Abstain from abstinence-only sex ed

Do your parents know what you do on weekends? For a fairly large proportion of the student body, the answer to this question is "No, and thank God they don't!"

As college students, we've honed our skills at avoiding certain lines of questioning, thereby hiding the myriad activities our parents would not approve of.

Still, one would think that most students' parents aren't utterly clueless enough to not be able to figure out there's something they've not been told when their son or daughter shows up at home at 5 a.m. and staggers to bed every week. How is it, then, that students are able to continue their deception for years, even though in many cases they don't hide it well at all?

In my experience, students have an unexpected ally in keeping parents uninformed about the poor decisions they may be making: the parents themselves. Parental naiveté has become a bulwark of life both for American college students and, increasingly, younger people as well.

The parental insistence on ignoring the pot smoking, binge drinking, Free Love bacchanalia of their little angels has led to a variety of repercussions. Luckily, most of these do not have wider societal implications; rather, these include parents being comically surprised by unwanted pregnancies or by having to pick their son or daughter up from the hospital after an emergency medical intervention.

One particular result of this parental naiveté has had wide-ranging effects on almost all aspects of an American child's upbringing, however: abstinence-only sex education.

Abstinence-only sex education is essentially the teaching of refraining from sex as the only method for avoiding pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs), while explicitly not instructing students on safe sex and the use of contraceptives. It's a major issue because a vast proportion of federal education funding is tied to the teaching of this castrated version of sex ed.

The most fascinating aspect of the tie of money for education to abstinence programs is that these programs have been repeatedly shown to fail at their stated goals. The government explicitly funds programs that advocate saving sex for marriage, and despite their increasing prevalence the average age at which Americans first have sex has held steady at 17.

The average age for marriage, on the other hand, remains at 25 years old for women and 27 years old for men, according to information from the Guttmacher Institute. Indeed, according to a 2003 study presented at the American Psychological Society (APS)'s annual meeting, over 60 percent of students who had pledged virginity in middle or high school failed to keep their vow to remain sex-free until marriage.

Furthermore, there are increasing concerns that abstinence-only sex education programs leave teenagers more, not less, vulnerable to STDs. Because they do not teach about the use of condoms or other methods for having safe sex, and because the teenagers are having sex anyway, they can find themselves more at risk.

The issue is complicated even further by the fact that the American insistence on abstinence has created a massive false dichotomy between vaginal penetration and other sexual acts like oral or anal sex. A survey conducted by Seventeen magazine in 2003 found that more than half of 15- to 17-year-olds believed that having oral sex did not mean breaking a vow of abstinence, and the APS study reported that students who pledged abstinence were no more likely to refrain from types of sex other than vaginal.

And these programs have resulted in disturbing statistics, such as 62 percent of males having sex before they were ever shown how to put on a condom, according to a 2002 study.

The body of evidence supporting the superiority of comprehensive sex education that includes a thorough explanation of contraceptives and their effectiveness is extensive. So why is it that the president, a fair proportion of the Senate, and vast numbers of parents support the less effective programs?

The only explanation I can come up with is that despite all the evidence to the contrary, parents continue to blindly believe their own children remain daisy-fresh while their neighbors raise a brood of trollops. Well, dear parents of America, it's time to accept it-your children are having sex, and they're doing it at much earlier ages than you seem to believe.

Now, if children are going to be having sex regardless, aren't they better off if schools educate them on all of the possible ways they can protect themselves, rather than making sex ed the religious or morality section of health class? I think if parents could get over the initial mental block of believing, they would agree that they want their children to know about all the different ways to keep themselves safe.

So what can be done to convince parents that they are wearing blinders? Well, as long as it's left up to us college students, nothing at all will be done, because we happen to like our parents assuming we're exemplar little humans. Perhaps, however, we should be altruistic and, for the benefit of future generations, have that belated conversation about the birds and the bees.

After all, it seems that our parents are really the ones in need of "sex education."