some merrit in teaching abstinence alongside safe sex but abstinence only? It will never happen.
Adam, I just have a few comments. And questions. Please tell me how condoms can keep someone from getting AIDS, when condoms can’t keep women from getting pregnant, and sperm is a lot larger than a virus.
I agree that teaching kids about sex doesn’t mean you’re promoting promiscuity, but when schools make condoms available to students, isn’t that like saying, “go ahead, just use protection” ?
Finally, society has been talking about sex since the sixties…talking it to death. Have things gotten better, or worse.
@ben -
thank you! it felt very confused to me, so it’s good to hear that it makes sense to someone else. this was an excercise in “remember what you’re (not) fighting for” that happily ended in “you can’t choose your friends”
@bobbie -
the condom thing:
fundamentally, i’ll have to disagree and say condoms can keep women from getting pregnant, and keep someone from getting AIDS. Opponents of “safe sex” generally cite condoms as failing 1 in 6 times, while proponents generally cite condoms as being 98% effective. why so different? studies that listcondoms as having ~80% effectiveness include improperly used condoms. studies that give 98% effectiveness against pregnancy and 99% effectiveness against HIV always qualify their results as “When used consistantly and correctly”. to me that screams the need for better education.
making condoms available:
it’s entirely possible that giving away condoms, in an attempt to jumpstart the use of condoms (by making them free) also jumpstarts promiscuity (by making them available, sans-embarassment). but i’d say that the more reasonable solution is to include better education about when to have sex, than to stop making condoms available. whether we’re teaching kids to only have sex inside a framework of marriage, or only where there’s “mutual respect, consent, and fulfillment” is a separate discussion. we need to be teaching them. handing out condoms is not a substitute for education.
society has been talking:
this is pretty broad, so i’m going to try to distill it into a microcosm: the playground. kids always talk. about sex, about war, about cars, and plenty of other things which they’re not actually experts. but the reason that we didn’t send ninjas into iraq is that we spend a lot of time educating people on their way to being the grown-ups who make those decisions. that’s a lot of time learning from history (this is where the idea of a literate society comes in). but if all we tell kids is that god’s plan is for sex to only happen inside marriage, and that outside of that there’s STD’s and heartbreak, they’ll grow up thinking that if there’s no penetration there’s no sin, STD’s or heartbreak. dispelling these myths is just as important as dispelling the playground misconception that cars go faster the harder you turn the steering wheel. sex is dangerous too.
Actually, I wasn’t talking about kids that talk about sex on the playground. Since the sixties there have been thounsands of books written about sex education, (and sex in general), talk shows, newspaper articles, classroom curiculum, you name it. Yet I see very little that has changed. Somehow the message isn’t getting through, and this scares me. Why not? I’m tempted to blame Hollywood, but that’s too easy.
I guess I just have to end this by saying that all we can do is tell our children our beliefs, (and live out those beliefs), give them the facts, and then pray.
I don’t think you’re too far from the mark there mom. This issue of sex is so multi-faceted there is no way to define who or what is to blame. From a Christian stance, however, we need only point back to Adam and Eve to find the culprit. From a non-Christian stance I really don’t know what the culprit would be. Perhaps from a non-Christian view there is no need to find a culprit because nothing is inherently wrong? I don’t know.
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