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Posted by conniem Wed Mar 14, 2007 12:48:29 PDT
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True story: I asked a group of junior highers what they thought the words “safe sex” meant. 

A junior high boy raised his hand and said, “Lock the car door.” 

As I have said many times, I couldn't make this stuff up. I do not believe there is safe sex for any teenager in any form whatsoever. That is why I teach abstinence and believe in it. That way the odds are in the teenager's favor 100 percent. 

 

Junior high boys always ask me, “How can we have sex with a girl and have nothing happen?”

I thought about that and likened it to a video game. I tell them you can’t download a code and punch it into the video game and bypass all the levels. Sex is a multi-dimensional, complicated issue. There is no way to have sex with someone and have nothing happen. There are physical and emotional consequences.

 

Let’s look at the emotional issues. A bond is formed; the girl might give her heart, mind, body and love to that person and end up feeling lonely, confused, depressed and degraded. Maybe she'll put a wall around her heart and never really deal with her loss of virginity. She may become hardened and use sex as a tool of power.

 

The girl needs to grieve her loss. Society lies to her and tells her that sex is everything, but it's nothing if you go from guy to guy. Society doesn’t equip her for emotions that range from heartbroken, depressed –– and sometimes suicidal. She may turn to drugs and alcohol to drown out her pain.

 

The teenage male, on the other hand, is encouraged to have sex to become a man. He's told that in order to be a man you have to be a pimp daddy and get all the girls –– put notches in his belt. He buys into this scenario, and then realizes that sex doesn’t make you a man.What they show on music videos isn’t real –– just titillating.

 

He then blames his bad behavior on the girl.

"Well you know it’s her fault –– she’s a whore." 

He doesn’t really ever learn to have a healthy relationship with a girl because he has been programmed to be only physical with her. He then disrespects her and himself, too.

 

Sometimes I tell my male students that becoming a man is sometimes determined by the things you say no to. 

 

The physical consequences of sex are more than 40 STDs, plus Hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS, which are transmitted through blood and sexual fluids. When I grew up there were only two STDs –– syphilis and gonorrhea –– and we could cure them with antibiotics. Despite that fact we are at a 40-year high of these infections in Kern County.

 

Chlamydia is a bacterial STD that is easily detected with a simple urine test and cured by an antibiotic. The problem is that chlamydia rarely manifests itself in noticeable symptoms and will fester for years in a female's reproductive organs.  Then when she is 25 and trying to get pregnant she has fertility problems because the scarring from the chlamydia has closed up her fallopian tubes. If a young girl has one exposure to chlamydia she has a 25 percent chance of becoming sterile.

 

Many STDs are viruses and have no cure. There is a new vaccine for women to prevent human papilloma virus (HPV), but there are over 60 kinds of genital warts and the vaccine doesn’t prevent them all.
 

What most people don’t know is that some of the STDs can be transferred by skin-to-skin contact. Genital areas touching together can transfer a STD from one person to another. Even herpes is contagious eight hours before a blister is present.

 

So, my case for abstinence. If a teenager has sex at a young age, the more sexual partners they will have before they marry. If he/she has 10 sexual partners, they are exposed to 1,000 people in a sexual way; double that number to 20 and the number rises to 1,000,000 people they are sexually exposed to. 

 

I always tell parents that they're not going to be there when their children make the decision to have sex, so they must be equipped with decision-making skills.

When considering sexual activity, I ask my students to think, "What do you gain versus what you lose?"

A sobering thought. 

Talk to them about waiting. If they haven’t decided to wait, they probably won’t. 

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