Quote reblogged from fuck yeah sex education with 499 notes
One thing I am going to do differently as a parent is go easy on the “save sex for someone special” rhetoric with my kids – both with my daughter and my son. I noticed some unintended consequences happened among my friends and I when we were growing up with this. The “save yourself for when you really love someone” thing comes from a good place – being nice to yourself and only choosing people who are also nice to you – but it pairs up too easily with the general culture of slut-shaming that’s out there. The “precious vagina” can easily become the “shameful vagina”.
“Saving yourself” can obviously also lend itself to an exploitative situation where male sexual pleasure is centred in sexual activity. Here’s how that works. You’re a girl and you’re having sexual encounters with boys (is it different for girls only hooking up with other girls?), and they’re very nice and you’re very attracted to them but they are not “the special one” so for as long as possible you end up choosing sexual activities that don’t involve your precious, precious virginity. The safest activities for this are those aimed solely at his sexual pleasure. With some friends I think this established a pattern that took them years to overcome in their sex lives.
Source: bluemilk.wordpress.com
Link reblogged from Prolonged Eye Contact with 63 notes
Excerpt from Guttmacher press release:
Teens who receive formal sex education prior to their first sexual experience demonstrate a range of healthier behaviors at first intercourse than those who receive no sex education at all. This is particularly so when the instruction they receive includes information about both waiting to have sex and methods of birth control. These findings come from a new study, “Consequences of Sex Education on Teen and Young Adult Sexual Behaviors and Outcomes,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg and Isaac Maddow-Zimet of the Guttmacher Institute.
The authors analyzed data from 4,691 men and women aged 15–24 who participated in the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth. They found that 66% of sexually experienced females and 55% of sexually experienced males reported having received information about both abstinence and birth control prior to first intercourse. Eighteen percent of sexually experienced females and 21% of males had received only abstinence instruction, while 16% of females and 24% of males had had no instruction on either topic. However, these measures do not correlate directly with any specific “abstinence-only” or “comprehensive” sex education programs (see below).
Respondents who had received instruction on both abstinence and birth control were older at first sex than their peers who had received no formal instruction and were more likely to have used condoms or other contraceptives at first sex; they also had healthier partnerships. Those who had received only abstinence instruction were more likely to have delayed first intercourse than were those who had had no sex education, but abstinence instruction was not associated with any of the other protective behaviors at first sex. Moreover, condom use at first sex was significantly less likely among females who had had only abstinence instruction than among those who had received information about both abstinence and birth control. The study found no relationship between sex education and current sexual behaviors, suggesting the need for ongoing education after the onset of sexual activity.
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“Consequences of Sex Education on Teen and Young Adult Sexual Behaviors and Outcomes,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg and Isaac Maddow-Zimet, is currently available online and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
For a comprehensive review of research findings on the effectiveness of comprehensive and abstinence-only sex education programs, click here.
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Would be interesting to know if there are any studies on sexual debut or sexual behavior which aren’t focused on cis and binary demographics. If you know of any, I’d love to read them!
Link reblogged from Prolonged Eye Contact with 287 notes
I am 19 years old. I am turning 20 in June. I have never had sex. I dated once, in my sophomore year of high school. The most me and my boyfriend did? Hold hands.
I am the goddamn poster child for abstinence.
Guess what? I’m also on birth control. I’ve been on birth…
Source: handsomephillip
