h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The fact that young people will be having sex regardless of how much or how little, or what type of sex-ed they are exposed to. Most parents I know whould rather they were well prepared to make mature choices and to understand the consequences when the inevitable happens and they become interested in the opposite sex.

The fact, too, is that girls are reaching puberty at younger and younger ages.... many parents I know have girls menstruating at 11 and 12 (two I know were 10!), and beginning to "fill out" at 8 and 9. While they are not necessarily (and hopefully not) going to be interested in relations for another few years, they appear more mature and, therefore, need to be prepared for not only the physical and emotional changes they are experiencing but to be educated enough to be able to understand and to make appropriate decisions when older people (and I am not necessarily speaking of adults) put pressure on them because of their physical maturity.

In order to protect themselves and to be able to make mature decisions, they need to have the facts -- all the facts. They also need to know that sex isn't just "fun", and it isn't a way of attaining love, and it isn't always enjoyable, and that just because your friends are doing it, and just because you see it on TV doesn't mean that it is appropriate.

Pedro, hi, I turned up to put the statistics and info I said i would supply last week, and interestingly, the last post, to which I would be replying was *your* intemperate one! What's with all the effing and blinding? No one's stopping you and other older people having all the sex you want, all day every day if you so choose...

Here it is... Five minutes searching... (pity about the source, but google insisted I spell it the American way, and so that's what they came up with.)
http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=18088

An extract..
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Yes, I truly pity the source. Here's a better one: http://www.brook.org.uk/content/M6_1_5_abstinence.asp

Highlights:

"Teenage pregnancy rates in the US have been falling since 1991, though they are still much higher than in the UK. Abstinence education is claimed to be responsible for this fall by its proponents. Research by the Alan Guttmacher Institute suggests in fact that while 25% of the decline was due to more teenagers remaining abstinent 75% was due to improved contraceptive use amongst sexually active teenagers."

"There is evidence to suggest that teenagers who pledge to remain abstinent until marriage delay having sex about one-third longer than comparable non-pledgers. Unfortunately, they are less likely to use contraception when they do have sex."

"Young people who make virginity pledges are more likely than others to be religious suggesting that they may already be committed to delaying sexual activity. They are also likely to be less advanced in pubertal development, also a factor associated with later initiation of sexual activity."

"There appears to be confusion amongst young people about what constitutes abstinence. Half of all 15-17 year olds in one survey believed that a person who had oral sex was still a virgin. Even more significantly 55% of college students who had pledged virginity and said they had kept the vow reported having had oral sex. Pledgers were as likely as non-pledgers to have had oral or anal sex."

Hi Adelaide, yes my remarks were rather intemerate (though succinct, I felt), but the sweary part was a play on words, if not terribly funny.

IntemPerate, I mean.


Oops...

Thanks for the link, Blatherskite - it's very interesting. There's just one thing..
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It isn't clear that the two groups referred to in this paragraph are the same population, i.e., that both groups are people who pledged virginity till marriage!
Given the bias of the site (I admit the site I linked to was biased the other way, but it's the first I found) fudging figures is not beyond the bounds of possibility..
It seems purely American to regards oral sex as not being sex. The fact is, that *true* abstinence, which isn't that difficult for anyone to do, is the only 100% effective way to avoid unplanned pregnancy and/or disease!

1) It couldn't be clearer that both groups are virginity pledgers. The 88-12 stat is reproduced in many other reports.

2) What bias? These guys are a British non-profit organization responsible for sexual counseling of teenagers. The results of abstinence pledges are of particular interest to them. If they actually did work, then it behooves this organization to incorporate the technique.

3) It seems purely Della-ish to dismiss offhand the oral sex data, simply because it doesn't help your argument. The Della Way is, as always, the One True Way.

Abstinence pledges are purely American at the moment. It behooves us to talk to these people and find out what they mean when they say they are practicing "abstinence." This allows us to put the data in context and make sense out of it. And the data tells us that even this group is groping and trading naughty bits. It also explains why viginity pledgers have statistically similar rates of STDs with non-pledgers.

Of the 12% who married, how many were driven to marry too early because of a conflict between hormonal instincts and moral conflict? What is the success rate of such marriages compared to other marriages? I think we'll find that the divorce rate is a bit higher than the norm. Sexual incompatibility, sexual boredom, and unhealthy sexual attitudes on the part of one or both partners are contributors to divorce among couples who have sex before marriage. The possibilities for these problems are magnified exponentially among the sexually ignorant/inexperienced.

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Not so... they're a NZ and Australian thing as well. From anecdotal evidence, they seem to work well here...
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What do you call too early? Judging by the figures quoted on that site (average age of [I presume first] marriage 30+), it would appear you'd consider 25 too early!
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The divorce rate overall, is less than people seem to believe. The figures I've seen all seem to work by dividing the number of divorces in any given year by the number of marriages that same year! Even a nong like me can see the fallacy in that. (BTW, I don't mind sounding Australian.)
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That is an assertion on your part. WTF is "sexual boredom"? What makes you think these (weird, in my view) "problems" are more likely among the "sexually ignorant"? Surely, they'd be less likely!
Oh, and purely on an anecdotal note - my cousin and his wife eloped during WW2 and married, he was 18, she was 17, and it's likely they had one 'partner' (each other) at the time, being too busy for bonking like rattlesnakes, and hey, they're still married 60+ years, two kids and a passle of grandchildren later.

"Not so... they're a NZ and Australian thing as well. From anecdotal evidence, they seem to work well here..."

And we all know what anecdotal evidence is worth, don't we?

"What do you call too early? Judging by the figures quoted on that site (average age of [I presume first] marriage 30+), it would appear you'd consider 25 too early!"

You don't get tired of being completely wrong, do you? "The average age of marriage in the US is 26 for women and almost 27 for men." And, from your own link: "Pledgers are less likely to initiate sex and more likely to marry." This means the average marriage age among pledgers is going to be significantly lower than 26 and 27. And that's just averages.

You probably presume too much regarding first-time marriages. There is nothing in the article to suggest that that is the case.

"That is an assertion on your part. WTF is "sexual boredom"? What makes you think these (weird, in my view) "problems" are more likely among the "sexually ignorant"?" - Do you really want me to explain? If so, you have led a very sheltered life. I recommend you watch late-night cable and figure this one out for yourself.

"Oh, and purely on an anecdotal note - my cousin and his wife eloped during WW2 and married, he was 18, she was 17, and it's likely they had one 'partner' (each other) at the time, being too busy for bonking like rattlesnakes, and hey, they're still married 60+ years, two kids and a passle of grandchildren later"

I am defeated. This one story clearly shows that the problems I have outlined never happen anywhere ever.

But we know what anecdotal evidence is worth, don't we?

Where did the idea that "unhealthy sexual attitudes" which causes the demise of many marriages is "weird" behaviour?

Unhealthy sexual attitudes include such things as thinking every other couple in the Universe has sex 15 times a week, that women shouldn't enjoy sex, and the like, not "kinky sex". This stems from ignorance, which, in turn, stems from not having a healthy understanding of sexual and human relations.

I always find the old "in the old days" people lived happily ever after because they were innocent as the driven snow when they got married. Piffle!

Having talked to many men and women about their lives, I have found that there were many couples who wished they had gotten an idea about the sexual attitudes of their spouse before marriage, that they had known more about their own bodies, that they hadn't been so completely in the dark about sex. Some women were so horrified and traumatized by their experiences that they grew to hate sex.

Even my dear grandmother, who passed away just last year, said to me "I would advise you to live with your young man before you get married. I wish I had lived with my husband before I got married. If I had known before I got married, I would never have married him."

I also know couples who, had wonderful relationships. Some had sex before marriage and some not.

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If it wasn't that difficult, as you say Della, then it would probably be a more natural option for most people, not requiring pledges or support groups.

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Just curious - American spelling of what? Google will usually offer spelling options and I've yet to see a Google page that only showed one (Christian) source.


az

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Well, it made *me* laugh, pedro7.


az
(aka 'b*tch from h*ll' )

Look Della.

Use your eyes and just look.

Rabbits, the repoductive rates of rats, the that teem beneath your feet. Listen to the howling of at night times. The 5 billion plus people on the planet. Lets ignore the shall we

Now have a good think about whether or not absitnence is natural.

There is not such thing as anecdotal evidence it is all observational just like scientific ok it may not be recorded and repeated under double blind circumstances. But my Little investigation into abstinence is something we can all repeat. So go out and look at the birds and the bees for your answer.

I take issue with the assertion that 'thinking that oral sex doesn't count is an American thing' (I paraphrase). When I was a teenager (in the UK) that was a commonly held-belief.

It is also a more coomon practice in catholic countries to indulge in hetero anal sex pre marriage so that brides arrive in the marital bed intacto.

Brings a whole new meaning to the Van Morrison record "brown eyed girl".

one love

I was under the impression that the idea of loss of virginity was generally defined to mean particularly the standard sort of sex that could result in babies.

It all strikes me as a little silly and possessive though.

To quote one of my lecuturers in sexual health medicine 'If I'd been b**g**d I wouldn't think I was still a virgin, but apparently the brazillians do'

I remember a very conversation with my grandmother at breakfast. She was talking to me and my then fiancee about her and my grandad visiting "private" cinemas together. My Gran was never one to mince words but the cubject of the conversation was far too weird for me.

I now realise why she didnt blow a gasket when she found my "Jazz" maggs under the shoe boxes in the wardrobe all those years back. I wish I could ask my granada why his were kept under tool boxes in the shed

Probabaly for much the same reason that although Liz knows I keep some and even makes jokes about them in public, mine are still not on open display in our house.


What all this anecdotal evidence shows is that sex did not suddenly start in the sixties. My greatgrandmother had a child out of wedlock and had it adopted by her sister back in the 1930s. So we even had sex outside marriage a long time back.

Infact unless you believe in any of those odd creation myths sex actually predates marriage.



All this points to the undeniable fact that sex is natural and marriage is not. Sex is not kinky or unsusual but we can end up with a lot of weird hang ups when our unrealistic preconceptions are exposed to reality.

one love

There is one (and one only!) case of pregnancy caused by oral sex. I was just reading about it in Phil Hammond's book 'Trust Me, I'm a Doctor'. The girl in question had an abnormality which blocked the normal way of getting sperm to egg, yet there she was, clearly nine months pregnant, to her own and the doctor's astonishment. However nine months before she'd been giving oral sex to her boyfriend when her ex burst in and during the altercation stabbed her in the stomach. The wound was washed out with sterile water, she was sewn back up, and all seemed well. The doctors theorised it was possible that the sterile water had swooshed some of the sperm from her cut stomach down to her fallopian tubes... and as we know one sperm is enough. Poor lamb, she was only 15.

Not a relevant anecdote, but an interesting one.

And if we are going to descend to personal anecdotage, I should like to point out that when I was at Uni, the girls who had had extensive sex education, read books about it, and had discussed it with teachers, parents and older siblings etc. were the ones who rarely slept with people, and then only in the context of a relationship, and used contraception, and seemed happiest. The girls who had not had much sex ed, or been brought up in very religious families, or especially both (and tended to suffer badly from shame and embarrassment) were the ones weeping in my room while I tried to convince them to go get the morning after pill, the ones having one-night-stands they felt ashamed about the next day, the ones who had the most and frankly most dreggy partners, And one poor kid got gonorrhea and spread it to three other men because she was too ashamed to visit the doctor for SIX MONTHS and too ashamed to tell her suitors that they really should use a condom. It seemed to me what an emphasis on abstinence really taught was shame and fear and no idea at all how to say no or use protection. Rather counterproductive. They merely ended up feeling bitterly ashamed of their bodies and consumed with self-hatred for having sexual desires at all. But that's just my personal opinion based on my limited experience and probably not relevant at all.

I have to agree with Agapanthas. In my experience at Uni, it was the girls who had very strict backgrounds that went a little crazy sexually. Mind you, as ever, why should all the onus be on the women? I know why but it really gets my goat that many guys couldn't give a stuff when it comes to sexual responsibilty.

Ice