I Kissed Dating Good-bye, and then gave it a bj

According to the NYTimes magazine article "Students of Virginity":

"In a follow-up study to a 1995 national survey of close to 12,000 students in grades 7 through 12, two sociologists, Peter Bearman at Columbia University and Hannah Brückner at Yale, found that while those who took virginity pledges preserved their technical virginity about 18 months longer than teenagers who didn’t pledge, they were six times more likely to engage in oral sex than virgins who hadn’t taken a pledge."

Uh, wow. It's possible that President Clinton's Oval Office hijinks led to this misunderstanding of what constitutes sexual activity, but I'm willing to bet that it's the result of abstinence-only education -- about which the article states that "11 of 13 abstinence curriculums that [Representative Henry Waxman's] government-reform committee examined were rife with scientific errors and false and misleading information about the risks of sexual activity."

You can, for instance, get a sexually transmitted disease by engaging in oral sex. Even my condom-distributing public high school "life skills" class missed that one; what's the likelihood abstinence-only education deals with the topic of oral sex at all?

Six times less likely, I would guess.

"Six times more likely to engage in oral sex" is not as descriptive as one might like, statistics-wise; do pledging teens engage in it six times more often, for instance, or is the it the number of teens participating at all that's six times higher? Either way, it seems like a lot of blow jobs. (I would guess.)

Joshua Harris -- the author of I Kissed Dating Good-bye and its follow-up, Boy Meets Girl -- would be spinning in his grave, if he were dead.

These are, after all, Rev. Josh's audience: middle and high-schoolers who agree with each other and before God to wait until they're married...to date.

The Times article does not mention whether efforts to keep teens from dating at all has had an effect on abstinence rates. I suspect that research would find that teens who are "not dating" would be just as likely to engage in high-risk behavior as those who threw out the Harris with the pacifier. I'm not convinced that Harris-ophiles would be as likely to engage in regular-risk behavior, however.

Repression seems to tend toward explosive rather than gradual release, after all.

Groups such as Harris acolytes don't seem willing to acknowledge the danger in demanding the level of self-control involved in attempting to live a "lust-free" life while also educating poorly on the consequences of failure. The all-or-nothing approach seems to be all-guilt and to cede nothing to human nature. It's admirable, perhaps, to want people to treat each other decently -- as ends in themselves, rather than means to selfish ends -- but lust is a fact of life. Denying it means giving up all ability to actually deal with it, to the point of higher teen pregnancy rates and cases of STDs among abstinence-only-educated teens.

The fact that abstinence-only education is the result of religious influence, rather than science, is evident when groups advocating premarital abstinence also speak out -- in an awe-inspiring contradiction of what they say about the benefits and necessity of marriage, unless viewed from an Old-Testament literalist perspective -- against gay marriage. The Times points this out as well:

"Perceiving a sexualized culture, members of True Love Revolution went to war. The group did not require an abstinence pledge, nor concern itself with drawing specific boundaries. Its one stated purpose was to discourage premarital intercourse, but by declining to endorse gay marriage, the group left gays, just as Princeton did, with no option but to abstain forever."

Since most of the members of True Love Revolution at Harvard -- most of the dozen or so active members, anyway -- seem to be Catholic, this isn't very suprising. Abstaining forever is what priests do, anyway. (Or what they're supposed to do.)

But don't worry, my gay friends.

Apparently, oral sex doesn't count.