It's time for a sexplanation

Sex has claimed our subconscious’ center stage since that universally infamous middle school health class, and that’s exactly where we need to start if we’re going to lift the veil, cure the curiosity and attend to our generation’s sexual health.

American teens are having sex. Unsafely, misguidedly, uninformedly.

They’re having it young, often and unprotected. They’re spreading disease and generating accidental pregnancies.  

A quick glance at recent statistics indicates a generation stumbling through its sexual landscape armed with nothing but hormones.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 47.8 percent of American high school students had engaged in sexual intercourse, and 35 percent considered themselves consistently sexually active in 2007.

NBC reported data from the Kinsey Institute that revealed the average teen loses his or her virginity at about age 17.

To further compound the issue, an estimated one in four sexually active teens contracts a sexually transmitted disease annually.

The prevalence of teen intercourse, disease and unplanned pregnancy is especially troubling considering all 50 states have their own versions of sex education.
Sorry, let me rephrase that: abstinence education.

Only 19 states require sex education must be medically accurate. That means only about four of 10 American teens who entered college this year were required to receive sex education that was actually correct. Only 46 percent of them were taught anything other than abstinence.

Those who do receive federally funded sex education receive psychologically troubling and emotionally critical lectures on the danger of sex outside of marriage.

Title V of the Social Security Act dictates a school’s program must “teach the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity; that a monogamous marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity; that sexual activity outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects; that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents and society.”

This kind of diction is foreboding, threatening and focused on moral intimidation via the threat of rejection.

And we wonder why teenage pregnancy is two to 10 times more likely in our country than in Europe, Asia and other similarly developed countries.

Teens aren’t being scared into abstaining. They’re being scared into having unsafe sex.

Young adults who choose to become sexually active aren’t unprepared because of their youth. They’re unprepared because they’ve been taught to fear societal
reprimand instead of being educated on how to live healthy, happy sexual lives.

In his 1953 book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” Dr. Alfred Kinsey wrote, “There are those who believe that we would do better if we ignored (sexuality’s) existence, that we should not try to understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pronouncements and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality.”

Teens of America, reclaim your reality.

­— sbkissel@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Sarah Kissel on Twitter @QueSarahSarah_.