Simcha Fisher, whose blog has already been noticed on this thread, has an interesting piece about the drawbacks of some forms of "abstinence education" as practised in the US.
This is written from a female perspective, so as a [single] male I will keep my comments to a minimum (adding some elucidations in CAPITALS.
I have also reproduced a comment by a reader who argues that this view represents a specifically Protestant view- that chastity has no intrinsic value, that men's sexual urges are essentially uncontrollable so that they should marry in order to have an outlet for them, and that "good" women should not be interested in sex but endure it for their husbands' sake.
A couple of points on this: Firstly, I think it derives from nineteenth-century attitudes (early modern puritans had quite a different attitude to male and female sexuality).
Second, I am not so sure as the commenter that this mindset, where found amongst US Catholics, is simply an importation from US Protestants. There is quite a lot of evidence that a similar "double standard" existed among many French and Irish Catholics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (nor was it confined to Catholics - the father in the opera LA TRAVIATA who says that he fooled around with prostitutes but married a virgin, wants his son to do the same, and declares that any woman who has lost her virginity is ruined forever and unfit for marriage or respectable society is now generally played as a hypocrite, but the author of the original play on which the opera is based published several works declaring in the plainest terms that he believed this himself and regarded it as a moral truism), and the "marriage debt" theology (which still survives among the SSPX, for example) lends itself very easily to this view of marital consummation as a shameful necessity and only for weaklings who can't endure the challenge of celibacy.
EXTRACT
...I've always assumed that the ineffectiveness of abstinence education is due to the "drop in a bucket" phenomenon -- that even a good message like abstinence gets lost in the ocean of bad messages that kids hear from TV, the internet, negligent parents, etc.
But maybe there's a deeper problem with abstinence-only education. I stumbled across this XOJane [PRESUMABLY A FEMINIST SITE] post, in which [NOW] thoroughly secular people recount their experiences in school with abstinence-only education. Here's a typical story:
[G]irls were given two glasses of water and told to chew up food and spit it into one of them.
Their teacher -- a guest speaker from an anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy" group, then asked them which glass they'd rather drink. The lesson, in case you haven't guessed already, is that premarital sex makes you a gross glass of regurgitated food.
The readers recounted many variations on the "used food" theme: kids were supposed to lick a Hershey's Kiss [CHOCOLATE BAR] and then invite someone else to lick it, too. Or kids were asked to take tape and stick it to their arms or the floor, and then pass it down the line. At the end of the activity, you look at the tape, or the candy, or the cup of water and think, "Ew, this is used. I don't want any."
Is this what a typical abstinence-only education is like? If so, I'm as horrified and disgusted as the XOJane commenters.
What's so bad about this kind of presentation? I'm going to answer as someone who remembers being a teenage girl (maybe men will have a different perspective, and can share it in the comment box).
Here are the problems: First, the message simply won't work for so many girls. What about the girls who have already had sex or "gone too far?" These demonstrations teach them that they are already ruined, worthless, revolting, useless. Many will despair, and throw themselves into promiscuity whole hog out of misery, or out of some desire to compensate themselves by at least getting some pleasure out of their "ruination." [THIS IS A FAIRLY WELL-ATTESTED REACTION TO VIEWS OF THE NON-VIRGIN AS IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED]
And what about girls who are in love with their boyfriends, or think they are? They'll think, "Well, this is no problem for me and my boyfriend. I can give myself to him and it will be pure and beautiful because we'll be together forever <B <B <B" (and meanwhile, the boyfriend is thinking, "Score!").
Girls have sex because of lust and desire, just as boys do, but also out of a desire to please and to be accepted -- and out of simple teenage shortsightedness. Many girls will think, "Okay, maybe sex is hurting me in some abstract, far-in-the-future way, but it's fun, and it keeps him sticking around and makes me feel important. Totally worth it."
So, for a large population of girls, the "used food" analogy will not persuade them to be abstinent -- just the opposite.
But what's even more disturbing is that this approach may actually work -- but it will do so by making girls into a commodity. It tells them, "Yep, you're Kleenex. Now make sure you only let your husband blow." (Oh, in theory you could say that the used chocolate or chewed-up crackers represent the boys' bodies as much as it does the girls', but come on. It's girls who have a hymen that can be broken; girls who can get pregnant. It's generally girls who hesitate, while boys apply the pressure. And it's girls who are more likely to be aware that they're giving something away when they have sex, whereas teenage boys are probably truly incapable of seeing sex as self-sacrificial: they're just not made that way. )
The most dangerous part of this idea -- that females are receptacles -- is that, like most lies, it looks very similar to the truth. The truth is that women are built to receive -- but like a wife welcoming in her beloved, not like a specimen cup. )
So this gimmicky abstinence education teaches a terrible lesson about what women are. And what about what it says about sex in general? That it's dirty, gross, -- something that is gonna mess you up anyway, use you up, make you cruddy and dirty. So your best option is to confine that filthy mess to marriage, because your spouse is the one who promised to deal with crap like that.
My God. What does this have to do with marital love? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I understand that teenagers are not easy to reach, and that sometimes you have to wield a heavy hammer to get their attention. But this kind of approach is why people think Christians hate women and fear sex. It's why people leave the faith...
Read more:
www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/is-this-what-abstinence-only-education-looks-like#ixzz1vudHsoS1www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/is-this-what-abstinence-only-education-looks-likeosted by JD on Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:26 AM (EST):
The abstinence-only horror stories can be traced to a false view of sex commonly held by conservative Protestants.
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The view is that sex is wrong and dirty and something that Good Girls shouldn’t like, but that men NEED. Women are supposed to stay “pure” until marriage and then be available to satisfy their husbands every sexual need afterward, lest he stray. (1 Corinthians 7:5 and Ephesians 5:22-24 are frequently misused as justification. This makes women’s bodies to a certain degree the property of their husband.) Men, on the other hand, simply cannot control themselves. This places the burden of chastity is almost entirely on the woman. This is why the concept of chastity in marriage is completely foreign to Protestants. (And without chastity in marriage, you can see why they do not condemn contraception.) This is why celibacy is thought of as “unnatural”, despite what Paul said. This is also why some condemn even celibate homosexuals. (The assumption is that celibacy is impossible). And this is why there is a trememdous amount of pressure in these churches to marry young. (And if marriage is entered into with due to external pressure and without proper maturity—both grounds for an annulment in the Catholic Church—this creates a need for divorce.)
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This is why Catholics need to be wary about taking sides in the United States’ “Culture War”. The US is predominantly a Protestant nation. This means that the battle lines aren’t between secularism and Christianity, but secularism and heretical Christianity. (Not that I don’t like Protestants, but their moral theology is seriously deficient. I certainly don’t stay Catholic for the music.) As a result, Catholics may find themselves unwittingly supporting positions and ideas contrary to Church teaching due to a poorly thought out political alliance.
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Do any of our readers -preferably female readers - have comments on this?