“For a while, I honestly wondered whether it was worth using a condom at all,” a friend told me when I asked her—a well-grounded, intelligent girl what she thought about her four years of abstinence-only sexual education at our high school.
I wasn’t surprised by my friend’s admission. Nearly 15 years of Catholic education have treated me to more than my fair share of movies, assemblies and guest speakers dedicated to keeping my fellow students and me out of bed. More than anything, those years have taught me to beware of the fact that abstinence-only sex ed programs shade the truth to make their case—every guest speaker at our school “knew a guy” who got a girl pregnant while wearing a condom, and every movie featured the dubious testimonies of girls who got pregnant despite practicing safe sex. After watching a movie in which a nineteen-year-old named Lucy testified to getting pregnant “the first time I ever had sex with my boyfriend, even though I was on the pill and he used a condom,” I thought to myself, “Yikes, Lucy, you’re one in a million. Literally.”
But far from just being sources of half-truths about safe sex, many of these abstinence-only assemblies incorporated surprisingly sophisticated emotional assaults. While they never failed to rattle off scary STD and teenage pregnancy statistics, speakers spent the bulk of their time striving to convince my classmates and me that until we were married, we would not be mentally healthy enough to have sex, that only the words “I do” could somehow transform us into the emotionally sound people we needed to be to have sex.
During my freshman year, our school invited the former Miss Wisconsin to speak to us about the dangers of premarital sex. I expected to hear the same “If you have sex, you will get pregnant and die” speech that I had been hearing since the seventh grade, but was surprised when instead she intimated that if we slept with our partners before we married them, our marriages were doomed to end in divorce.
“Out of all couples who got divorced last year, more than 90 percent of them slept with each other before they got married,” Miss Wisconsin said. “‘But we love each other,’ you’ll probably say. Well, in teenage relationships, the average time that the relationship lasts after sex is introduced is two weeks.”
Never mind that the Guttmacher Institute found that 95 percent of Americans between the ages of 15 and 44 have had premarital sex, and so it follows logically that that percentage should remain the same among divorced couples. What’s most alarming about this sex-is-only-for-married-grownups rhetoric is the danger it poses to young teens who are navigating adolescence, something that we all know is confusing enough without anyone else’s help.
Being told that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to combine love and sex did little more than insult me. But many of my classmates seem to have felt the effects. After she began sleeping with her boyfriend, one of my friends remembers having “a strong feeling that something should be going wrong in the relationship.”
Looking back, it makes sense. We were high schoolers with little clue as to who we were or what we were doing, and we all found it less than encouraging that our school was essentially telling us, “You won’t have a clue what you’re doing for a good ten years.” And high schools should be as encouraging as they can of teens who are mentally growing up. Insinuating to a high school student that he or she won’t be mentally sophisticated until marriage is cruel, and adding to the uncertainty teenagers naturally feel is flat wrong on the part of the people who are responsible for their mental growth.
“All abstinence-only ever did was make me stupid,” my condom-doubting friend concluded. With its emotionally entangling foundations, abstinence-only sex ed promotes chastity while emotionally screwing its captive audience.
