All together, the federal government has spent $1.7 billion plus on abstinence-only programs since 1982; that money might just as well have been set on fire. As I mentioned earlier, while virginity pledgers delayed intercourse for a few months longer than their nonpledging peers, when they did become sexually active, they were less likely to protect themselves or their partners against pregnancy or disease. The same holds true for participants in abstinence-only classes. Studies stretching back over a decade have found that, at best, when compared to a control group, participants neither abstain entirely from sex nor delay intercourse; they also do not have fewer sexual partners. They are, however, a lot more likely to become unintentionally pregnant: as much as 60 percent more likely. That could lead one to suspect that abstinence-only advocates are more concerned with ideology than with public health or even sexual restraint—otherwise they would have given it up long ago for something that has been repeatedly proven to reduce teens’ sexual activity, increase their use of contraception and disease protection, and improve their relationships: comprehensive sex education.
Under President Barack Obama, comprehensive sex ed finally got its first federal love, although the focus remained squarely on reducing negative consequences: $185 million earmarked for research and programs that have been shown, through rigorous evaluation, to reduce teen pregnancy. That money, of course, could easily disappear under another, less progressive commander in chief, and probably will: for instance, a clause buried in the Student Success Act, a Republican rewrite of No Child Left Behind that passed the House in the summer of 2015, zeros out any funding for programs that “normalize teen sexual activity as an expected behavior, implicitly or explicitly, whether homosexual or heterosexual.” Meanwhile, $75 million in abstinence-only funds continued to be doled out each year through the Affordable Care Act. While substantially less than under President Bush, that’s still an awful lot to blow on the sex ed equivalent of a tinfoil hat.
What this means for parents is that you never know what your child’s “sex education” class may entail. Only fourteen states require that sex ed be medically accurate. Yet even that is no guarantee. Mine is supposed to be one of them. Yet it wasn’t until the spring of 2015 that a judge ruled for the first time against a public school system that was actively teaching misinformation: students in the city of Clovis, California, had for years been made to watch videos that compared an unmarried woman who had intercourse to a “dirty shoe” and were encouraged to chant the antigay motto “One man, one woman, one life.” Around that same time, Alice Dreger, a professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, live-tweeted her son’s abstinence-based sex education class from a public high school in politically progressive East Lansing, Michigan. Instructors there warned about the potential failure rates of contraceptives, citing, as an example, a box of condoms in which every single one had a hole! They also advised the boys to seek out “good girls” who say no to sex. At one point, Dreger tweeted, the students were told, “‘We are going to roll this dice 8 times. Every time your number comes up, pretend your condom failed and you get a paper baby.’” She followed that up shortly with “Paper babies are being handed out to EVERYONE. They have ALL HAD CONDOM FAILURE AND THE WHOLE CLASS IS PREGNANT.” When it was over, Dreger tweeted, “I just want to grab all those kids after school and say HERE IS THE TRUTH. SEX FEELS GOOD. THAT’S WHY YOU SEEK IT. TAKE CARE & HAVE FUN.”
Life Is Like an English Essay
Nearly twenty-five years ago, while teaching English and leading outdoor programs at an all-girls’ private school, Charis Denison had an epiphany. So many of the critical lessons of middle and high school took place outside the classroom. Her students wanted (needed) to talk about their experience, but didn’t know how, and anyway, there was nowhere they could try. “I started feeling that we were failing these kids,” she told me. What would happen if she carved out a formal space for those conversations? What would happen if she encouraged students to apply the rigorous critical skills they used in the classroom to life beyond it? “You wouldn’t walk into an essay exam wondering which book the test was on, right?” she said. “But people will go to a party without any thought at all, not even of what they don’t want to happen.” Rather than blaming themselves when things go awry, students needed to remember, Denison began urging them, the “reflect-revise-redraft” strategy they used when editing a paper. “Instead of just thinking, ‘Oh my God, that night was awful, that was horrible!’ I want them to back it up and think, ‘Why did that suck? And what part did I play in it, and what part was out of my control?’ Just like you would with a bad grade, or with anything else that goes wrong. Avoiding the blame game—just backing up, figuring it out, reflecting on it, revising your plan, forgiving yourself, and moving forward.”
Denison consciously avoids labels like “good” and “bad,” “responsible” and “irresponsible,” even “healthy” and “unhealthy,” in her classes. “Those are a matter of personal belief,” she explained. “The idea of ‘regret’ works regardless.” That’s important, she said, because she teaches in communities that encompass a broad range of backgrounds and values. During time devoted to anonymous questions, one student might want to know, “Is it okay that I have casual hookups on a pretty regular basis?” Another, in the same class, might ask, “Is it okay if I wait until I get married to have sex?” “In that context, the idea of ‘good’ choices doesn’t make sense,” she explained. “What’s key is to be able to talk about sex in a way that makes it equally comfortable for both of those students. So, if Monday morning, after you hooked up with a couple of guys, you feel joy, then that’s the right choice. And from there we can back up and ask: Is that serving your partners, too? Is it clear that you’re on the same page? And if you’re not, does that really serve you? Then, for that girl who perceives sex as something she’s holding on to and wants to keep as a part of her to give to a partner that she made a commitment to be with for the rest of her life: How does that feel? If you don’t feel guilt, if you don’t feel shame, if you’re feeling joy and honor, then bingo. And if you are feeling guilt and shame, then let’s talk about that. Where is it coming from? So developing this idea of ‘How are the choices affecting me and the people around me? How are they serving me, and how are they serving my partner?’”
Much of Denison’s curriculum, perhaps most of it, is not specifically about sex. It’s about decision making and communication, skills that are useful in any realm. On another afternoon, I watched her with a group of ninth-graders she was meeting for the first time. She was explaining what she calls “fallbacks,” unconscious, reflexive behaviors we resort to when we’re uncomfortable. “A lot of fallbacks come from gender roles,” she said. “A lot of them come from ways we cope in our families. Like, what if you want to do one thing after school and your friends want to do something else? Or you’re in a situation and all of a sudden you’re super uncomfortable and you don’t know what to do?”
Book smarts won’t necessarily help in those fight-or-flight moments, especially, perhaps, for girls. “I talk to a hundred girls a month who are superassertive, feminist, who can correct their teachers about the symbolism of a novel in class,” she said. “Then they’re at a party and some dude’s hand is on their leg—or between their legs—and they feel like duct tape is over their mouths. They literally can’t say, ‘Can you move your hand?’ Superassertive, but not in that situation, because they’re using a different part of themselves. And then there’s regret and shame. And that’s just because we need to practice.” Once again, the room has fallen silent, the kind of hush that occurs when a teacher has truly touched a nerve.
Denison asked for a volunteer, and Jackson, a lanky boy in a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, stood up. “People talk about ‘assertive’ all the time,” Denison said. “And ‘aggressive’ and ‘passive-aggressive.’ Those are ways to think about how we react in the real world, especially when we are uncomfortable.” S
he pulled out her cell phone. “So, let’s say I borrowed Jackson’s phone and said I’d have it back in a day. But it’s been three days. Also, I’ve cracked the screen. Now I’m going to return it to him, and he’s going to show us what a passive response would be.”
She sauntered over and dumped the device in his hand. “Thanks for the phone, Jackson. It’s awesome.” She casually gestured to the imaginary crack, adding, “There’s just, like, that little thing here.”
“No problem,” Jackson said.
“Really?” Denison took a step toward him. “Can I borrow it again, then?”
“No, um . . .”
She took another step. “Oh. Well, do you have a car?”
“Yeah, it’s over there.”
“Can I have the keys?” Jackson pretended to toss them to her, and the scene was over.
Denison turned to the class. “So his fallback was ‘I’m uncomfortable, this is unpleasant, I want it to end, and agreeing with her is the fastest way.’ But did you see how when I stepped forward and he backed away I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this. I do not have to be accountable in any way. I can take advantage.’ So the bummer of that response is ‘Am I going to come back?’ Oh, hell yeah. He’s got a Post-it on his forehead with a bull’s-eye now. But if he could get to a place of thinking, ‘How do I feel right now? What do I think? And what do I want to have happen?’ Maybe it would be worth thirty seconds of doing something different so that this obnoxious girl will not come back.”
A thin boy in a red-and-white striped shirt raised his hand. “So what exactly is an aggressive fallback?”
“Pushing back against someone before they can go after you,” another boy said. “Or saying someone’s an asshole.”
“Or, like, yelling back if your parents start yelling at you,” said one of the girls.
Denison had invited a handful of seniors, students the underclassmen respected, to join her today as de facto teaching assistants. One of them, a girl wearing a fedora and a vintage Violent Femmes T-shirt, raised her hand. “My fallback was, when someone asked, like, ‘What do you want to eat?’ I’d say, ‘Whatever you want.’ And I would never, ever, ever say what I wanted to do. I’ve been trying to change that, at least with people I’m comfortable around.”
“So it must not have been working for you . . .” Dennison prompted.
The girl nodded. “I still do it often. But I didn’t like never having the power within myself to say what I wanted. I was always so worried about people not liking me if I said what I might want to do.”
“Bringing that back to the situations we’re talking about,” Denison said, “especially in the hookup scene, especially in the city, where there’s so much more access to underage dance clubs—if that’s your fallback, it’s like a potential minefield of regret. Because there’s a lot of ninth-graders who go to those clubs and they say they’re not going to drink, they’re just going to dance, but they don’t think through situations that might make them uncomfortable, or come up with a plan.
“There’s a lot of oral sex happening in these clubs, in the back hallways,” she continued. “Sometimes it’s because people know they don’t want to have intercourse, but they haven’t practiced saying, ‘No, I’m not going to go down on you.’ That just seems impossible to them. And then there’s a lot of regrettable sexual behavior. And drinking, too. Because you get tired of saying no or getting your mom to text you that you have to come home. So, trying to come up with some real, workable tools, and especially working with your seniors here, people who’ve been there, is really helpful. And trying to get you guys at the beginning to identify two or three of your fallbacks, even by the end of this semester. Then let’s talk about it over the next few years. Let’s really work that muscle. To avoid regret and practice that assertiveness is so important. And what’s cool is the more you practice the easier it gets.”
They acted out a few more passive, aggressive, and assertive scenarios, with Denison urging volunteers to state firmly “How you feel right now, what you think, what you want to have happen.” In the few minutes of class time that remained, she fielded several anonymous questions that students had submitted on index cards, then gave out the number for a cell phone she keeps specifically for their calls and texts. Some of her colleagues over the years have questioned Denison’s willingness to let kids intrude on her life at any hour of the day or night. “They say it’s a boundary issue,” she told me later, “but I disagree. I come here and encourage students to question themselves, to name a situation when it’s not going well, to acknowledge that it’s not going well, and reflect on it. I promise I will advocate for them. If after that I disappeared, if I bailed, I wouldn’t be doing my job.” Most of the messages she receives are queries about basic facts involving sex and drugs; sometimes they are about relationship dilemmas or the choice between dueling visions of “regret”; sometimes they are just notes of gratitude. Typically they are anonymous, sometimes from friends of friends of students she’s taught, kids she’ll never meet. Among the texts she had recently received:
“My boyfriend won’t touch me after he comes. Is that valid?”
“My girlfriend and I had a mishap with a condom and were wondering if we should get Plan B, but she is on a hormonal birth control pill. Would it be a bad idea to mix medication?”
“I am talking to this guy and he told me (through text), ‘You act like you’re never gonna suck a dick. That’s, like, a girl’s job. . . .’ We’ve been ‘a thing’ for about two months, and I don’t know what to do because I want to make a decision on handling this that I won’t regret.”
“I just took four busses and a train to follow a boy who called me a bitch a month ago and I need to know why I’m here.”
“Charis: I so appreciate everything you do. You were such an incredible resource while I was in high school and have motivated me to start a sex ed radio show/podcast at my college!”
Scrolling through the texts, Denison shakes her head in wonder. “If adults thought about their world and their choices as deeply as the teens who reach out to me do . . .” she said. “They’re so thoughtful. Thoughtful before they do something. Thoughtful after they do something. Thoughtful while they do something. It’s inspiring.”
Going Dutch
Here’s a solution for concerned parents: move to the Netherlands. Okay, maybe that’s not the most practical advice. Perhaps, though, we can move a little of the Netherlands here. Because the Dutch seem to have it all figured out. While we in the United States have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world, they have among the lowest. Our teen birth rate? Eight times higher than theirs, and our teen abortion rate is 1.7 times higher. Yes, there are some significant demographic differences that affect those numbers: we are a more diverse nation than Holland, with higher rates of childhood poverty, fewer social welfare guarantees, and more social conservatives. Yet even when controlling for all that, the difference holds. Consider a study comparing the early sexual experiences of four hundred randomly chosen American and Dutch women at two similar colleges—nearly all white, all middle class, with similar religious backgrounds. So, apples to apples. The American girls had become sexually active at a younger age than the Dutch, had had more encounters with more partners, and were less likely to use birth control. They were more likely to say they’d had first intercourse because of “opportunity” or pressure from friends or partners. In subsequent interviews with some of the participants, the Americans, much like the ones I met, described interactions that were “driven by hormones,” in which boys determined relationships, male pleasure was prioritized, and reciprocity was rare. As for the Dutch girls? Their early sexual activity took place in loving, respectful relationships in which they communicated openly with their partners (whom they said they knew “very well”) about what felt good and what didn’t, about how “far” they wanted to go, and about what kind of protection they would need along the way. They reported more comfort with their bodies and t
heir desires than the Americans and were more in touch with their own pleasure.
It’s enough to make you rush out to buy a pair of wooden shoes.
What’s their secret? The Dutch girls said that teachers and doctors had talked candidly to them about sex, pleasure, and the importance of a loving relationship. More than that, though, there was a stark difference in how their parents approached those topics. The American moms had focused on the potential risks and dangers of sex, while their dads, if they said anything at all, stuck to lame jokes. Dutch parents, by contrast, had talked to their daughters from an early age about both the joys and responsibilities of intimacy. As a result, one Dutch girl said she told her mother immediately after her first intercourse, “because we talk very open[ly] about this. My friend’s mother also asked me how it was, if I had an orgasm and if he had one.”
The attitudes of the two nations weren’t always so far apart. According to Amy Schalet, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and author of Not Under My Roof, in the late 1960s the Dutch, like Americans, roundly disapproved of premarital sex. The sexual revolution transformed attitudes in both countries, but whereas American parents and policy makers responded by treating teen sex as a health crisis, the Dutch went another way: they consciously embraced it as natural, though requiring proper guidance. Their government made pelvic exams, birth control, and abortion free to anyone under twenty-two, with no requirements for parental consent. By the 1990s, when Americans were shoveling millions into the maw of useless abstinence-only education, Dutch teachers (and parents) were busy discussing the positive aspects of sex and relationships, as well as anatomy, reproduction, disease prevention, contraception, and abortion. They emphasized respect for self and others in intimate encounters, and openly addressed masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and orgasm. When a Dutch national poll found that most teenagers still believed that boys should be the more active partner during sex, the government added “interaction” skills to its sex ed curricula, such as how to let “the other person know exactly what feels good” and how to set boundaries. By 2005, four out of five Dutch youth said that their first sexual experiences were well timed, within their control, and fun. Eighty-six percent of girls and 93 percent of boys agreed that “We both were equally eager to have it.” Compare that to the United States, where two-thirds of sexually experienced teenagers say they wish they had waited longer to have intercourse for the first time.
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